Photo taken from www.4us2be.com
I really started to wonder how it was even possible to catch a cold and be sick on the third week of school. As if getting back into a school routine wasn’t hard enough, I now had to deal with the torture of trying not to suffer through this cold. Because my immune system is that of a child, I was desperate to find a fast cure.
It’s amazing what one can find on a Google search. After relentlessly going through multiple articles and discussion posts, I came across a very interesting post. There’s a popular saying “Feed a cold, starve a fever” that many live by when it comes to their health. However, this post posed the opposite: “Starve a cold, feed a fever.” One man told his account of getting a terrible cold a couple months ago and decided to go on a water fast all day. He did not eat any sort of solid food all day and only drank water and the occasional fruit juice, all while resting and doing no sort of activity. He claimed that he not only started feeling better that day, but the cold was almost gone by the next day.
What did I have to lose? I decided to try it for myself.
Granted that I was required to go to my 8 am morning class, I came straight home and went back to sleep. After my glorious three-hour nap, I woke up and immediately began to guzzle down a nice glass of water.
When I say I barely moved and did absolutely nothing, I’m not even exaggerating. I literally sat on my couch and watched TV for God knows how many hours. The only times I stood up and went anywhere were to refill my water cup or go to the bathroom.
To be honest, I thought by the first couple hours I would start dying of starvation and find myself wanting to stuff my face with whatever I had in my pantry. But because I did no sort of activity all day, I didn’t even find myself craving to consume any sorts of food.
Throughout the day, I continued to just consume water and took a hot shower sometime around 4 pm. I also drank Airborne or Emergen-C every three or four hours. Maybe it was a mental thing, but I actually started to feel a little better. Although my body was not getting a lot of nutrients due to a lack of food, it was getting the fluids it needed to flush out the virus.
However, once 7 pm hit, I was starting to feel myself getting very hungry. I tried my very hardest to continue with the fast, but at the same time, I figured after fasting for about 12 hours my body needed some food. I decided to try and stick with a somewhat liquid diet and ordered myself Japanese broth with noodles and vegetables. I also had a little bit of rice and splurged on some potstickers but still only drank water. After dinner, I didn’t know if I’d be able to sleep since I’ve been resting and sleeping all day. To my surprise, I fell right to sleep and had a nice nine-hour sleep until I had to wake up for game day.
I felt like a completely new person the next day. I went from feeling miserable and so sick to feeling as healthy as I could be. I really felt like I didn’t even get sick all week. Because I still had a little bit of a runny nose, I took some Sudafed and I felt fine.
I would like to think that this whole fasting thing really did work, but I still can’t be 100% sure. Did it help? Most likely. The idea of a lot of resting and liquids is exactly what the body needs during a cold. I’m not sure if fasting is entirely healthy for the body during sickness, but it certainly convinced me because it made me feel so much better.
So the next time you have a cold, I would highly recommend trying it. It may or may not work for you, but in a personal account, I would like to believe that it definitely helped for me. Good luck to those getting over their sickness, and I hope you find a cure through this!