Fasting with Loren Lockman

We had a great speaker in town recently, Loren Lockman, 

Founder and Director of the Tanglewood Wellness Center located in Panama.

About Loren Lockman:
Loren Lockman began studying the relationship between nutrition and health while in college in 1979. He became seriously ill in 1984, ultimately diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Candidiasis, Sinusitis, and almost 60 allergies. In 1987 after three years of getting worse, he gave up on traditional medicine and sought to find his own answers. He went back to, and ultimately, beyond traditional nutritional theory, seeking to discover what was natural to the human body. By making these changes, he was well within six months. Since 1987, he hasn’t been sick a single day.
Since 1993, Loren has been supervising fasts and teaching these principles to many people throughout the world helping more then 4000 people in 32 countries. His natural approach has helped many people gain vitality, youthfulness, and overall health.

Lecture points:

* Our human body has at least 50 trillion cells and each cell performs about one hundred thousand functions constantly.

* Physiologists say that with proper nutritional care, we could live for 125-150 years. Unfortunately, the moment we are born in our society our health starts to decline. From the moment we are born, we are injected with unnatural chemicals called vaccines. We take pounds and pounds of antibiotics whether it’s in the form of a medical prescription or a meal on a plate. Our kids’ favorite meals are pizza, macaroni & cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, and when the kids’ stomachs hurt we suggest they drink soda, Ginger Ale! 70% of people in the US die from cancer, heart disease, and stroke. We live in the polluted environment and we rush to accomplish a task after task.
These are just a few reasons why our health declines as soon as we are born. Loren stressed it more than once that it’s never too late to change your lifestyle and improve your diet and that, “Your past doesn’t determine your future.” He pointed to statistics that if you just give up animal products, you can eliminate the risk of cancer, heart disease, and stroke by 80%.

* Fasting: average person has a 6–8 week reserve without food, if doing it properly.

* Dehydration: most of us are dehydrated. If you are not drinking 8 cups of water a day (preferably 16oz each) and not eating 70% of veggies on your plate – you are dehydrated. In fact, I thought I was pretty good about liquids. However, Loren measured my levels with a special machine and I was only 43.5% hydrated at that moment when the normal is around 70%. My body fat was also pretty high which made me think of the “skinny fat people” expression and feeling guilty for eating really fast not to be late for lecture and having stomach cramps because of it :(. Don't Eat Fast!

* More on dehydration: aging, dry skin and shrinking in height are all results of many years of dehydration. The body has to give up some water in skin, spine and other organs in order to maintain and keep alive main organs like heart, brain and blood. His example isn’t pleasant, but I have to describe it for the sake of better understanding. When you eat a bag of chips – they are really dry, but when those chips come out of you they are not dry at all, so the body had to suck all the waters from other body reserves.

* Fasting: every single aspect improves in your body during fasting but to really start eliminating the toxins, you have to do it for 3-3.5 days at least. Doing it for 1 day only is a “surfing” fasting that doesn’t bring any significant benefits unless you are sick. The body has a 48 hour period when it’s searching for food, realizing it’s not there, it “shuts off” the digestive system moving to a state of ketosis –metabolic process of burning primarily fat for energy and getting rid of toxins– our body can be in this state for many weeks believe it or not!

* Garlic: many cultures love garlic including my Ukrainian culture and there was a question whether it’s good or bad for you. Loren suggested that garlic is a natural antibiotic. It kills bacteria that we depend on, it will help you to eliminate symptoms and will make you feel better if you are sick, but it won’t make you healthier as it’s eliminating symptoms not the cause.

He finished with a great saying from Hippocrates:

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,

But to eat when you are already sick is to feed your sickness”