Author: Herbert M. Shelton Year of Release: 1978 Herbert Shelton wrote 40 books over his 60-year career in health education and “natural hygiene.” He supervised over 30,000 fasts of chronically ill and terminal patients, losing only three. Shelton’s teachings on fasting inspired Gandhi as well as such popular authors as Fuhrman, the Diamonds, Mercola, and […]
The Fasting Catholic Saints
The fasting saints of the Middle Ages are considered holy men and holy women by the Catholic Church. Ironically, the same church viewed many of them with extreme skepticism—at times denouncing them—primarily because of their extreme fasting. In her thesis, A Thin Body Carries the Most Definition(s): Reconceptualizing Voluntary Self-Starvation as an Act of Resistance, […]
Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa
Winner of four major awards, Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls, presents a history of women’s food-refusal dating back as far as the sixteenth century. Here is a tableau of female self-denial: medieval martyrs who used starvation to demonstrate religious devotion, “wonders of science” whose families capitalized on their ability to survive on flower petals and […]
Fasting and Religious Mystics
Inedia, the alleged ability to live without food, is a fast-based lifestyle originally established within the Catholic tradition. In Christianity, the notion of inedia holds that certain saints and mystics were able to survive for extended periods of time without food or drink other than the Eucharist. The Catholic saints and mystics claimed to have […]