Re: I thought I was the only one nuts enough to do this
omg suck your blood? Eat your vital organs. The things people come up with. It's all fear and ingnorance based. Ask them where their fasting research comes from. I and many others here do plenty of researching and don't restrict ourselves to 'positive' articles about fasting but read up on all we can. These fear based comments that people come up with are just totally ignorant of the facts.
The body cleans out while fasting, it also repairs and rebalances our system, left out of balance by incorrect eating. We don't need to add anything into it, it rebalances itself from our stores. Adding things in will at best confuse it and at worst knock us out of ketosis altogether while the body expects more nutrients to come from outside so it can again function from ingestion rather than from the breakdown of it's own stores.
Shelton was talking about the large intestine only I'm sure. The small intestine and the bowels often have a lot of junk piled up on them and stuck to the walls apparently from old food left in there too long. It is quite capable of removing that junk on it's own without help from the outside and from my personal experience does so efficiently and without discomfort. I do believe also that there are important enzymatic processes that take place in the small intestines when we aren't eating- whether fasting or not- and that the natural balance of enzymes needs to be encouraged for those processes to run efficiently. I do believe it is best to leave the body alone to do what it does best and not try to second guess it unless it gives us a damn good reason to. 'If it aint broke don't fix it' I always say.
There is no reason to believe at all that a
parasite would outlive it's fasting host. They live off what we feed them, they aren't aliens digesting our body bit by bit that would be like biting their own legs off to survive (if they had legs). It is true that animals can fast for a longer time than expected but remember that we are much much larger than they are and we have our limits. Even allowing for a large margin of error if you go by body mass comparison alone they will be dead and reabsorbed (ewwwww) in no time. :)
Good luck,
Andrew.