tolerate a water fast, an elimination diet (to be described in
detail later) was employed, while stringently avoiding all foods
usually found to be allergy producing.

I also decided that if I was going to employ fasting as my primary
medicine, it was important for me to have a more intense personal
experience with it, because in the process of reviewing the
literature on fasting I saw that there were many different
approaches, each one staunchly defended by highly partisan
advocates. For example, the capital "N" Natural, capital "H"
Hygienists, such a Herbert Shelton, aggressively assert that only a
pure water fast can be called a fast. Sheltonites contend that juice
fasting as advocated by Paavo Airola, for example, is not a fast but
rather a modified diet without the benefits of real fasting. Colon
cleansing was another area of profound disagreement among the
authorities. Shelton strongly insisted that enemas and colonics
should not be employed; the juice advocates tend to strongly
recommend intestinal cleansing.

To be able to intelligently take a position in this maze of conflict
I decided to first try every system on myself. It seems to me that
if I can be said to really own anything in this life it is my own
body, and I have the absolute right to experiment with it as long as
I'm not irresponsible about important things such as care of my
kids. I also feel strongly that it was unethical to ask anyone to do
anything that I was not willing or able to do myself. Just imagine
what would happen if all medical doctors applied this principal in
their practice of medicine, if all surgeons did it too!

I set out to do a complete and fully rigorous water fast according