Curing Diarrhea With Dry Fasting

Being in overall excellent health and leading a vegan lifestyle I was surprised that I had to deal with a terrible bout of diarrhea a few months ago. I exercise regularly and always include raw fruits and vegetables in my diet (by eating salads and making smoothies and juices), so I figured that these practices would be sufficient to avoid any gastrointestinal problems. I am, however, currently living in an eastern country where the sanitation is not always up to par and sometimes various strange ingredients find their way into my meals, so diarrhea should not have been completely unexpected.

I generally make every effort to avoid using medications, whether over the counter or prescription, but after 3 days of going to the bathroom 10 to 20 times per day, I started drinking the Pepto Bismol pink fluid and eating as many crackers as possible. Nothing changed except the color of my stool darkened. Then, a friend recommended Imodium. I bought a package of Imodium and took the recommended dose, but a week later, I am still going and going and going.

At that point it had been two weeks and my bowels have not shown any interest in tightening up my stool, so I started getting desperate. I could have gone to see a doctor, but I knew he would prescribe antibiotics, and I had no interest in taking antibiotics for various reasons, including the fact that antibiotics kill the beneficial as well as the harmful bacteria of your body and otherwise wreak havoc on your system. So I kept searching for a solution. One internet source suggested that NOT drinking water is the solution because the pathogenic bacteria that have proliferated in my stomach or intestines are thriving on all the water I am giving it. Specifically, the resource suggested performing a dry fast.

This seemed like a crazy suggestion at first since everyone I talked to, as well as many internet resources, emphasized drinking as much water as possible, the idea being that I am losing water all the time because of the diarrhea and I need to halt the dehydration. This seemed to make sense, but I knew that oftentimes, the same logical argument can be used to argue for the diametrically opposite idea. Since drinking lots of water for 2 weeks had not helped, I tried to keep my mind open and started to learn more about dry fasting.

For me, a dry fast was not a great leap of faith, since I have performed 3 day juice fasts before. A juice fast involves drinking only fresh squeezed vegetable juices and consuming no other foods. I also have some experience with water fasting, which requires only drinking water and eating no food for several days. I have read about juice and water fasting before and already had confidence in the ability of these practices to detoxify my body. But dry fasting was new to me and the very idea of not eating and not drinking at a time when I am quickly losing fluids seemed very strange at first glance.

Now I am not talking no water no food for a week or longer. I hesitate to even call it a fast because of the many negative connotations fasting has for people. Many think of starvation when they hear the word fasting and especially when they think of the idea of not drinking anything for a long time. But a dry fast needs to only last for 24 hours to cure many nagging ailments. In my case, exactly 24 hours was all that I needed.

As the sources I read suggested, I ate a normal breakfast and for the rest of the day I did not eat or drink anything. From breakfast until about 6 pm I had approximately 8 bowel movements, all just as runny as before, but after 6, I did not have to go to the bathroom at all. I could feel something was happening. My stomach kept making various growling noises, but I had no pain. I did feel thirsty and wanted to drink but I really wanted to give this a shot so I controlled myself. It was difficult to go to sleep in the evening but I finally did drift away.

The next morning (24 hours later) I broke the fast by eating food that is extremely easy to digest. All the sources indicated that you should break the fast with raw fruit and later in the day you can have raw veggies. They also stated that during that first day after breaking the fast I should avoid heavy foods such as rice, cheese, eggs and meat. So I had watermelon and two bananas and drank a big glass of water for breakfast. At lunch, I ate a salad and a vegetable soup. Early afternoon I had my first bowel movement, and voila, it was normal! The kind of normal that I had not had in over two weeks! And that was all. No more diarrhea.

This was amazing to me because in essence, I did not have to do anything. Instead, I just had to give my body enough rest for it to deal with the problem by itself. I encourage everyone to learn more about fasting and dry fasting in particular. Dry fasting is a controversial practice, especially if performed for long periods of time, so there is a paucity of resources and the medical community does not approve of it.

However, there is some useful online information available, usually published by raw food diet promoters. These are the three websites that I found to be the most helpful and well researched in the area of dry fasting: http://rawfoodists.blogspot.com/ (has a good article explaining precautions regarding dry fasting), http://rawfoodme.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/dry-fasting-benefits/ (discusses the numerous benefits of dry fasting) and kaboodle.com/rawfood (a site which suggests more in depth resources).