"During my 40-day Program, I have learned that the body is a miraculous and extremely evolved organism, quite capable of healing itself, if only given the chance. I found myself singing, laughing and loving more than I had ever done before. I see now that we kill ourselves slowly, by neglecting to allow ourselves the time to naturally heal."--Kim Tanaka, 19, Japanese university sophomore

"All seems to be a matter of routine, at this point. I have lost 35 lbs. and I am enjoying playing basketball at a faster clip. I received a compliment last night at a varsity basketball game; one of the players' mother said, 'Have you found the Fountain of Youth?!' Thank you very much, Dennis; your program makes me feel great, and others seem to be enjoying my results."--Bill Hanson, 48, CEO of an Easton, CT, home-building business, during his Program to lose 50 lbs.

"I've had 22 major surgeries, and am on my fourth pacemaker, but I more than obtained my goal through FCI's skillful fasting Program, losing 37 lbs.!"--Michael Maxwell, 82, American retired autoworker

[See in more detail near bottom, if curious.]

Scientific fasting is the oldest, fastest, and most effective healing method now known to humankind.

IS IT SAFE?

Naturally, if you suffer from a disease condition such as advanced cancer, Type I diabetes, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disorder, etc., you should be under your medical doctor's supervision. Likewise, fasting is contraindicated for children not yet fully grown (still forming bone and teeth); pregnant and lactating women (as their detoxification toxifies their baby), and those suffering from wasting disease.

Otherwise, scientific juice-fasting is perfectly safe (read the next five paragraphs), although every reputable fasting book on Earth recommends that one should never do a prolonged fast, initially, without skilled, veteran, professional supervision. If it was safe for all three Fathers of Western Medicine, as well as for Buddha and Christ, it's probably safe for you, as well. And in the sense Einstein referred to in concluding that nothing happens in this Universe by accident, it's no accident your intuitive wisdom has led you here, just as it's no accident FCI has been blessed these past 35 years to supervise our world's largest, nonresidential fasting clientele, with clients continuously on all major continents and in all time zones.

CAN I STILL FUNCTION?

A common question among prospecive clients or those familiar with the unnecessarily debilitating water-fasting regime (which none of the world's best fasting clinics/centers have done over the past century, instructively) is: Will I have enough energy to still function at work, and to exercise? Our Fasting.com home page mentions not only a client who trained during our Program and went on to set an American record and win Olympic Gold (missing the world record by .007 of a second), but also a psychiatrist-pediatrician, 49, who throughout his 50-day Program, practiced psychiatry all week long at the Univ. of California at San Francisco, and on weekends, trained six hours each day for the Western States Ultramarathon, during which they not only run 100 miles, but climb 32,000 feet over the course of the race. His six-hour workouts included 2.5-hr., nonstop runs up hilly, mountain trails on Mt. Tamilpais.

Similarly, a Utah client, 41, wrote the following on the 37th fasting day of her 50-day FCI Program: "All is going well, and I have more energy and feel great. I have just returned from competing at Nationals in Full Contact Olympic Sport Taekwondo, where I won a gold and silver medal! I never thought that I could do that while fasting, but I found myself with lots of energy, and was very focused for what needed to be done."

One final example also (rather embarrassingly) puts all such questions to rest. . .from a Herzliya Pituach, Israel, mild-mannered newspaper reporter, 38, who spent 10 years as a U.S. Navy Seal officer after attending the Naval Academy, speaking here on the 40th day of the 50-day FCI Program he began at 5' 8", 191 lbs., wanting to leave behind a junk-food/beer habit that had resulted in him feeling "fat, fatigue, and dullness":

"As an exclamation point on my 40th fasting day, I participated in a local triathlon. Recall that I put this year's Ironman aspirations on hold to follow my intuition that led me to your site (baruch hashem--bless the name, as the locals here say). It was a last-minute decision, because I haven't been training for anything like a triathlon in months, not even a short sprint like this one, but was jogging, stretching, even some Pilates, as I tried to get used to my new, limber and lighter body. I didn't mention it to you the day before, because I really didn't want you to have to advise me against it. It was hot (you know, it is Israel in Summer) and the short race I did had a late-morning start, and I truly stuck to my plan of taking it extremely easy and just having fun.

"I wore a heart-rate monitor, which I never do during a race, just to keep myself in check. Despite the fact that I hadn't eaten solid food in 40 days, plus the heat, and the fact that I wasn't loaded out with my gucci endurance drinks, Carbo-Pro, salt tablets, gels and bars (just a bottle or two of strained OJ), I felt incredible, and really had to work on holding myself back the whole time! My heart rate was MUCH lower than before (pre-fast), and I was actually going FASTER with much less effort, and had to force myself to slow down. The difference on the bike was also incredible!

It's hilarious, actually, how some of us hedge and haw over a couple of grams or ounces here and there on our bike equipment. Imagine losing 33 POUNDS, and then getting on your old bike that was sneered at for being half a pound heavier than some other dude's new $9,000 racing bike. The time will come when I get to unleash this new engine at top speed, and see how my old bike motors along then. I got it moving pretty fast on Saturday, and it was oh-so-much easier. PeaceCheers, (confidential)."

[For those unfamiliar with the term, the first modern, long-distance triathlon event was the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, during which participants swam 2.4 miles (3.86 kilometers), bicycled 112 miles (180.2 km.), and finished up with a 26.2 mile run (42.2 km.). The abovementioned psychiatrist-pediatrician had done the Ironman a dozen times before doing our Program.]

FOR HOW LONG?

Physicians, globally, trained as symptomatic practitioners, have neither theoretical nor experiential knowledge of scientific, therapeutic, prolonged fasting, excepting, that is, the worldwide M.D.s, psychiatrists, D.O.s, D.D.S.s and Ph.D.s in most all fields who do FCI Programs each and every year in increasing numbers, plus those few who have learned autodidacticly. Therefore, please don't fault the former for not making recommendations, one way or the other, until they've further schooled themselves.

Among those M.D.s who do have knowledge, Drs. J. Kellberg and P. Reizenstein of the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm--which actually awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year--clinically monitored in-hospital patients (not well-beings such as you and me) in fasting studies lasting up to 55 days, demonstrating that scientific, prolonged fasting's not only perfectly safe for most, but also therapeutically beneficial, as well. There are countless hundreds of fasting clinics and centers in nations throughout Europe, where therapeutic juice-fasting has long been used as the premier weight-loss, detoxification, and healing modality over the entire 20th Century, continuing here into the 21st.

German and Swedish biological clinics, operated by medical doctors, routinely treat nearly every disease, from cardiovascular and digestive disorders to rheumatic and skin conditions, with scientific, therapeutic fasting. Germany's late Otto Buchinger, Sr., M.D., supervised over 100,000 successful juice-fasting "cures." In Russia, fasting has been used for over a half-century as the most effective treatment for schizophrenia, with irrefragable studies showing that 70% of patients improved mentally after 20-to-30 days of controlled fasting. Similarly, one Japanese research clinic fasted 382 patients, all suffering psychosomatic disease, with a success rate of 87%.

North America is still far behind the learning curve, nevertheless, as is clear to Dr. Charles Goodrich of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, who has fasted countless times: "People don't realize that the chief obstacle to fasting is overcoming the cultural, social and psychological fears of going without food. These fears are ingrained. . . .However, fasting is not starving, not even in a medical sense or the natural sense." Dr. George Cahill of Harvard Medical School emphasized the point: "Man's survival [of long abstentions from food] is predicated upon a remarkable ability to conserve the relatively limited body protein stores, while utilizing fat as the primary energy producing food."

Nobel Prize-winnning Fr. biologist and surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel, who spent 34 of his professional years in the United States, described in his magnum opus, Man, The Unknown, the body's brilliant rejuvenative and regenerative capability, inherent in its own detoxification process vis a vis scientific fasting: "Privation of food at first brings a sensation of hunger, occasionally some nervous stimulation, but it also determines certain hidden phenomena which are more important. The sugar of the liver and the fat of the subcutaneous deposits are mobilized, and also the proteins of the muscles and the glands. . .in order to maintain blood, heart, and brain in a normal condition. Fasting purifies and profoundly modifies our tissues."

TYPES OF FASTS.

Those choosing Fasting Center International Programs primarily to lose their unnecessary weight do 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, 70-, 80-, 90- or 100-day Programs, depending upon their goals. FCI's average client loses one lb./day for the first 20 days; then, 1/2 lb./day, thereafter, down to their body's next metabolic set-point, whatever that may be. On the average, 5-7 of those pounds are fecal matter from the colon, which is regained post-fast, upon refeeding.

However, fully half of all FCI clients are not fasting to lose weight, but to regain lost energy, heighten clarity of consciousness, enhance innate spirituality, or for prophylactic purposes--to clean, rest, regenerate and rejuvenate their own unique body. . .to detoxify the 5-to-10 lbs. of toxic chemicals the average adult now carries. Once again, one's Program length should be somewhat commensurate with one's goals. An educated estimate of how long it will take you to now totally detoxify your body--in the number of actual juice-fasting days--is your chronological-age number, plus 17. Obviously, you don't have to do it all at once, although the majority of FCI clients now elect to do just that, taking advantage of FCI's 35 years of veteran, skilled, professional supervision.

FCI'S 'AVERAGE' CLIENT.

Since 1996, our 'average' client, worldwide, now does FCI's Total Detoxification Program--their chronological-age number + 17, in number of actual juice-fasting days, plus 5 days to transition in intelligently, and another 5 to skillfully break their fast. Our fees--all presently listed on FCI's How Do I Start link--also presently include FCI's post-fast LIFETIME OPTIMUM-HEALTH PLAN, containing the latest nutritional biochemistry, along with the oldest wisdom from the healthiest, most long-lived cultures on Earth. . .what they are doing that we're not!

'Diets', as most learned the hard way, fail 99.5% of the time (according to America's Washington Post, which researched over 26,000 popular 'diets' that have come and gone over the previous 70 years). Fasting, on the other hand, has been used by humanity's greatest thinkers and spiritual teachers for countless millennia, because it actually works! Further, FCI's nonpareil 98.5% Program completion rate attests to that fact--a large portion of the reason why FCI has developed our world's largest, nonresidential fasting clientele, over the past 35 years.

So, why not just do it. . .for yourself (and/or your loved ones). Let FCI be your skillful guide to a modern, scientific, health-restoring and rejuvenating juice-fast. You'll save most of the cost on solids not taken during your Program. You'll then have this magnificent, self-improvement technique for the rest of your life. It'll help keep you out of US$1600 per day hospital rooms in your future. And you'll become healthier than most everyone around you! Considering the failed alternatives, most FCI clients consider their Program cost absurdly inexpensive!

Respectfully, DENNIS PAULSON, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Fasting Center International, Inc.

 P.S. Perhaps the greatest myth about scientific fasting is that you shall become weaker. European physicians disproved this myth long ago. In what famed Swedish biochemist and nutrition expert Dr. Ragnar Berg then declared was a "great scientific success," all the participants in the famous Swedish Fast Marches of both 1954 and 1964, led by Dr. Lennart Edren, walked 325 miles over 10 days--from Gothenberg to Stockholm--with no solid food at all. And as participant Karl-Otto Aly, M.D., concluded:

"The marches clearly showed that humans can live for an extended period without food, and even accomplish a hard, physical effort while fasting. The general, expressed feeling among participants was that they felt stronger and had more vigor and vitality after the fast, than before it!"

European physicians also tested the parameters of safety, long ago. At Stobhill General Hospital in Glascow, Scotland, a 54-year-old, grossly overweight woman who had arthritis was clinically monitored on a 249-day juice-fast, losing 74 of her 262 lbs., while watching her arthritis disappear completely.

Three of FCI Founder/Director Dennis Paulson's most important teachers and inspirations on Earth--Malika, Atisha and their younger sister Tamar--all familiar with the academic ladder (Atisha with two University of California undergraduate degrees, and his sister Malika, one, although she later simultaneously took her Master's at Rockefeller University and her Juris Doctor at Albany Law School, before passing the New York and Washington Bar Exams, and becoming a prosecutor in Seattle; Tamar's completed her undergraduate work at U.C.L.A., having studied Spanish in Spain and French in France one Summer, spent 7 months "giving back" by teaching English to children in Busan, South Korea, during another, and now volunteering with the Instituto Accesoria Legal Derecho Internacionales in Lima, Peru, while sorting through grad school acceptance letters).

All three have traveled extensively, both with their parents and independently. Tamar, to Argentina, Botswana, Cambodia, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Peru, South Korea, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Malika, to China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, India, Israel, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Thailand and Tibet.

Their big brother Atisha, who spent a junior high Summer in Costa Rica focused on Spanish and surfing, is a veteran globetrotter, as well, having backpacked around the world for nearly a year for post-graduate learning--through parts of Central and South America, north Africa, Europe and Asia--before opening an upscale restaurant with a friend in Santa Barbara, and then moving to New York's greater energy field to pursue his creative passion--photography. . .all world travelers inspired, on their Dad's side, by the 55 nations he was blessed to visit during his 14-month sabbatical in 2003, after previously living 10 years outside the U.S. As is often the case, the fruit does not fall far from the tree. If interested, click on photos for enhanced viewing.

Any questions, email or phone FCI. Email: FastMaster@fasting.com; phone: 818-590-2536 (know that the best time to catch Founder/Director Dennis Paulson, himself, with the least interruption, is between 10-4, California time). For the Fasting Center International home page, click here: www.fasting.com

For further info., please click the 'How Do I Start' button, below.

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