Whenever you are on a fast the body has no more work of digestion. In that period the body can work in throwing out dead cells, toxins. It is just as one day, Sunday or Saturday, you are on a holiday and you come home and you clean the whole day. The whole week you were so engaged and so busy you couldn’t clean the house.

When the body has nothing to digest, you have not eaten anything, the body starts a self-cleaning.  A process starts spontaneously and the body starts throwing out all that is not needed, which is like a load. Fasting is a method of purification. Once in a while a fast is beautiful — not doing anything, not eating, just resting. Take as much liquid as possible and just rest, and the body will be cleaned.

Sometimes, if you feel that a longer fast is needed, you can do a longer fast also — but be deep in love with the body. And if you feel the fast is harming the body in any way, stop it. If the fast is helping the body, you will feel more energetic; you will feel more alive; you will feel rejuvenated, vitalized. This should be the criterion: if you start feeling that you are getting weaker, if you start feeling that a subtle trembling is coming into the body, then be aware — now the thing is no longer a purification, it has become destructive. Stop it.

But one should learn the whole science of it. In fact one should do fasting near somebody who has been fasting for long and who knows the whole path very well, who knows all the symptoms: if it becomes destructive what will start happening; if it is not destructive then what will happen. After a real, purifying fast you will feel new, younger, cleaner, weightless, happier; and the body will be functioning better because now it is unloaded. But fasting comes only if you have been eating wrongly. If you have not been eating wrongly there is no need for fasting. Fasting is needed only when you have already done the wrong with the body — and we all have been eating wrongly.

A man should not deny anything, because the denied part will take revenge. The moment you start denying you go against Tao. Tao is to be natural — a feast and not a fast. A fast can be used only when it comes naturally.

Sometimes animals fast. Sometimes you may have observed your dog fasting: you put the food down and he will not eat. But he is not a believer in fasting; he does not feel like eating. It is not a question of principle, it is not a philosophy. He is ill, his whole being is against eating — rather than eat, he would like to vomit. He will go and eat grass and vomit. He would like to relieve himself, his stomach is not in a condition to digest any more. But he is not a faster. It is natural.  So, if sometimes you feel that the fast comes naturally — not as a law, not as a principle, not as a philosophy to be followed, as a discipline to be imposed, but out of your natural feel for it — good. Then, too, remember always that your fast is in the service of feasting, so that you can eat well again. The purpose of fasting is as a means, never as an end; and that will happen rarely, once in a while. And if you are perfectly aware while you are eating, and enjoying it, you will never eat too much.