Re: Fasting buddies on Day 18

I've been kind of interested in Candida Support Forum here. They should all be water fasting, IMO, and none are, but there is some good strategy there... kind of.. or ways to tell if you have candida... I think there is an at-home saliva test you can do just by spitting 1st saliva of the morning in some water. sorry i forget the procedure exactly. Like, if you see spiraling strands from the saliva presently you have yeast (candida). White matter on stool: yeast. Dandruff/white matter on scalp: yeast. White tongue: yeast. genito-urinary infections: probably yeast. All the brain fog/depression/anxiety/constipation/colitis-type symptoms: prob. yeast. And if your feces stay in the colon sluggishly the yeast will grow on them. yuck yuck yuck I know. How to get rid of the yeast: starve the yeast by water fasting, I believe. Scientific studies show yeast is NOT a natural necessary component of intestinal flora but infestations of it arose in people as the post-industrial-revolution period gave us all processed food which we overate. .Of necessity, by definition. i think you cannot not overeat processed food. I think it always just feeds microbes and causes food addiction, which demands ever greater quantities of food .. the microbes themselves somehow create the cravings for their foods of choice... they are accomplished parasites... maybe by definition you cannot not overeat processed food because one morsel of it is too much for a truly healthy body -- at least this is true if you have a compromised system/weak immunity/history of food addiction.... What they do on that forum: take many different ANTIFUNGALS (yeast-killing agents). But this isn't the end of the story. You need the antifungals in high enough doses (otherwise , @ lower doses, antifungals are just "fungistatic" i.e. keep yeast constant but do not eliminate) Somehow, one has also to manage not to just use and use and use antifungals and thus develop antifungal-resistant yeast. (good luck, I say) and using the RIGHT antifungal because there are diff. strains of yeast and these are killed by diff. antifungals. Some antifungals are natural some are Rx/chemical. Garlic, grapeseed extract, oregano oil; then the Rx stuff I don't know. ... It does all seem quite dangerous expensive and futile to me when you can starve the yeast by fasting. They also follow anticandida diets but it seems to me ANY food can feed the yeast though it is good to know the foods that are the worst and avoid those. ... ALSO, the Candida Forum people seek to "build up their beneficial intestinal bacteria," after killing the fungus, because these beneficial bacteria will eat the yeast and keep it under control after a cessation of the antifungals and (shudder) a return to a "normal" diet -- or, really, eating any food at all, in the absence of antifungals -- exposes these people to a full regrowth of the yeast problem. If you stop actively killing the yeast which you pretty much have to do sometime (side effects, development of antifungal-resistant yeast strains) -- and you also do not stop eating - and you also do not have an abundance of "beneficial bacteria" (but is this even natural, to have such an abundance??) -- the yeast will grow right back. .... Moreover, there is a practice of feeding the "beneficial bacteria" with "prebiotics --" sugars/carbs that , problematically, also feed the yeast and other harmful bacteria, at least to some extent; though you may? be able to find carbs that don't feed the bad microbes AS much???? ... this part of the procedure is still not quite clear to me. ( Why would you ever go back to eating what had made you so ill in the first place??? Well, I should know -- I am utterly food-addicted. ) ...my critique of it all is just that it all seems to me to be more or less a life-consuming struggle to find a way to get away with eating foods that just will probably always cause problems... instead of attacking the problem more at its source (the craving-causing bacteria) by fasting I am not wishing to be judgmental AT ALL -- I just yearn for an affirmation that LIFE WILL NOT END if you just have to live without triggering food!!!! Like, why is food that important??? Important enough to ruin your entire life over? --Perhaps this is a testament to the addicting power of the parasitic bacteria/yeast.. it gets you to devote your LIFE to serving IT what IT wants to eat -- without regard to your own health or even sanity. (let me say here: BRAVO FOR FASTING, CRHALL!!!)... I want to read a message that LIFE WILL NOT END if you just have to fast and eat carefully afterward and just keep your microbes under control that way. I yearn for a message that this is possible! ... OK .... I see my perfectionism... I see that I myself have failed at sticking to an anticandida diet, adhere to raw foods only as I might; I see the place of these drug strategies if one cannot find any support to fast. I just want to CHOOSE DIFFERENTLY FOR MYSELF, AND FAST!!!

I have tried to control my diet and I KNOW which foods REALLY don't cause the yeast to grow (I aim for bitter-tasting, green-colored, LIVING, i,e. sprouted foods -- no fun whatsoever and after life stress daily I just go for the triggering foods. theoreticaly I could learn to adhere to this diet and HAVE -- BUT! the REAL solution to follow was to FAST. my body could not handle food at all; after a week on my sprouts i started throwing up! .. My interpretation was: the sprouts were truly my FRIENDS and were assisting my body to RESIST my eating since my body needed to fast! The more triggering foods would just create the food addiction so strongly that my body's resistance to eating would be overwhelmed. So, the triggering foods INTERFERE with the strong signals my body would ordinarily send to get me to stop eating. these foods don't make me vomit, but I OUGHT TO BE vomiting. These triggering foods beat up my body and stop it from beneficially disciplining me. (incidentally -- fasting strengthens my body's resistances to my eating when it can't handle food. And so after a fast I feel MUCH MORE ILL from even slightly overeating, all because my body has become strengthened by the fast and become enabled to send the very strong and compelling "stop eating!" signals. )

... The one possible problem with sprouts -- in every other way the most perfect and gentle and non-triggering food, the food that does not overwhelm , addict, override, or seduce the body --is this: it is actually slightly tough to avoid STARCH in the sprout diet -- though it IS possible --and starch is worse than Sugar for feeding yeast. In my brief periods of adherence to a sprout diet I was not too starch-heavy; and so I did not get "Addicted" to the sprouts -- and my body was, when sprouts were the only option of things to eat, my body was able to FIGHT my compulsive eating! (i.e., cause me to vomit) ... But I had no support and just relapsed into eating a lot of sweet fruit -- a disaster , though admittedly somewhat better than eating Pop-Tarts. What would happen is, I would get so ill on the sprouts, since they would not have the power to overwhelm my body's healthy resistance to eating: I would get ill; then, because I was too food-addicted to accept my body's signal to fast, I would simply not be equipped to resist the food addiction's next prompting to eat. I would just want to eat, and not sprouts, because thinking of eating sprouts was totally unappealing, even sickening. THis was as it should have been, since my body was not in condition to tolerate food -- it needed to fast. The sprouts were NOT overwhelming the body, were NOT seductive foods; and the body's real feelings could come through when i contemplated eating sprouts. But could I obey my body's message to fast? No. i was too compulsed to eat. I would just want food that would not "make me ill." I would want food that would violently seduce my body -- that would not let my body resist my eating -- i would want food that felt at least at first "painless" to eat -- I would want fruit. I would get fruit and eat it and be re-addicted , even though the pain would come as surely as night follows day; the bloating. The fruit did not LET my body WARN me and RESIST eating it. The bloating would be something that I was prevented from anticipating, despite YEARS of experience with it. ... yeah, there are ways of combining foods and being strategic and avoiding the worst kind of bloating, and believe me, I know them -- but I really feel these are merely ways of overriding the body's healthy signal to fast. Is the expression "making an end run" around the body's boundaries? Anyway, I do know it is very self-humiliating to override in this way, and that is not good; and that when I make the effort to respect and not override myself, and push away the food when the body resists food, I feel REALLY GOOD.

The trouble is the intensity of the suffering on the fruit diet. Fruit, being in a funny place between triggering and non-triggering, i think, won't really prompt you to fast/be totally unappealing/make you barf, the way the right food would, given that you NEED TO FAST (I say "you;" I mean "I."). So what happens? I eat fruit. My body is SOMEWHAT overwhelmed/unable to resist my eating; but not totally. So I do not get a full illness reaction that prevents my eating and prompts me to fully fast. Instead I get HORRIBLE SUFFERING from the eating of fruit-type food -- bloating; agony. I'm confused here... this bloating is vilified in the popular understanding but seems like a positive motivator to fast. and therefore a positiv part of the body's resistance to one's eating when there is a need to fast. I don't know. Anyway, on the fruit, the yeast/bacteria grow. And presently you crave more fruit, though all along you should be fasting. And you eat it again and suffer again. What I have done is FORCED myself to use fruit only -- not refined Sugar -- well, I suffered SO MUCH on the Sugar that it was natural to give it up -- BUT! the Rigidity! of my addictedness has not allowed me to become as merciful to myself as regards fruit/or the more triggering raw foods -- nuts etc. anything tempting. To be merciful would be to STOP eating these foods and stick to sprouts... and ultimately to fast, since the sprouts would ultimately not interfere with the body's strong resistance to eating. And so I am STUCK eating these addictive foods and causing myself HORRIBLE suffering. ...if the suffering is horrible, why not just eat sucrose? Sometimes this is tempting! Never seriously, but it is understandable why one would relapse into the most triggering foods. These foods enable a kind of release of the tension of the Craving. These (triggering) foods enable one to eat enough to satisfy the infesting microbes. I am continually consuming fruit, because I feel (wrongly) that "I can stand the horrible suffering of microbial overgrowth better than I can endure the tension of unsatisfied cravings." I think maybe sucrose didn't cause the bloating exactly or not so much but it DEVASTATED my nervous system and brain, nearly killing me with depression. I am thankful I have enough health in myself to stand firm against the most triggering foods, though I cannot move all the way (yet) to truly non-triggering foods/fasting, and consequently suffer a lot (though bloating as horrible as it is is better than Depression ANY DAY)... only at my absolute lowest points am I pushed into getting refined foods... I can actually, on the fruit diet, to SOME extent (by no means to a satisfactory extent) limit my food consumption and thus limit my suffering... this was not the case with processed food ..... So fruit, though "natural", and not conducive to the worst neurological effects of food addiction -- the depression, the panic attacks -- is still a recipe for a miserable life with yeast. OK.

So.. I determined to learn to fast. I found fasting actually a lot easier than sticking to sprouted foods. Besides, these proper foods would ultimately COMPEL me to fast anyway, by ultimately "making me ill," that is, ultimately ceasing to interfere with my body's message to me to GO TO BED AND FAST. (the more triggering foods just keep on interfering with the body's message to fast, as these triggering foods feed the yeast/bacteria and these microbes "demand" their foods of choice and the body's will to fast and ability to create illness-symptoms to compel fasting are overwhelmed)...

... As I say, I could not respond properly to this vomiting/illness- message from my body, and fast. Or, I HAD to fast for like 12 hours, I was so ill; but then the addiction took over again. The primary mental tool of the addiction is Anxiety. I get terrified and feel like something REALLY BAD is going to happen to me if I don't eat the foods the bacteria and yeast like and grow on. These are very vicious microbes, real little Al Capones. So I, as I say, just after a week or so on sprouts, just would always relapse. I would be overcome by a compulsion to eat, though my body could not tolerate food. And would I in that state choose sprouts? Um, no. I'd FEEL how ill the sprouts would INSTANTLY make me. Or I would retch even thinking about eating them. No sprouts then. What to do with my emotional compulsion (of course it is created bacterially/created by the fungus) to eat? ... go for foods that will beat up the body and suppress temporarily its screams to have mercy and not eat. Eat fruit, in other words. Once the parasitic microbes are satisfied, on the fruit sugar, they stop interfering with/anesthetizing the body. Then the horrible suffering starts -- the bloating and brain fog and all of it.

And I just could not pursue the real solution, either -- could not stay on a fast for any real length of time. I just have been languishing in a no-man's land of always being ill and jsut helplessly continuing to eat, (foods that triggered further eating instead of prompted me to fast as I needed to) -- which was making me stay ill. I am trying to learn this essential life skill of fasting here on this forum right now. I will learn it. I am doing a seven-day fast now. I am in such a weakened life-state; I have got to learn fasting. But my conviction is also that the fasting will restore me to health better than ever in my life. . FAsting has the effect of enabling me actually to stay on the diet better. I know the proper diet for me: nonstarchy living food. flax sprouts, sesame sprouts adzuki sprouts are 3 big possibilities for sober, non-yeast-triggering eating -- once my body is ready to tolerate food. Alfalfa sprouts clover sprouts that type of thing too. Other varieties of sprouts tend to be starchy. Foods high in starch/sugar the yeast like and the yeast make you crave and want to eat. You have to fast so you no longer crave them.

on the candida support forum the second step assuming you succeed in killing the fungus (yeast) (which you never can totally and it quickly grows back if any remains alive) is to implant "beneficial bacteria" (sold as acidophilus & other strains in health food stores) in the colon. Probably ideally via enemas. Apparently these beneficial bacteria eat the yeast and keep it under control. .. This all works in theory but not so easily in practice. i adhere to fasting as my true solution. I question the philosophy of there being any such thing as beneficial microbes in the body -- bacteria or fungus. I REALLY want to find natural hygienists who write on these matters. i KNOW I have read somewhere an hygienist who questioned the "need" for bacteria same as me... and I even question at least for myself the practice of breaking fasts on fruit/juices, which seems only a way of reactivating an addicted way of eating. it seems to be a certain violence toward the body -- re-addicting it to food instead of ... I don't know... awaiting a true hunger for non-yeast/bacteria-encouraging foods like the sprouts I have in mind. ...... Stuff that feeds the "beneficial" bacteria, also, with me, causes efflorescence of my harmful bacteria! -- Colostrum difficilum. i've been diagnosed with that/overgrowth of harmful intestinal bacteria. To manage , in desperation, I use enemas and a ton of antimicrobial spices. These bring the symptoms down. Temporarily. But they do not kill off the addicting agents (the microbes) enough ever-- the addictions just come back ... in spite of my using oregano garlic blah blah. this use of antibiotic/antifungal agents and enemas is a losing battle and a bad, ultimately harmful band-aid measure. i really know that ultimately only fasting will help me. it will starve out what is infesting and hurting me. So i am just committed to becoming able to fast at length. I am having success on this forum. .. the last thing I will say is that the ORIGIN of all this overgrowth in me would seem to be a HABIT and ATTITUDE of .. engaging in negativity and ...seeking comfort in food... a WAY of eating, if you will... curable ONLY by adhering to a diet of foods that I DON'T WANT, or at least, never want when my body cannot handle food. After a fast they taste fine; and also they never trigger me to overeat them (because they never trigger the growth of the overeating-inducing bacteria/fungus)

Hope that was a little clear. i hope you are having a wonderful day. You have done an astonishingly brave, honest, correct thing by taking this long fast against your dysbioses (if you do suffer from these) and pro- your-health. I want to be just like you and fast for long times, until my dysbioses are cured. My whole mental emotional habit repertoire will also be healed via this process. i know if you hold on, you will get incredible healing. Congratulations on your work so far. Yes, listen to Mighty. You are ABSOLUTELY JUSTIFIED IN CARING for your health this way, TO HECK WITH THE INCONVENIENCE TO ANYONE ELSE. i think your loved ones can tolerate a few weeks of finding other people to engage in outdoor sports with, for the sake of your Health!!! There is nothing more valuable to you than your well-being.

i am realizing I just have to adjust my expectations of my general activity levels in Life at this point. I have got to say, OK, I am going to be spending a lot of time in bed for the foreseeable future, fasting! i have got to develop a real Bed Life -- a way to connect and participate in life from my bed. Thus I will be able to do the fasting I need to do. i cannot expect that I will be healed in 1 week and bounce back. it might take a year or 5 years of lots of fasting, and oh so careful eating. As I write this I can hardly believe my behavior with food in just the past week. i feel I have grown up a lot just writing this letter to you today. OK! Thank you for letting me do this!!!
Best , best wishes,
Powerray

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