Fasting Page #6

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he will let me go to my

mission and that I would

have his support.

(inspirational music)

It's very meaningful to me

because it was regarding

my mission to serve

and because of it, my life changed.

- It brings me closer to God.

I feel spiritual strength coming to me,

temporal blessings come from it.

Graduating from high

school I wanted to know

which of the two colleges I should go to

that I had been admitted

to and I really wanted it

to be the right place and so as I prayed,

I determined fasting would really help me

and so I fasted.

At the closure of my fast, as I prayed,

it was very clear to me the

choice that I should make.

- We believe that it is

beneficial both spiritually,

physically, and in fact, it

has a humanitarian benefit

when coupled with helping the poor.

- A greater compassion

for those who are in need

and a greater desire to serve

them comes from fasting.

- We learn from the

ancient prophet Isaiah,

that God introduced fasting

to the children of Israel.

He even said, "This is the

fast that I have chosen,"

and then goes on that it's

purpose is to deal bread

to the hungry.

- We fast once a month

for a period of 24 hours,

two consecutive meals.

- The monies that are saved from that fast

are donated to the poor to

help them with all sorts

of humanitarian needs.

- Not enough money to

pay the electric bill,

they don't have the food

necessary for their children,

for clothing, et cetera,

to help them get themselves on their feet

so they can come self-reliant.

- Every person has the opportunity to fast

and even the poorest among

us sometimes will fast

and give what they can in order to help

their brothers and sisters.

- There are seven billion

people in the world.

If we all did this, we

would end world hunger.

(dramatic music)

- We're at the sight of the Donner party.

There were over 80 individuals.

They ended up in Truckee

Meadows on Halloween of 1846

and it was right around this spot

where they got completely snowed in

and it wasn't until the spring

that rescue parties came.

You can see the monument behind me,

you can see the immigrants

are standing on a platform

that is 22 feet high.

That is how deep the compacted snow was.

It got to the point where

they took all the bones

of the animals and boiled

them and boiled them

and boiled them 'til they

were reduced to fragments

about the size of my pinky fingernail

and these I have seen directly

because we excavated them

in 2004.

There were thousands

of fragments that size

and they were boiling

them to extract collagen

which was the only

source of energy in bone.

Some of the stories

about the Donner Party,

it's heart wrenching.

I mean, these mothers did

some unbelievable things

just to keep their kids alive.

They started utilizing a

little bit of human flesh

and that helped sustain

at least half of them

until the rescue parties

came in the spring.

When it comes to cannibalism,

when the body starts

breaking down, shutting down,

one system at a time,

eventually you reach the

point where you'd do things

that you ordinarily would never consider.

Once the body is starved of nutrients,

once it's utilized muscle,

bone, and fat stores,

then things start shutting down.

The organs of high growth priority,

they are maintained until the end

and you might be able to

imagine what those would be.

The heart continues to

beat, you need that.

The lungs continue to

inhale and exhale air,

you need that and the

hind and the midbrain

continue to function because

they control breathing

and respiration and everything else

but interestingly and this

is what surprises people -

the sequence that things

start shutting down.

When you say you would

never eat human flesh,

that is because you've never

been faced with that dilemma

because starvation basically

impacts the rational part

of the brain and the cerebellum,

the part of the brain

that focuses on survival,

that's still going, the limbic system,

but the part involved

in thinking is not going

so you have to have

been there to understand

what these people went through.

- So I pretty much started

with very turbulent teen years.

I was 14 when I first

moved in with my boyfriend.

I was heavily into the

kind of drug party scene,

like drinking a lot of alcohol,

all that kind of stuff.

I spent a lot of nights up

partying in bars with fake IDs,

drinking, not eating properly,

subsiding on processed food,

eventually developing

septicemia when I was about 16.

It started from a really

bad case of pneumonia,

about 24 hours later I was in the hospital

on intravenous antibiotics for

swollen menages of the brain,

septicemia, multiple organ failures,

and severe chronic disease.

My chances of survival

were actually only 40%.

Something changed and it

was probably a combination

of everything that went on but I remember

leaving the hospital and

I wasn't the same person,

like any happiness for life was gone,

I was very apathetic and depressed.

I seemed to be really

struggling to believe

in a positive future for

myself and self-conscious

and a lot more introverted.

All of this sort of made me focus on,

made me begin focusing on

what I felt I could control

which is what I ate, how I

looked, how other people saw me

and I think I used obsession with my body

and controlling my intake

as a way to be accepted,

feel connected to the

world and the environment,

to be a part of something,

to feel home somewhere.

(train clacking on tracks)

I remember looking in the

mirror and hating my body

and judging it so harshly.

So I had a lot of different

health conditions,

my main conditions,

I was dealing with

autoimmune thyroid disease,

extreme hypothyroid and a thyroid goiter.

It was actually very difficult

to swallow and eat food.

I had gastroparesis so

really slow stomach emptying

and chronic stomach

inflammation and gastritis,

probably from years of an

eating disorder and antibiotics

and all that stuff as well.

I had really bad irritable bowel syndrome

and chronic inflammatory bowel disease

so I was bloated all the time,

a lot of pain in the bathroom

more than anybody should be,

and my most painful condition by far

and what actually prompted me

to start my YouTube channel,

what I really focused on at the beginning

was one of the top three

most painful conditions

that exist and it was

intrastitial cystitis.

So it's a chronic ulcerative

bladder disease and it's,

the symptoms are a lot of

urgency, burning, pain,

but you have no life really.

You're kind of housebound

and living in your bathroom

in a lot of pain.

This is where I lived for two years.

I was a prisoner in my own bathroom

and I had my identity stripped

by my eating disorder.

I really didn't have a life at all.

- I think the problem is

when you do this fasting,

basically you're simulating

the same kind of situation

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