Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/89

Rh only of benefit provided it could be borne without too much of a mental strain and provided great care is used not to over-eat when normal dietary habits are resumed. In fact the greatest difficulty in connection with a fast of any duration is the tendency to over-eat after the fast. This error will often be productive of so much injury that all the beneficial results of a fast are practically nil.

After the fast I have described here I made the mistake myself of eating too heartily on two or three occasions and I am satisfied that much harm resulted thereby. On the second day after the fast I ate three hearty meals, when one hearty meal would have been sufficient. This was, as before mentioned, the first fast of this duration that I had ever gone through, and I was not prepared to meet conditions with which I was not familiar.

Unquestionably it would be better in experimenting with fasting to start by fasting one meal or say one day at a time. The result of this will give you confidence in its benefits, then you can gradually advance into a full-fledged convert. The principal result of value in such a conversion will be from that day forward absolute independence