WEIGHT LOSS

 I wrote to a Doctor in the US about weight loss and here is a copy of the letter.

Doctor Dave,

 I read some of your views on your website. Quite interesting.

 If you take the trouble to read my website you will most likely be surprised.

Some wit once said that beauty is in the eye of the beer holder, whatever, I am quite a sight to see.

It amazes me that people like you rely almost entirely on diet to lose weight.

Do you know what Jockeys and Boxers do to lose weight ? They have a fairly strict diet, they engage in strenuous exercise (even just riding horses is good exercise for the body) and they sit in Saunas.

 Your colleagues in the medical profession tend to think that it is only surface water that is lost in Saunas.

They are wrong. If you spend an hour in a sauna, you will lose up to a pound in weight and you can do that every day. That is thirty pounds lost a month - if desired. As long as you don't leave the sauna and splurge on junk food you will not regain that pound lost each day.

What causes weight gain ? It is the salt in the processed foods that people eat. Salt is used as preservative in most processed foods. When it gets into your body it combines with the fluids you drink and the salt keeps your body cells full of more water than they need.

It is actually excess water that causes everyone's weight problems. Though we have to make the distinction between stored water in the body's cells which is like urine mixed with salt, and fresh water that you might be drinking.

We need to get rid of the less healthy water that makes up weight gain when it mixes with too much salt in say fast foods, and keep drinking fresh water that is alkaline and salt free.

If you change your diet from salty processed foods and rely 80 per cent on fruit and vegetables as your basic diet - big changes take place in your body.

Like most people you probably eat a lot of chicken and meats. Chicken farmers sometimes give the growing chickens only salty water to drink. That makes the chickens fat and means extra money for the farmers because the chickens are sold by body weight. Good for the farmers, but you eat that chicken and you are consuming a lot of extra salt which in turn makes you overweight.

There is virtually no salt in fruit and vegetables. You can eat them all the time and not put on weight. But eat all the processed foods and Cows milk and you will put on weight.

The notion of calories being a factor in weight gain is a myth. It is simply excess salt in processed foods, combining with the fluids we drink - that causes weight gain.

 If you want to lose weight , you have to drop the processed foods or spend a lot of time in saunas. Sorry to read of your appendicitis problem, but if you were consuming less salt and more fruit and vegetables and water, you probably not have had that problem.

Dr B of the website www,watercure.com was mostly right. He was right about the need to drink extra water, but he made the mistake of eating too much processed foods himself.

Most people consume more than twice the amount of food that their bodies require to function properly.

What is the most common addiction ? Cigarettes ? Alcohol ? prescription drugs ? No, the most common addiction for people around the world is Food !

Tell some of your patients to skip a meal each day and watch them respond in disbelief .

Because of a silly notion (given to us in childhood) that we need three hearty meals a day, most people try to eat three largish meals a day, and feel withdrawal pangs if they miss a meal.

Over eating plus not drinking enough water are the two major causes of ill health in the western world.

Typically your medical colleagues tend to subscribe to the old notion of needing quite a lot of food every day, yet that is one of the great myths. Some years back in Rome Italy, a man who did maintenance contracting work, was sent by a company to do some specific task at a block of home units which were untenanted and soon to be redeveloped. He used an Elevator which needed some maintenance itself, and as he was going between floors the Elevator stopped. With no phone or any means by which to get outside help, he found himself stuck in the elevator in a deserted Building. He was there for ten very boring days with neither food nor water. He was a single Man who lived alone so he was not missed at home, and his employers assumed that he had done the work and would later contact them about payment, So he was forgotten .

Forgotten for ten days ! Then the company that employed him decided that they had better find out what had happened about the work he was asked to do and went looking for him. When they eventually found him n a lift, ithey were quite surprised .

He was in good health, he had lost about ten or twelve pounds in weight, and apart from desperately needing some water to drink - he was alright.

Was he some kind of freak ? No, thousands of people have had similar experiences when they have been lost while travelling through Bushland or Snow or even at Sea. We can all learn to fast (not eat for a short time)

and those who go through the experience would be healthier as a result.

Why ? Because when you stop eating food for a period of time, your body starts to cleanse itself internally.

All the beneficial Bacteria in your body that might have previously been say helping to digest the often vast amount of food that people put in their stomachs, suddenly have nothing to do, so they start focusing on old residues throughout the entire body.

This is not just the obvious residues ( which hardening of the Arteries represent) but every cell in the body. That is why I don't have much in the way of hardening of the Arteries. Each year I stop eating food for a period of time and exist on just water. It might be for a few days or it might be a couple of weeks.

And the most incredible aspect of deliberately not eating food for a while, is that after the first day or two, you don't feel hungry. You lose your appetite.

This business of not eating food at times, is called Fasting. How could it be that a person could have not eaten for some days and not feel hungry, while most people start to feel quite hungry if they miss a meal or two ?

Incredibly, it is withdrawal symptoms that people experience when they miss a meal or two. Exactly like when a cigarette smoker has not had a puff for a while, he starts to show withdrawal symptoms. The same thing applies to our eating food. Food is more of an addiction than a necessity !

I am not suggesting that people stop eating food of course, it is just a matter of keeping food in perspective.

We do need food, but we actually need not much food at all to function at our peak. I usually consume over one day, about the same amount of food (for me that is mainly fruit) that the average Man consumes at every meal, and at times during the year I don't eat at all for some days or even (shock horror) a couple of weeks !

This together with regular exercise is the basic reason for my good health and youthfulness. I have been in excellent shape for decades. I was making only one mistake and that was that I was not drinking enough water.

I discovered that I needed to drink much more water than I had been drinking and now I feel better than ever.

There was a man who wrote a book he called ' The secret of longevity ' He had attained a great age himself and his message was basically, only have one meal a day plus regular exercise.

So has anyone else ever tried this fasting caper ? Well, it is surprising how many well known people have been regular fasters . In the Bible Jesus was reported to have fasted for forty days. But in earlier times fasting was common. The medical profession have traditionally taken an Oath (which is more or less a promise to take good care of their patients, and most do mean well, though their heavy reliance on drug therapy and often unnecessary operations is a worry) which is called the Hippocratic Oath, and it is named after a Man who is referred to as the father of Medicine.

He was the Greek Physician Hippocrates . In his time he was a well known Physician and had what would these days be called a significant medical practice. There was another well known person about this time and his name was Pythagoras. He helped create a lot of the Mathematics that are still used today, so he was not an uneducated Man. He was interested in the medical work that Hippocrates was doing, and wrote to him asking if he could visit for a while. Hippocrates wrote back and said that he was welcome, but he would have to agree to undergo a quite long fast before he could join the community in which he was interested.

So we can see that this very highly regarded Physician was strongly in favor of fasting as a basis for good health. They might still call Hippocrates the father of modern Medicine, but the medical profession, (with the help of the Drug companies which make vast amounts of money from making so called medical drugs) are no longer interested in natural healing therapies like Fasting.

There is no significant financial returns in getting people to simply not eat for a few days, so that idea was quietly forgotten a long time ago, and these days most doctors would have no knowledge of the benefits of fasting. It is just a few of the natural healers who advocate fasting these days. (and me of course) But anyone who tries fasting for a few days will notice improvements to their health, including quick weight loss.

Best not to overdo it at first. First timers tend to have a lot of waste matter removed from the cells of their bodies and they feel like they are experiencing a cold or flu, but after a couple of days they feel very well.

They don't call it the 'Miracle of Fasting ' for nothing.

Almost all the mainstream medical practitioners and the independent experts sometimes called Nutritionists, all subscribe to three meals a day and a balanced diet.

 By a balanced diet they usually mean a wide ranging diet like fruit, vegetables and meats and dairy foods. Yet most people have an eighty percent non fruit and vegetable diet. They know that they should eat a lot of fruit etc but it usually gets tacked on to the end of a lot of bread, pasta , meats and dairy foods. ( which give you weight problems and hardening of the arteries)

 So I do not agree with the notion of a balanced diet. I tend to advocate an ' unbalanced ' (to use their terminology ) diet of mainly fruit and vegetables, plus exercise and plenty of water. It can be a bit boring, so once or twice a week I might have a so called normal meal at a resturant. But most of the time my diet is just fruit and vegetables, and only the equivelant of one meal a day.

Do most animals have a mixture of foods in their diets ? No, most Cattle, horses, and even the larger animals like Elephants prefer green grass as their basic diet. They usually remain healthy on just green grass. They do not have what the nutritionists describe as a balanced diet.

 Interestingly during the second world war, British scientists experimented with giving people green grass to help compensate for the shortage of other foods during that time. Green grass is a vegetable . It is a strong tasting vegetable which takes a lot of chewing, but is very good for you.

Probably best cut up and put in a juicing machine . It can them be mixed with other juices. It has high levels of green chlorophyll, calcium etc which is very good for people as well as Animals.

You sometimes see farmers giving cattle dry hay. This fills them up as white bread can fill us up, but it is not very nutritious, as it has lost a lot of Oxygen and Chlorophyll etc after drying out. Hay is green grass that has dried out.

 It is the high Oxygen content of fruit and vegetables which is their prime nutritional component. The essence of good health is a high consumption of Oxygen as in water, and fruit and vegetables. There is not much Oxygen in the commercial foods like meats, bread and pastries and dairy foods, but there is a lot of salt , which is there to preserve these foods while they are on the super market shelves,and that additional salt consumed every day is the main cause of weight problems.

So if you want to lose weight, switch over to a mainly fruit and vegetable diet.

 Almost no bread or cakes or meats or dairy foodsm and walk as much as you can (exercise is a big help in weight loss) But also try to spend an hour or so in and out of saunas each day.

The perspiration you lose in a sauna takes away the excess skin folds that sometimes remain when you lose a lot of weight.

It is better to not have surgery or what they call liposuction to remove excess body cells.

Natural is always best. I have never had any of those cosmetic surgery operations and never will.

A mainly fruit and vegetable diet will soon have you slimmed down, but if you want to remain always looking youthful, then you should try to do fasting, A day or two just to begin with, then later on you can go for a week, just on water or fruit juices.