Why We Decided to Go on a Two-Week Water-Only Fast

Healing

Nov 15

Underneath it all, this is a love story.

Back in late August, we arrived at TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, for two weeks of medically supervised water-only fasting. That’s right — two weeks of no food, nothing but water. By choice. Before I get into the experience, I need to explain why we decided to embark on a very expensive trip to sit around and starve — not what most people would do on their vacations.

As I’ve mentioned before, my husband Tex and I have a thirty-year age difference between us. Three. Zero. When we first got together, people sometimes had preconceived notions about what that meant — one of us had to be rich or predatory. My family had a whole meeting about us when we first started dating, assuming that Tex was a “cradle robber” (except I was already twenty-eight, Mom). Two years later, when Tex told his contractor friends that he’d gotten married to a thirty-year-old, they’d have one of two reactions — “don’t get her pregnant” or a blank “does not compute” stare (the latter amused me to no end). The truth was that we met in a spiritual group, and we fell in love, other people’s opinions be damned.

Since then, keeping Tex healthy has been one of our ongoing projects. I am frequently aware that we likely won’t have the rest of my life together. Every year, the clock is ticking. He turned seventy this year, and we’re determined to get another twenty good years out of him. Twenty years seems like a long time, but we’ve already been together for ten, and those went by like a flash. I don’t think like that all the time—only every so often. Sometimes it makes me cry. But the age difference was never a deal-breaker. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow, anyway. So our main motivation for putting ourselves through this voluntary ordeal was, well, love.

Why Water-Only Fasting

I first learned about TrueNorth around 2013, after my aunt went there for a fast (she’s the adventurous one in the family, kind of like me), which led me to read more about the benefits of water-only fasting. During fasting, assuming a person had adequate nutrition to begin with, the body goes into a state where it uses up fat stores while ridding itself of toxins and digesting old and damaged cells. The effects of a water-only fast include improvements in many chronic illnesses, healing of old injuries, increased stress resilience, reduced inflammation, and in general a “reset” of the body and mind. There are other types of fasting such as juice fasts and intermittent fasting that can also have similar benefits, but it usually takes longer to achieve those benefits than on a water-only fast.

The idea that our body can heal itself through the simple act of not eating captured my curiosity. It made sense, since for most of our evolutionary history, we would have rarely had three meals a day consistently. At the time, I was eager to try it for myself, but a stay at TrueNorth cost a lot of money and took too much time out of our schedule. You had to do it for more than a week to see more obvious healing effects, and a two-week vacation was just a lot of time away.

Incidentally, we had to stay three weeks for a two-week fast because they required you to stay half as long as your fast to do a careful re-introduction of foods, or “re-feeding.” Increasing food intake too quickly after a fast can cause “re-feeding syndrome,” which can potentially lead to death. Our three-week stay cost around $4,000 per person for lodging, food, and medical care (including some optional chiropractic treatments). Not everybody can afford that, but for the amount of care we received—the twice-a-day doctor visits, exams and lab work, chef-made meals (when not fasting), housekeeping and laundry service—I felt it was a reasonable price. They’re not getting rich off of this, just passionate people doing what they believe in.

Back in 2013, though, we just weren’t motivated enough to spend the money or time. After I got excited about water-only fasting, I tried to do it by myself at home, keeping an eye on my own vitals with urinalysis strips and a glucose monitor. Tex was once a physician’s assistant, so I figured his help was good enough. That fast ended up only lasting 4 days because my stomach was cramping too much, and I got tired of lying around the house unable to do anything. Life went on, and I didn’t think about fasting again for years.

A Health Issue We Couldn’t Ignore

Last October, Tex started having pain in his right knee. He works as a self-employed concrete cutter, which means he cuts doors, windows, trenches, and holes in concrete walls and floors. It’s hard physical labor, and if anybody ever tried to do it themselves, they usually swore to never do it again and became his best customers. When the Covid-19 pandemic started, he had a month and a half off during lockdown, then work returned with a vengeance as people decided to work on their houses all at once. Tex busted his butt all summer to get to all the jobs coming his way. We were working on our own backyard at the same time, and he would come home and work with our builders after a hard day outside. The pain in his knee started out small, then escalated over a month until he had to stop working because he could hardly walk.

The problem with his knee wasn’t as straightforward as we’d hoped. An MRI showed that Tex’s right femur was missing a piece of cartilage at the end, but the report said they couldn’t see any pieces floating around, meaning it probably didn’t break off due to an injury. Tex had a theory how it could have happened, and it may not be a random effect of aging. About thirty years ago, he had an accident at work and nearly cut his right arm off at the elbow, slicing through the artery. The surgeon that fixed his arm took a piece of the saphenous vein (the major vein near the surface of the leg) to reconnect the artery. Well, that first surgeon screwed up and connected the artery in his arm to a vein, and Tex didn’t find out until six months later, when he became progressively weaker and noticed that the veins in his right arm were pulsing. So another surgeon redid the surgery and took out a second piece of the saphenous vein on the same leg, near the ankle. Years later, his right leg started having blood supply issues as the saphenous vein in his right leg collapsed, and his body tried to create alternate routes for the blood supply back to the heart. Tex suspected the cartilage on his femur had probably withered from the poor blood supply.

Aiming for True Healing

Tex and I aren’t people who default to Western medicine for our health issues. As long as the issue isn’t an emergency or life-threatening, we prefer non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical solutions that address the source of the problem, which unfortunately our medical system does poorly. Having gone through medical school and navigated his own and his late wife’s cancer diagnoses, Tex knows a thing or two about what Western medicine can and cannot do.

We had already been getting acupuncture and herbal medicine on a regular basis for other issues, so of course the first person to treat the knee pain was our Chinese medicine doctor. The acupuncture treatments began alongside Tex’s visits to his primary care doctor to get an evaluation and an MRI. Tex would have seen an orthopedic surgeon as well (and still may), but the referral took so long, he never managed to make the appointment before it was no longer needed.

Chinese medicine worked gradually because it was addressing the whole body and not just the symptom (i.e. the knee). We learned that the old surgery in Tex’s right leg disrupted the energy flow, but the effects were subtle enough that they didn’t show up for decades. We also learned that the lungs and the knee were connected by the same energy meridian, and sometimes Tex’s knee would feel better after a session treating the lungs.

Whether or not you believe the explanations about energy flow, the results were self-evident. After getting two to three treatments per week for a month, Tex went from almost needing a cane to being able to do jobs that didn’t require kneeling. He could return to work as long as he was careful.

Over the next few months, Chinese medicine continued to help, with the healing progressing in starts and stops. Sometimes weeks would go by without any obvious changes, then Tex and our doctor would try something new, and the knee would respond with more improvement. It healed to a point where he could do most jobs again and even kneel with knee pads on. Unfortunately, the one activity that hurt the most was walking longer distances, because of the repetitive impact on his knee. We hadn’t been able to walk all the way around Green Lake Park near our house, almost 3 miles in circumference, since he started having knee problems.

Feeling His Age

Being agnostic about trying anything that could help, Tex continued to study other treatment options, including surgery (still the last resort). He really felt his age for the first time, since up through his sixties (he turned seventy in January 2021), he had no aches and pains in the ten years we’ve been on a plant-based diet — except for a diagnosis of COPD in 2018, but he has been managing it through acupuncture and herbs as well. His body seemed unable to heal this on its own this time, and that disturbed him as much as having difficulty walking. He saw the deteriorating knee as a symptom of an imbalanced system, a system that was on a path toward eventual death. Tex was not one to resign himself to gradual deterioration.

A few months into the healing process, during one of our discussions where Tex talked my ears off about his research into knee treatments and anti-aging supplements, I off-handedly suggested he look at water-only fasting again, remembering that during a fast, the body would go into a healing process that could repair old injuries. The same mechanism might help his knee. To my surprise, Tex agreed, then proceeded to research everything he could find on the benefits and mechanisms of fasting.

This time, the money and time seemed worth it since we had more at stake. It wasn’t just a curiosity anymore. I thought Tex would want to fast at home and save some money, but he preferred medical supervision to be on the safe side, considering the potential electrolyte imbalances that could happen. So we called TrueNorth Health Center and booked a three-week stay.

This is the first story in a multi-part series on our experience doing water-only fasting for two weeks. Stay tuned for the next part!