Elizabeth Walling’s 23-day raw milk fast

Thanks to Anne-Marie Michaels for the heads up on this exciting story. This is from a report by Elizabeth Walling of The Nourished Life blog. That report appears as a guest post on Matt Stone’s 180 degrees health blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Elizabeth Walling -- the "fast" woman

“It’s now time for the greatly-anticipated results of Elizabeth Walling’s milk mania.  How did it go?  As expected.  She had the full-on milk diet experience as described by the old-schoolers like J.E. Crewe, Bernarr MacFadden, and Charles Sanford Porter.  How’s this for a kickoff to Milk-Man Michael Miles’s upcoming milk diet website?

I guess this is as good a time as any to also reveal some news.  I’ll be doing the milk diet for most of the month of May while in California.  I can’t wait.  I’ll be blogging like a madman.  Anyway, without further ado, here’s Elizabeth Walling, a woman who clings to the word “Nourish” and who has taken the concept to new heights.  Thank you so much Elizabeth.  May this inspire many out there in desperate need of a health “miracle.” …”

Matt Stone encouraged Elizabeth with her diet.

“In the past my diet “experiments” have all turned out less than impressive and mostly disappointing (even depressing–and I mean literally; I’ve learned the hard way both butter and carbs are friends when it comes to my mental health). My milk diet adventure, however, has been the exception. As crazy as it sounds to conventional ears, a full 23 days on pure raw milk offered nothing but improvements for me. Raw milk fans may not be so surprised–after all, they know this traditional food packs a powerful nutritional punch like no other.

I’ve thought the idea of subsisting on raw milk alone was an intriguing concept ever since my early days exploring Realmilk.com, but in recent months it began to strike me that the milk diet may be one of the only extreme diets out there that doesn’t damage the metabolism–in fact, it may actually heal it.

Since I’ve personally never encountered a “diet” that did anything but hurt me in the long run, the milk diet started to sound tempting as an experiment I could try without further damaging the metabolism I’ve worked so hard to heal during the last two years. While I love to self-experiment, I’m pretty much through beating the heck out of my poor metabolism. It’s been through the ringer and I’d prefer to give it a break. To me, the milk diet sounded like the best of both worlds: do something adventurous with food that has loads of healing potential. After a few encouraging words from Matt, I was headed down to my local farm for ten gallons of fresh milk so I could officially get started.

I spent 23 entire days on raw milk alone. For me, this was a terrific feat, because I have never, ever been able to stick to a strict-strict diet for more than a few days at a time, and I’m not kidding. I guess I just figured I was some sort of defective human with unusually weak willpower (though I’m able to stick to my guns in plenty of other situations that don’t involve food). But when I learned about real food, I discovered what I had considered willpower was actually my body crying out for nourishment.

These days I find my eating habits far easier to stay on top of, but still I wasn’t too sure I would have the motivation to stick to only milk for longer than a few days. But to be honest it was surprisingly easy, and in some ways I seriously thought I could live on raw milk forever and be quite content. And when that happened, I realized that under the right conditions, this thing called willpower came natural to me after all.

Basal Temperature Results

Now, I know a lot of you 180 fans are going to be interested in hearing about how the milk diet affects basal temperature. As long as I can remember my temperature has been low. My mother’s was the same way and I assumed it was genetic. I didn’t realize until the past couple years that it was probably metabolic more than anything. And though I’ve been working on healing my metabolism through diet and lifestyle changes during that time, it wasn’t until I went on the milk diet that I saw the most drastic change in my basal temperature.

I recorded my axillary basal temp in bed almost every morning during the milk diet. For those who don’t know, menstruating women generally have a lower basal temperature during the first half of their cycle, and higher during the last half. This is part of the reason I went on such a long sprint with the milk diet, because I wanted at least three solid weeks to gauge the results and get a real idea of what was happening. And here’s how it turned out:

During the first half of my cycle I averaged 98.3 degrees F.

During the second half of my cycle I averaged 99.1 degrees F.

What’s more: so far I’m still holding these averages today, three weeks after eating normally. This is coming from someone who rarely broke higher than 97.8 degrees in recent months, and still saw as low as 96.4 sometimes. After the first three days my temperature read above 98.0 every single morning on the milk diet–so for me, this was nothing short of a miracle….”

Get the whole story here on 180 degrees health

Elizabeth Walling’s blog “The Nourished Life”.

The story was posted April 7 and has already attracted 25 comments. Be sure to read them all.

I don’t usually editorialize here, but this is truly amazing!