A viewer asks: “Fasting for short, medium or long periods of time has been touted as highly beneficial to reaching the spiritual plateau while in this earthly plane. Examples from the Judeo-Christian tradition include Moses, and Jesus, who spent 40 days fasting and praying in the wilderness. Native peoples do Spirit quests where they fast for longer periods of time. Then there are the Breatharians and those who believe they should never pick anything from a tree, but only eat fruit that falls on the ground. On the other hand, Anthony William, the Medical Medium, recommends against fasting for any length of time. Who is right and can both of these types of approaches be correct?”

They are both correct, but in different settings for different reasons. The Medical Medium is helping humanity fight the battle of poor nutrition, as you are at a tremendous disadvantage having access to mediocre food sources and polluted dead water in order to live. This is a far from ideal circumstance. When people have a meager nutritional support to begin with, adding fasting into the routine is risky at best, even though it might have advantages with respect to metabolic reset. People will not understand the proper time and way to add fasting to their routines. There are many, many, people with eating disorders and the danger in promoting fasting to the general public is for those individuals to see it as a magic answer and begin to starve themselves, thinking it is beneficial and further blessed as divine wisdom. That could be enough additional sanction to have them end up killing themselves in the process. This is the risk with all such advice. The nutritional arena is one that is particularly complicated and impossible to give one size fits all solutions. There are significant health advantages from regular periods of fasting, and we have commented to you before some of the parameters involved. It, in fact, is a natural way to be, as the typical lifestyle of the first establishment of the divine human colony was that food availability would be intermittent, so it was natural and a part of the expected life experience that periods of fasting would occur. So the human body was, in fact, designed to compensate for this and, in fact, to utilize it as an opportunity to rebalance the bodily systems metabolically to derive a benefit that is best done when not in use, in the same way that long-term maintenance of an aircraft can only be done when it is resting on the ground and not in mid-flight. Living things need a certain amount of rest and recuperation at all levels, big and small, within the organism. Even when the heart is not beating it is in a period of rest, even though short-lived. The same is true of respiratory muscles. One cannot go more than a few minutes without taking a breath and live. So these capabilities are factored into the very makeup of the body. When fasting is never done, that is an unnatural state in and of itself. In a sense, fasting is a signal to the body to economize, rearrange set-points, and the redirecting of energy in a way to maximize efficiency, draw on long-term reserves like fat stores, and so on, to support day-to-day functioning while undergoing a time of caloric restriction. This has deeper benefits as well, in fine-tuning the regulatory pathways to promote healthy rebalancing and a kind of strengthening, a kind of girding, to cope with the challenge of lack of food intake. That strengthening is productive and will add to well-being and longevity if not taken to excess. So, as in all things, what is needed is a balance that suits the individual. And this can be determined by trial and error starting with short periods to assess what happens, the comfort level, the ease in handling what is experienced, and backing away if there are problems. By feeling one’s way along, it is possible to get a good sense of what will help you end up feeling healthier, and that feedback will help you optimize the practice of fasting.