Introduction

Oh my God, who would have thought, me, a foodie, would be here writing a book on fasting?

This has to be the opposite of what I love most in my life. Okay, so it's my husband, Gary, and our two gorgeous Labradors first, but hey, food is definitely a very close second. I love food. I love cooking it, eating it, researching it, discovering it, and experimenting with it. I love the smell and the experiences you get because of it, and it's pretty much what dictates most of what I do and where I go in life. "Oh, let's go here; it's a food festival," or "Wanna check out the farmers' market?" or my favourite, "Let's go check out this new restaurant—I've heard their desserts are divine!" Yes, yes, yes—a foodie I definitely am.

So what on earth is a person who loves food so much doing writing a book about going without the very thing she claims to love? Well, it's like this: I got tired of the people around me dying.

Grandparents, parents, sister, cousin, aunties; lots of death, lots of sickness, lots of people thinking they were doing the right thing, the safe thing, the good and healthy thing, only to find out they weren't. Not even close. In a nutshell: "They just didn't know what they didn't know."

My story goes like this: Once upon a time, there lived a fairly typical girl in a pretty typical life. She worked in the middle of a big city in a really big office building, and she looked forward to her weekends and life outside "those walls" more than anything. She was a party girl and loved being social and going out dancing and drinking and having fun with her friends. She was young, child-free, living on her own, and having the time of her life!

This typical girl came from a big family, seven children in all, pretty much all raised by a single mum. "Hang on a minute, seven children is hardly typical," I hear you say. Yes, in this day and age it might not be, but where I come from and when I grew up, big families were the norm.

This typical girl, with her very big family, with all of her sisters and brother now married and all with children (so it's extra big now) all basically followed the same path. They all grew up with a family doctor, and regular visits were just part of life—like going to the dentist or getting your hair cut.

Whatever the doctor said went. If the doctor said you needed to get a flu shot, you did. If he said you needed to take a course of antibiotics, you did. If he said you needed to take some tests, you did. And if he said you needed to go home and rest, that advice was followed too.

The doctor played a very important role within the typical girl's family. The years went by with the doctor always listened to and everyone always doing as they were told. The doctor's words were never questioned, never put to the test. They existed to be that truth, the one voice that had only your best interest at heart.

This was all well and good until people close to the girl, people she loved more than anything, started getting sick and actually didn't get better. They might have for a little bit, but soon enough something else would be wrong, and off to the doctor they would go again.

It played out like this: The unsuspecting relatives would go to the doctor with a symptom, one that had been getting progressively worse each month, each year. They would go, already fearful, already knowing they should have done something sooner, something to ward off the inevitable, something to alleviate the downward spiral. So they went to the doctor—almost with tail between legs—saying, "I've got such-and-such, and it's been there for ages, and I haven't paid it much attention" (although they had thought about it constantly for days, weeks, months, and sometimes years).

Then the process would begin. Test after test, analysis after analysis, until a conclusion was determined and a treatment plan would follow.

That's when typical girl would get called in. She, along with the rest of her family, would gather around and support whoever happened to be going through whatever treatment had been decided. They would do what they could do—which wasn't much.

Relative after relative would go down this path—until they stopped getting better. Their symptom became many symptoms, and there weren't enough drugs or things they could do to alleviate the pain or the inevitability of their grave situation.

So, typical girl found herself asking, "What is going on? Why do all the people I cherish most in this world get sick and die? Is this it? Is this how life plays out?" Cancer one in two, diabetes following a very close second, heart conditions—is this it? You work through everything in life—relationship bust-ups, job failures, weight issues, self-esteem issues, depression, bullying, money issues—all of those painful experiences that helped you grow like nothing else, only to get sick and die?

You're kidding right, surely there is more? Surely there is a better way? And so, this is where the real story begins. It's about why I, your typical girl with a fairly typical life, made a decision to find a better way, to seriously find a better way and to break the pattern that was being handed down like a `prized parcel of land' from generation to generation to generation. Yes, this is where typical girl made a decision that enough was enough.

And, whilst she couldn't change the past, she couldn't bring people back who had died, nor change what everyone else did with, and in, their lives with regards to health and sickness, she absolutely could change what she did and how she viewed health and looked after her own body.

Now you have some context as to why I have been unconsciously propelled into this space. I haven't found my way here because of any real sickness; I haven't discovered a lump, I haven't had any tests, nor has a psychic told me I really need to do something about my energy field. I am just a typical girl who enjoys life and all the bounty it offers, and I am not someone whose driving force comes from a diagnosis.

The passion I have comes from the very sad fact that by the time I was thirty-six, I had already witnessed the death of my mother, father, sister, aunty, cousin, and both sets of grandparents. The thing is, every one of them died by their own hand; they all had stuff going on in their bodies that they truly could have prevented through making diet and lifestyle changes. All of these beautiful people who were a part of my life, who had stories to share, lives to live, and families to be part of, died because they were all just too scared and—sad to say—too ignorant.

They blindly followed when their hearts told them otherwise; they ignored their own bodies when little symptoms led to bigger wake-up symptoms—led to death. They didn't understand that their bodies were trying to communicate to them, working to keep them alive...