I am on the sixth day of what I hope to be a 10-day juice fast. I preceded this fast with a 2 week detox diet consisting of fruits and leafy green vegetables. On the third day of the detox diet, I experienced detox symptoms but after that I felt great. My plan is to go back on the detox diet for two weeks after I end the fast in 4 days. I'm feeling ok now, I am comfortable but I'm not maintaining my heavy work schedule; I took off from work for 10 days to do this.

My theory(which could be totally wrong) is that the fast will blast the pathogens out of their hiding place and into the blood stream where they will be killed by the doxy. The cysts will be killed by the enzymes that the liver generates during a fast. I'm on 400 mg of doxy with 100 mg doses approximately every 5 hours. Today was the first day that the lyme symptoms reoccurred , which according to my theory is what should happen, so this is good.

The fasting regimen I'm using is the one prescribed by Dr Pavro Airola's book ``Juice Fasting''. It consists of two glasses of diluted orange juice, two cups of vegetable broth, and about a quart of water per day. I also take 4 caps of psyllium each time I take the 100 mg doxy, I add an ounce of aloe Vera juice to the water when washing down the doxy. The vegetable broth I make with a blender and strainer using celery, asparagus, onions, carrots .

I've been on antibiotics for about two years. When I am on antibiotics my symptoms are pretty much gone. I tried stopping twice and each time it came back. The first time after 7 days, the second time after 19 days. I have noticed that each time it reoccurred was after a period of high activity. The first after a couple days of mountain hiking, the second after a couple days of strenuous biking. I suspect that the pathogens were hiding either in the fat or wastes which would be unearthed during a period of high activity.

I did a 30 day detox diet last year which worked very well , I thought I had cleared out all the garbage and was very surprised when the reoccurrence happened. I feel that the detox diet wasn't enough so this time I added in the fast. My LLMD is talking about stopping the abx again in the fall. I might do another fast before that time. I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Thanks for listening,

Jack

Nowdays I usually do not eat one day a week, going from supper to supper the next day. A 24 hour fast is not much but it helps.

I agree with your docor to a point but the psyllium provides me the solid cushion needed to protect my intestines, it protects even better than food, in the large amounts of it i'm taking. To try to take doxy without some kind of protection would be suicide. I have daily bowel movements and my stomach feels great.

I should warn people that it takes a few days or so before the body becomes used to psyllium. In most cases one will get gas and/or runs when one takes large doses of psyllium for the first time.

To detox...saunas.

Eat, drink (not alcohol), and be merry!

Exercise...more oxygen in your tissues...the keet does not like this! (The cyst form could care less.) You uncoupled a few keets from their grasp on Magnesium in your muscles with negatively charged oxyhemaglobin, and your own immune (herx) kicked in.

I think if anyone wants to fast for a day or two, it would be wise to not take abx for those days. However, i agree that the psyllium would provide some protection.

And I agree that fasting may not always be the best thing for us Lymies!

Saw my LLMD today and he likes what he sees. I talked him into stopping antibiotics. This will be my third try and I'm excited . Here's the supplements he wants me on for the next month:

Ultra Flora Plus DF
Maitake Gold 404
Caprylex
Allicin
Pycnogenol

Also at least 8 ounces of Aloe Vera juice each day. He particularly concerned about a yeast infection and wants me to go on a diet that will help prevent that.

I'm also going to continue with Ledum pellets for awhile.

I believe that more studies need to be done in the area of Fasting & Lyme.

Wish me luck.

Jack

Good point Keeter. There seems to be something to this. I think I may have put a hole somewhere in my gut as a result of eating doxycycline, and some other abx.

Jack - thanks for sharing! I'm glad you had positive results...sounds like an intense fast...congratulations for sticking with it!

I'm really interested in trying a fast, but i don't think I can do it right now as the tetracyline tears up my stomach and I also get sick and dizzy when i dont eat for long periods. However, I just read about an Indian dish called "Kitchari" (sp?) that is tradionally used during cleanses and fasts. Over here, we would never think of eating carbs during a fast, but this mung bean/rice dish provides the body with a lot of nutrients while helping flush the toxins. So that's something I may try. hmm...and it looks yummmmmy.

if anyone else has experiences with fasting, please post!!

I have had LD for almost 30 years and during the years I have tried most things: diets, probiotics + all possible herbs,HBOT, ICHT, high dose abx iv + orals for long periods etc. During these years I noticed that always when I was able to stay on strict raw vegetable - fruit diet or fasted for some time, the disease went into a remission. It seems to me that when my immunesystem is strong, it is able to control the bacteria and viruses quite well.

In February I decided finally to stop taking abx and started first taking isopathic medicines and later juice fasting. That kind of fasting isn�t starving - I get more nutrients at the moment than what I ever got before because of the high amounts of different green -, vegetable - and fruit juices. Originally my plan was to fast 10 days but after those days I noticed that the cleansing process wasn�t ready (for instance my mouth was still coated), so I�m now on my 15th day of fasting. I try to fast 30 days or maybe even longer but haven�t decided yet. I�ll see how I�m feeling.

So far this "experiment" has been a good experience and I haven�t felt this good for years - hopefully it stays that way. During these days I have experienced also so called "toxic or healing crisis" days - they are normal when fasting, but also days that have been very good. My eyes are not any more as dim as they have been for years and I have had much more energy. To help my body to get rid of neurotoxins, I also go to sauna every other day, do dry massage, walk outside etc.

My experience is that fasting seems to be good especially when one�s body is stressed -most of the energy is normally used for the digestion and now that energy is available for the repairing and detoxing.

It was good to hear that someone else has also tried fasting. Hopefully more people tell about their experiences.

you need to keep building ur red bllod cells...

it can mess w ur sugar and bloodpressure

tons of stuff in ur body is being desroyed ...food is where we get our energy (most of us are low on energy eating regularly)we need to replenish what is desroyed ...

and fasting can weaken our immune system

its good to take suppliments but they are supposed to be extra.... our bodies are set up to get the vitimins protien minerials we need from food

this is my opinion based on dealing with the disease.

I remember reading a long time ago that the Gerson diet, which has lots of raw jucies, cured Albert Schweitzer's wife of chronic tubeculosis. Perhaps it could apply to lyme, although I think modern day tickborne disease is much worse than TB!:

Max Gerson, M.D. was born in Wongrowitz, Germany (1881). He attended the universtities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. Suffering from severe migraines, Dr. Gerson focused his initial experimentation with diet on preventing his headaches. One of Dr. Gerson's patients discovered in the course of his treatment, that the ``migraine diet'' had cured his skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to further study the diet, and he went on to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D.
Under Sauerbruch's supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world's leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.

At this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer's wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed. Gerson and Schweitzer remained friends for life, and maintained regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson's progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally - cancer. Schweitzer's own Type II diabetes was cured by treatment with Gerson's therapy.

I had hiked about 550+ miles up and down mountains before I got bit. I had lost 40 pounds and was probably burning 5,000 or 6,000 calories per day.

No matter how much I tried I could never consume more than 3,000 calories in a day, so my body was burning almost twice what it was using.

I had no symptoms for almost 2 months after my tick bites. Only after being off the trail for 3 weeks did I get my first symptoms, which was a flu-like thing that kept me bedridden for about 5 days.

I think the combination of the exercise and (comparatively) low-calorie diet is what kept the Lyme in check.

I'm actually considering a long distance hike coupled with abx to see if that can flush this thing out for good.

Matt

fasting is an ancient medical treatment that has been used for centuries. I think it is one of those things that fell to the wayside in our modern society cause there is NO money to made on it...
I am slowly adding short fasts into my treatment and will try to build up to longer fasts. will it help? I dunno.

I'm an old AT thru hiker myself, well 500 miles of it(1973) I don't remember anyone that year having a problem with LD. I went back in 1977 to do the Maine section and there was one hiker that came down with it bad. At that time I don't believe they used anitbiotics. They did an entire blood transfusion and he was back on the trail in a few days.

I like your idea of doing a long hike on abx. Blow the pathogens out of their hiding places. There must be a link between weight gain and LD. When I first started taking abx I got into the trap of overeating because , as we all know, the intestinal tract needs protection from doxy. This was not good.

I wonder if those who have successfully undergone ICHT, gained or lost weight during that treatment?

This is my third day off abx and everything's fine, although I know I'll need at least a month before I can make an evaluation.