Fasting, intermittent & otherwise

Continuing the discussion from Where is the line drawn between manifestations of belief and accepted root assumptions?:

My best friend does intermittent fasting. I’m not sure what I think of it, on the one hand I’m sure it can be quite beneficial in certain scenarios (and of course more-so with positive beliefs), but on the other hand I think of Seth’s comments in regard to say, sexual activity, and wonder if something similar might apply.

I can’t find the quote, but I remember Seth saying, for instance, that both intense periods of sexual activity and long(er) periods of abstinence are both beneficial spiritually. Anyone want to help me find the quote?

Also I can’t help but think of this quote as well:

In humans, the idea of nutrition is also involved. With your habits the body is literally starved for long periods at night, then often overfed during the day. Important therapeutic information that is given in dreams, and meant to be recalled, is not remembered because your sleep habits plunge you into what you think of as unconsciousness far too long.

Session 652, Chapter 13, The Nature of Personal Reality

Although if we take Seth’s statement to refer to the typical diet, we can correlate it to blood sugar, and when the body enters nutritional ketosis (with available fat to burn) things can be a little different (provided you are ketoadapted) and blood sugar can actually be quite stable…

I have written a great deal on nutritional ketosis on a different forum. In many ways this is the same as fasting (the body enters nutritional ketosis when fasting) and rapid (healthy) weight loss occurs from ketosis while food (without carbohydrates) is still eaten, but in regard to the spiritual side of fasting I’m out of my element to draw comparison.

I’m sure Seth has spoken about fasting? Would be interesting to read.

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I was referring to weight loss regarding I.F. and not the spiritual side. Spiritually I image it might be helpful because it puts you more in touch with your body and its sensations (hunger). Feeling those sensations and then denying them might be like zen meditation; being aware of your thoughts (monkey mind), observing them but not attaching to them.

I believe the passage referring to sex or the absence, thereof, is in Dreams and Projection of Consciousness–as these extreme states cause the buildup of certain chemicals that facilitate OBEs.

I do not recall Seth ever mentioning fasting although I have yet to read, only, the last Personal Sessions book and some of the 2nd ESP class sessions (which is all that remains to be published of the Seth Material!) Seth doesn’t mention specific health-related comments much (like drinking pure water, eg.) so I tend to remember the relatively few that he did.

Seth advocated the taking of 4 to 5 small meals a day. We know, now, that this does indeed not stress the body with excess and then lack of food periods.

Regarding fasting, whatever works, I suppose. As Seth says, we look alike, relatively speaking, in physical reality; and yet those looks are, indeed, deceiving as we are vastly different, really. No doubt we each have idiosyncratic ways of using energy, including how we convert such at the bodily level.

Last year, without any pre-planning or forethought, consciously, I began a water fast. I researched it and saw 20 days is safe (after that, one would have to be careful to not miss signs that say stop). When I realized I was fasting, I told my body to help me along. I had almost zero food desire. When it returned at Day 19, I broke the fast. It reset my feelings about food, actually, and taught me to be more in tune with my body–and to better distinguish when my body was hungry from when I was wishing to eat for comforting reasons. Fascinating!! I had a belly so I had lots of fat reserves to work with/though/out.

After about 3 days, when the glycogen stores in the liver are used up, then the body goes to work–every bit of cell detritus, etc., viral fragments and whatnot are scavenged by the body as it grabs whatever food sources available. So I lost weight and got healthier at the same time while saving money on food, lol. Better than the pill approach to dieting, safe and quite the deal for me. :stuck_out_tongue:

Frankly, it was an amazing experience and I’d recommend it to anyone, especially a sethian who can create the necessary mindset (limiting beliefs about hunger and the body, etc. will cause a lot of discomfort–extreme hunger, for example, and psychological distress.) It was an amazing experience just to see my applying beliefs in the realm of the body and seeing them work so beautifully–not being hungry or distressed and feeling, instead, a certain kind of psychological shift, mentally… Hard to describe!

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This is not really a Seth related question, but I’m curious about your results from the water fast. I’ve considered doing a juice fast (fresh juices, not the store bought sugary stuff), but I’ve heard that A) you’re basically starving yourself when you do that because liquid isn’t processed the same way as solid food and B) you gain back all the weight and toxins when you’re done.
You said you felt really good while doing the water fast - you didn’t feel like you were starving or anything. That’s what I’ve heard from people doing juice fasts too, I’ve just heard from medical resources that it’s dangerous.
But do you feel like it made you healthier overall, or did you kind of just reset back to the point you were at a while after stopping?

I would obviously need to get my beliefs a little more in order and more positive before doing any sort of fast.

Some medical opinion is quite negative about fasting. As a sethian, I think their view is because of their beliefs. But looking at the science of it, the body is getting nutrition, as I wrote in my last post, by breaking down cellular detritus, etc.

Juice fasts are great IMO as long as too much fruit juice is not taken in.

The toxins, etc. were built up over a long time; you can’t just get them back quickly unless you are eating flame-broiled hamburgers every meal. I did not regain the weight I lost. In fact, I’ve continued to lose weight very gradually since then.

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Cool, thank you! I might actually try it, since you experienced lasting results.

Do you mean unless you’re eating flame-broiled hamburgers every meal and no other sources of nutrition?

Just making a general point not stipulating quantities, etc. That said, flame-broiled meat is at the bottom of my list of stuff to eat.

My lasting results continue because of the internal changes as well as the external ones. I have taken action and not merely relied on belief. I’m more grounded in my life and that is helping, too, to reduce belly fat–men tend to have stress-related fat deposition there; women, in the thighs/butt.

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I was just amused because a hamburger or similar with every meal was more or less a staple of my weight loss. (Eating high levels of fat = heart issues is a myth, it’s quite the opposite.)

You might be thinking that these guys are inappropriately encouraging consumption of saturated fats, given all the hype about it being related to heart disease. On careful inspection of the scientific literature, however, the widespread belief that dietary saturated fat is harmful turns out to be an out-dated paradigm based upon flawed reasoning.

Yes, we know that this looks like an outrageous statement. So here is a brief summary of the details. Current evidence shows no association between dietary saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease (CVD)[50, 51]. There is, however, a consistent pattern of increased risk for CVD[52-55] and diabetes[56-58] associated with increased amounts of saturated fat circulating in the blood. It is a common mistake for people to assume that your intake of saturates is what determines your blood level of this much maligned nutrient, but this is incorrect. Particularly in the keto-adapted state, fat is being burned at a much higher rate, and this is particularly true for saturated fat. In two recently published studies we showed that a low carbohydrate, high fat diet significantly decreased circulating levels of saturated fat[23, 59]. It’s hard to imagine how dietary saturated fat can be problematic when it is promptly burned to carbon dioxide and water.

Phinney, Stephen; Volek, Jeff (2012-06-15). The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance (p. 71-72). Beyond Obesity LLC. Kindle Edition.

23. Forsythe CE, Phinney SD, Fernandez ML, Quann EE, Wood RJ, Bibus DM, Kraemer WJ, Feinman RD, Volek JS: Comparison of low fat and low carbohydrate diets on circulating fatty acid composition and markers of inflammation. Lipids 2008, 43(1):65-77.

50. Jakobsen MU, O’Reilly EJ, Heitmann BL, Pereira MA, Balter K, Fraser GE, Goldbourt U, Hallmans G, Knekt P, Liu S et al: Major types of dietary fat and risk of coronary heart disease: a pooled analysis of 11 cohort studies. Am J Clin Nutr 2009, 89(5):1425-1432.

51. Siri-Tarino PW, Sun Q, Hu FB, Krauss RM: Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr 2010, 91(3):535-546.

52. Miettinen TA, Naukkarinen V, Huttunen JK, Mattila S, Kumlin T: Fatty-acid composition of serum lipids predicts myocardial infarction. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed) 1982, 285(6347):993-996.

53. Simon JA, Hodgkins ML, Browner WS, Neuhaus JM, Bernert JT, Jr., Hulley SB: Serum fatty acids and the risk of coronary heart disease. Am J Epidemiol 1995, 142(5):469-476.

54. Wang L, Folsom AR, Eckfeldt JH: Plasma fatty acid composition and incidence of coronary heart disease in middle aged adults: the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis 2003, 13(5):256-266.

55. Yamagishi K, Iso H, Yatsuya H, Tanabe N, Date C, Kikuchi S, Yamamoto A, Inaba Y, Tamakoshi A: Dietary intake of saturated fatty acids and mortality from cardiovascular disease in Japanese: the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study for Evaluation of Cancer Risk (JACC) Study. Am J Clin Nutr 2010, 92(4):759-765.

56. Patel PS, Sharp SJ, Jansen E, Luben RN, Khaw KT, Wareham NJ, Forouhi NG: Fatty acids measured in plasma and erythrocyte-membrane phospholipids and derived by food-frequency questionnaire and the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes: a pilot study in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Norfolk cohort. Am J Clin Nutr 2010, 92(5):1214-1222.

57. Wang L, Folsom AR, Zheng ZJ, Pankow JS, Eckfeldt JH: Plasma fatty acid composition and incidence of diabetes in middle-aged adults: the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Am J Clin Nutr 2003, 78(1):91-98.

58. Warensjo E, Riserus U, Vessby B: Fatty acid composition of serum lipids predicts the development of the metabolic syndrome in men. Diabetologia 2005, 48(10):1999-2005.

59. Forsythe CE, Phinney SD, Feinman RD, Volk BM, Freidenreich D, Quann E, Ballard K, Puglisi MJ, Maresh CM, Kraemer WJ et al: Limited effect of dietary saturated fat on plasma saturated fat in the context of a low carbohydrate diet. Lipids 2010, 45(10):947-962.

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There is this:

“You are what you think you are.” That statement is far more to the point than the one that says, “You are what you eat.”

The Personal Sessions Book 7, page 192

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