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On Fasting by Laura Fraser from LOSING IT (NY, 1997)
"Very low-calorie diets starve people. Physicians have tried several means of starvation to get people to lose weight, from total fasting to modified fasts with protein supplements to more nutritionally balanced very-low-calorie diets. All of them eventually lead to the well- documented and unpleasant side effects of starvation-including fatigue, hair loss, cold intolerance, anemia, depression, loss of muscle tissue, dehydration, irritability, weakness, bad breath, gallstones, and cardiac arrhythmia's-and all have been responsible for patient deaths. A Swedish study shows about 59 sudden unexplained deaths per 100,000 people on very low-calorie diets, which is 40 times the rate of sudden death in the general population. (Lars Sjostrom of the University of Goteburg in Sweden, quoted by Frances Berg, "The Health Risks of Weight Loss" (Hettinger, ND: Healthy Living Institute, 1993) p. 71 )"
"Eating no food whatsoever will obviously cause people to lose weight quickly, though no one can keep it up for long without serious physical damage. "Fasting"-the term is a euphemism for starvation, as if the body can tell whether it is receiving no food on purpose or not, - has been popular as a diet aid, off and on, since William the Conqueror. (In 1087, having difficulties riding on horseback because of his tremendous bulk, William the Conqueror took to his bed to lose weight with a "liquid diet" consisting mainly of alcoholic beverages.)
Fasting had a recent heyday in the 1970s, when several diet doctors wrote books claiming that long-term fasting would not only help dieters lose weight, but would rid the body of impurities and give the organs a well-needed rest. Allan Cott, a Manhattan psychiatrist who wrote Fasting as a Way of Life (1977), for instance, advocated that fasting was the "healthiest way to lose weight," and believed that the body has at least a month's supply of food in reserve to feed on.
But in reality, fasting for more than a day or two is hardly healthy. Instead of eliminating toxins from the body, it creates them, and puts a great strain on the heart, kidneys, and liver. The body not only burns up fat, but muscle and organs as well. No one can last for long on a fast, and at least five hospital patients who were put on fasts in the late 1960s died. (Others died during the course of treatment, or in the re-feeding stage immediately afterward, but physicians claimed that the deaths were the result of obesity-related problems)."
LOSING IT, an exposé of the diet industry, can be purchased at any bookstore (it's in paperback) or at:
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