"Do not take any supplements or electrolytes or salt. If you do, you will go back to normal habits of eating after you brake your fast."
Archus, I am not sure this is true... I have read my
Shelton and I am well aware of the arguments he makes against supplementation on water fasts. What I am arguing here is not that a water-only fast is inferior to a fast that includes supplements. However, I do not think there is a link between supplementing or not and a person's ability to return to healthy eating after a fast. I have done one 12-day and one 31-day water-only fasts on which I didn't supplement. I did not return to normal eating afterwards, even though I did my best to refeed on raw foods, etc. If you say, when you do/don't do A, B will happen, "will" implies certainty and causation. A scientific truth, if you will. And I am not sure this is the case here.
I have not done a long, supplemented fast so I can compare which scenario is better to refeed from, so I cannot compare, but I can say for sure that eating, bingeing, and food addiction are not as simple as the chemical dependencies that form when one abuses highly palatable foods. Neither you nor I are scientists and can conduct our own studies to test things: what we can do is read the available literature, and we have both done so. I worry, however, that you are setting this person up for failure. Imagine she fasts on pure water. Imagine this does not cure the bingeing, which is a distinct possibility - in fact, it is harder to find people who have refed properly than people who have not, regardless of whether they supplemented. So, imagine she is one of those people. A knowledgeable figure told me, as long as you don;t supplement, you won't binge, and I find myself bingeing. What is the conclusion here: that there is something wrong with me? That I have tried fasting and obviously it didn;t work, so there is no hope now? The truth is, we don't have a proven formula that assures that people will not binge post-fast. If we did, our obesity epidemic would be done and over with. We should give people realistic ideas. Yes, fasting is an -immensely- powerful tool for healing, both physical and spiritual. But we should also caution people realistically as to what to expect and what happens on a fast.
PS: I don't want to make this into a debate on religious beliefs here, but Dr. Moser routinely used supplemented fasts, and they worked, too. It is entirely possible that
Shelton went on his no-supplementation gig because this would have cut costs for his fasting clinics - I assume the cost of supplements add over the approx 10 000 ppl he fasted. Not supplementing works, too - there are factors: length of fast, level of rest the person can afford to take, etc. etc. So I am not saying that supplementation is superior - there are risks, for instance, e.g. with cathy's plan to drink salt water which will result in an electrolyte imballance on a long fast (icky kids strawberry stuff will be better if she were set on supplementing, even with the chemical dies it likely contains). I am saying that both approaches can be valid depending on the context.