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Fasting works if you want to lose weight. Weight loss/management is all about calories in/calories out. As Napoleon mentioned in the post, a good reference to know how many calories you need to eat per day to maintain an ideal weight for your height is 10 x (ideal weight).

Example if your ideal weight should be 140 pounds you need to eat 1400 calories a day (10 x 140).

I never understood the government mantra that men should eat 2,400 calories per day and women should eat 2,000 calories per day. If I ate 2,000 calories per day I would weight 200 pounds! (I am a woman who is 5' 2" tall and I currently weigh 129 lbs, my ideal weight should be 116 pounds).

No wonder the average weight of an American woman is 170 pounds. We eat too many calories period. I am now doing rolling fasts (22-24 hour liquid fast, then one meal, then back to 22-24 hour fasting). I have done it for a week and I have lost 3 lbs (probably water loss mainly). Fasting is teaching me to eat less calories. 120 lbs is my goal weight, which means I need to limit my calories on average o 1200 calories a day. During my rolling fasts I am probably averaging no more than 800 calories a day.

It truly is all about calories in/out with regard to weight management.

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What you say, and what Jesus said, applies to "food". What many or most westerners call "food" today is not what Jesus spoke about. Eating adulterated foods can lead to metabolic dysfunction, which can lead to unwanted weight gain or even unwanted weight loss, in part by causing the appetite to malfunction. Under these circumstances reducing caloric intake can produce weight loss, but it doesn't remove any disease process that may be present.

It's best to eat the foods that God gave us (Gen. 9:3), and not industrial products concocted by man, often with the goal of disrupting metabolism and increasing consumption (as well as profits -- the love of money). Eating what God has provided, you may find that your appetite works as it should and that your weight corrects itself, once you heal.

Genesis 9:3 is the primary guidance, but interestingly it falls within the scope of Gen. 7:2, concerning clean and unclean animals. The distinction between "clean" and "unclean" was around long before Moses. Underlying that is the notion of food -- "that which is edible". Not even all plants are. Industrial food-like products? No way.

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True. The industrial food is getting worse and worse. Simply unedible. I was reading some articles about the average weight of women in the US now and it is 170lbs for a 5ft 3inch woman. How did we get here? GMO food I swear. The chemicals are killing us. People say it's sugar, sugar, sugar. No, sugar is natural, it is all the processed sugars, fake sugars, GMO wheat, corn, mRNA meat and vegetables, food preservatives, food dyes. Also, have you noticed store-bought bread does not get moldy anymore? This started about 4 years ago. In my case, the only way to get away from the bad food is to eat less food.

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GMO is an issue. Glyphosate disrupts the gut microbiome, leading to a host of complications, and GMO "foods" that have been modified for glyphosate tolerance may contain higher levels of it due to being doused in it. There may be other effects as well, that have not been studied. Industry is not eager to spend money on research that could spoil its profits. Again, it's the love of money, a root symptom of much of what ails society, from the bad food to corrupt government operating in concert with industry and the mob.

What people think of now as "sugar" is primarily refined sugar. It began to come down in price in the late 18th century as I recall, through the use of slave labor. This time also represented the beginnings of the diabetes epidemic. Most flour is also refined, making it "acellular" -- ultra-fine milling destroys the cell structure of the food, which is an essential part of God's design for it as food.

Then there are the seed oils, euphemistically known as "vegetable oil". These oils are extracted using industrial processes, mechanical or chemical, the latter involving carcinogenic solvents, and they represent substances that were only recently introduced into the food supply. God's design provides for eating whole seeds -- those that are edible -- with the oil intact within the seed. Seed oils are particularly damaging to the metabolism, and are a major component of cheap, convenient, processed and ultra-processed foods.

I could go on, but I am running screens at church this morning and I have to go there instead!

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This was an excellent post. Thanks for sharing your fasting experience, thoughts on the subject matter and the video of the temptations Jesus went through with Lucifer. No matter how dark this world gets we know we are on the right side and will be victorious with staying on the straight and narrow path regardless of the temptations we can overcome with God's help and blessings that fasting with prayer can induce. I love you and your sister and hope to meet up with you one day.

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Thank you Charlotte for your thoughts and comments. Hopefully someday we can meet. If you are ever coming through upstate NY give me a shout at napoleon@use.startmail.com. It'd be great to meet you! We'll see what God has in store.

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I live in the northwestern region of Missouri near the Missouri river. We live in a small rural town population of about 2000. We are a tourist attraction for the greater Kansas City area, so we have specialty shops and good restaurants, many Bed and Breakfasts and a State Park that gets too crowded. My three sons and their families all live about 30 minutes from us. This is just info if you and your sister ever want to come over to the wild west for a visit. I would love to visit your area of Upper New York to meet up with you and your sister and who knows what may transpire in the future?

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