Two years ago, my feet started to disappear. I didn’t need new glasses and I could still see my toes, but the shoe-laced parts seemed to dissolve whenever I stood up. “Where’d they go?” I muttered.
Sadly, like millions of others, I had succumbed to a new disease: the Belly-Blindness Syndrome. The rotundity of our girths forces the disappearance of other body parts, so explained my Messed-Up Medical Book, the one subtitled, Everything You Don’t Want to Know about Your Body and Why Not.

So that New Year’s I resolved to step on our old scales every day and record my weight, to see if I might regain some of this lost vision. But the first rolling of those numbers won me an amazingly high jackpot that no-way could be right, so I chose the logical solution and went out and bought other scales. Now instead of the revolving old-fashioned numbers, I had a fancy digital display that added a decimal to the figure I had to lean over to see. And instead of being 20 pounds over my high school wrestling weight of 25 years ago, I was now 20.5 pounds over that ideal. Terrific.

That winter, my wife Sarah found an amazing book by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., titled The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted. Campbell, a highly regarded scientist, had the incredible opportunity to compare our standard diet of affluence with the diets of thousands of rural, usually lower-class Chinese. Campbell’s conclusion based on the Chinese diet: we eat too much protein, particularly from animal sources, so eliminate most if not all meat, dairy, and eggs, and eat a plant-based diet.

In our house, we had followed a vegetarian diet off-and-on for several years, but it always included dairy—butter and yogurt and lots of cheese. We occasionally ate venison hunted from our own farm or fish when we ate out, but now for the first time we concentrated on eating even less flesh and cutting out all dairy, counting on broccoli and tofu for our calcium needs. Slowly as the scales read different numbers, I began to see the burr stuck in my shoelaces as my feet reappeared.

That digital number on the fancy scales, however, plateaued. I had lost 10 pounds, but to regain that high school skinniness, I needed to dissolve another 10. It didn’t seem to want to happen, especially after I had to give up running because of a bum knee. I still hiked a lot, but the lowest I could get that magical number to read was 8 pounds from my goal, and that was after a nasty stomach virus which, besides laying me up for two days, forced a day-and-a-half of fluid-only intake.

And there, thanks to an unwelcome bug, was another healthy alternative to help lose a few more pounds. Why not fast once a week? Such a simple idea, really. So, this New Year’s, that’s our new resolution. Though it might at first sound wacky, it has a long history of effective use, including Hippocrates, Plato, and Socrates all recommending it for different health problems.

In his book, Fasting and Eating for Health, Dr. Joel Fuhrman outlines the many benefits of this ancient, cheap alternative, while also giving several success stories, including his own. As a world-class ice-skater when he was a young man, Fuhrman suffered a serious foot injury that would not heal, despite some of the best medical treatment. After months of doctors prodding with no success, an expert doctor demanded the young athlete go through with an experimental surgery. Fuhrman refused, left the hospital, and journeyed to Dr. Herbert Shelton, an expert on fasting. At Shelton’s Health School, Fuhrman fasted for 46 days and walked out of the clinic with no crutches and no pain. A year later, he placed third in the World Professional Figure Skating Championships.

The idea of fasting, whether it cures an injury or other medical condition (such as asthma, arthritis, or colitis) or just helps lose the Belly-Blindness Syndrome, is simply to allow the body to heal itself. As Fuhrman explains, fasting “works because the body has within it the capacity to heal when the obstacles to healing are removed.” Those obstacles, usually, are too much Beanie-Weanies, Budweisers, and Moon Pies.

While food, even nutritious food, provides nutrition to the body, each item also introduces a certain amount of toxins. Fasting, in turn, gives the digestive system a vacation and allows the body to put that energy into healing itself. Fuhrman tells remarkable stories of many patients fasting and curing themselves of heart problems, diabetes, headaches and scores of other illnesses. And yes, including, obviously, being overweight. It seems so simple of a solution, to just stop eating for a bit, and maybe that’s why fasting is considered “alternative.” No big drug companies can patent it and no plastic surgeons can pad their wallets by telling their patients to not eat. Who wants to hear that anyway? Maybe all of us should.

This morning, after a 24-hour fast, that digital registered in at 8 pounds from goal—hopefully I’m through the plateau. Look out my old wrestling weight, my new self.

Jim Minick teaches at Radford University and lives in Wythe County. He still suffers from a slight case of Belly-Blindness, but hopefully that’s fast disappearing.