“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.” ~Jim Rohn

My health was pitiful last year. I was plagued by bout after bout of gout. Sometimes this was localized in my feet and I could not walk. Sometimes the gout had spread into my knee joints and even some of my finger joints. I could do very little of the things that I most love: tennis, walking in the mountains with my friends and family, even camping was out of my reach last year. I had been on all kinds of medicine, sometimes it worked, many times it did not, and it was always very bad for my health. Gout will never kill you; it will make you miserable, but you will never die from it. The medicine for gout though…that stuff can kill you!

I had just plain had it by the start of this year. It was time to do whatever was required to get past gout. The only thing that I had not tried, which I was also an expert in, was prolonged fasting. I took a great class in college long ago, the continents had not yet separated, and the class was just about the physiology of fasting; in other words what happens to humans when they fast. We are not talking about a juice fast or any of the other fad fasts that are running around the internet. We are talking about a straight water fast; you drink water and lots of it and that is it.

I am not going to go into all of the medical research or benefits of fasting in this entry. Perhaps I will cover some of that another time. I am also not encouraging any of my readers to fast. You need to know what you are doing. Still my results have been very encouraging so far. This is the 20th day of my fast. I have taken off 31 lbs. of bodyweight and I have not been on my gout medicine for more than 20 days. I have had 3 minor attacks of gout and most interestingly they cleared themselves without medicine in just a couple of days. Typically, with medicine, I could expect a couple of weeks of strong medicine that made me feel ill in order to clear a gout attack. This is very encouraging indeed!

Am I hungry? Of course. I haven’t eaten in 20 days, but I am not as hungry as you might expect. I have more energy than I did before the fast started. I feel better, other than hunger, than before the fast started. My thoughts are clear as ever and I am wearing a full size smaller set of clothes. And best of all, I think I will have cleared enough accumulated toxins out of my body to accomplish one of my major life goals…to get past gout.

Till next time…Jack…I put 2 quotes from Jim Rohn on this entry. I love his material. If you are a student of self-improvement like me, you will love his stuff.

“We can have more than we’ve got because we can become more than we are.” ~Jim Rohn