Q. You recommend fasting as a way to rest the digestive system, eliminate toxins, and improve health. If I don’t eat at night, I have trouble sleeping. Wouldn’t it be wrong for me to fast?
That depends on how you prepare yourself. Can you mentally accept the idea that you don’t need three or four meals every day to be healthy? If you can believe that fasting will improve your health, then retrain yourself to gradually break your dependence upon food to help you sleep.
Because the digeestive system slows down considerably when you sleep, food that is eaten before bedtime tends to ferment instead of digest. This can result in catarrh of the alimentary canal.
Furthermore, because energy is pulled from the brain to digest the food, your sleep might become restless. You may fail to experience truly peaceful sleep, even though you may not be aware of or remember this on the conscious level.
How You Can Break the Habit of Drugging Yourself with Food
You can break this habit the same way you would break a dependency on sleeping pills. Cut down on the amount until you can do without it. One of the uses of food that few people are aware of is food’s use as a drug.
What else can food be but a drug when it is used beyond its need to nourish the body?
Even the best food becomes a poison to the body, when it is taken to excess.
While you may easily accept the psychologists’ idea that many overweight people drug themselves with excess food in order to compensate for feelings of inferiority, can you also realize that when you are used to eating an excess that stretches and overloads your stomach to bring on drowsiness so that you slip into an afternoon siesta, that you are doing the same thing: Drugging Yourself?
Use Deep Breathing to Help You Sleep Better
If you have trouble relaxing or falling asleep, you would be far better off doing some slow, deep breathing exercises to relax yourself, than overloading your stomach to bring on drowsiness. In addition to relaxing you, the slow, deep breathing exercises will cleanse the lungs, bloodstream, and cells of carbon dioxide, make more room for oxygen in the bloodstream and cells, and recharge the cells with energy. In short, instead of drugging yourself, you will be rejuvenating yourself.
Q. You have talked about diet, fasting, and exercise for bettering your health. While I can understand that all of these are important, I feel that it would be too complicated for me to make all of these changes at once. If I were to start with just one thing, what would you recommend as the most important that I work on first?
ATTITUDE. If you will concentrate upon improving your attitude, than all else will follow. Conversely, if your attitude is not good, then there is little chance of anything else succeeding for any length of time.
Let go of the idea that you can’t help what you are or how you think. At any time you always have a choice.
Choose to think those thoughts and entertain those ideas that will take you to better health and happiness.
Choose to think positive, constructive thoughts that will make a better future for yourself and for all concerned.
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