The Dark Side of Spiritual Fasting - Detangling IHOPKC

Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of International House of Prayer. Jed is good to be back and to continue our conversation we had started into last week, but we were talking a bit about the fasting, and I mentioned, I don't know how far I went into it, but I did mention that I had had a conversation with Adam Short, and we were talking about fasting,

and he mentioned that if you do the intermittent fasting, it can lower your A1C. We got all kinds of hate mail and comments, and I get people emailing me, no that's not right, John A1C is three months. Well, I can assure you that fasting does have an improvement on your A1C. I'm living proof of this. It doesn't directly affect the A1C by fasting just two or three days, right? But if you do it over time incrementally, it will lower your blood sugar because you're cutting out carbs and cut out carbs. The carbs don't turn to sugar. You have less sugar, therefore your A1C

lowers, but this is a fascinating discussion for me. I studied fasting, not from a religious standpoint because we didn't have the same thing that you did. Even though laterane, the premise of it was fasting when it started. It was totally forgotten by the time the cult emerged that I grew up in, but I fasted for medical reasons because I was pre-diabetic, and so I spent a good, I probably spent a year studying intermittent fasting, how it works, what it does to your body, and in many ways it's very healthy because it can retrain your cells to be more active,

and so therefore one of the theories was that if you practice intermittent fasting, not anything extreme, but for me it was, I think men get 600 calories per day and you fast. I did the one where you do all day, so Monday and Tuesday, I did 600 calories only per day, no carbs, and then Wednesday through Friday, or Wednesday through Sunday, I had normal meals, and I lost 44 pounds and 44 days, which was amazing.

My blood sugar, my A1C did get better, and in fact, I thought I had reversed diabetes because the numbers on my meter were so good, I was in the normal range every single time I tested it.

Apparently at night, I was still having some issues, so it did progress, but however, all that said, fasting when done correctly can be a good thing, it can be healthy, it's not for everyone because there are people that you can get very, very sick if you did what I did.

So I'm not recommending it by no means, but anyway, today we're talking about fasting and IHOP, KC and their hyper extensive methods of fasting. Yeah, well, and I think that with a lot of these different things, you can have healthy and unhealthy ways about fasting in and of itself, is it beneficial, is it not beneficial, from a health standpoint, from a religious standpoint, I think that I don't wanna speak universally at all about how people might experience fasting and how that might affect their lives in positive or negative ways.

What I can say, though, is from a personal perspective of what I saw at the International House of Prayer. First of all, you gotta be really careful about any of that sort of stuff with young, when you are in development stages of your life, when you are need that sort of nutrition or if you are pregnant and you have, even if you're having a newborn and you are nursing,

there are certain times where fasting should just be off the table and it's during any sort of stages of development or if you are helping with an infant, you're nursing an infant, there's a couple of times where it's just like no goes.

But, and unfortunately at the International House of Prayer, that wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot of good conversations

about responsibility around fasting and this was really problematic about the entire experience of fasting is that it was couched within these very intense conversations and spiritual means, right? Like we were talking about last session or last discussion,

there's all of the friends of the bridegroom, bridegroom, bridal paradigm mentality that Mike Bechel instilled in the International House of Prayer and this sort of like longing desire to connect with the Lord and this sort of disconnect.

between that he is going to return and that we need to fast and ready ourselves for his return. And so there was a lot of intensity that surrounded fasting as well. And there has to be if you're going to fast for, you know, 10 days at a time or something like that. And so the mental toll that it would take on me and the other individuals that I saw within my community, both children, adults, et cetera, would be really pronounced, you know. It's kind of like, have you ever watched the show Survivor? Oh, I love Survivor, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're doing some of that, you know,

not intentionally, but they're eating only coconuts or only drinking water and sometimes not even eating any food. And the whole point of it is that it's kind of torture, you know. And they're in this midst of this competition that is really intense and high strung and everything like that. And so we were doing it. I think I'd be great on Survivor because I already, you know, you've already done it. I've already survived. So, you know, but it is that it's the mental stress in conjunction with the physical stress that you're feeling. There is so much anguish

and fear in the premise of what fuels the fasts that you can't help, but just have the sort of so psychological torture. I pulled, I looked at IHOP's website today just to just curious how they talk about fasting and here they pull from Matthew 915 that says, but the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them and then they will fast. And that's just it. There's no context of the rest of that conversation and whatever it's about. It's just the bridegroom will be taken away from them and then they will fast. And I was like, man, perfect encapsulation of what

the fasting culture at the international house prayer was. The bridegroom has been taken away and we are fasting until he returns. That's pretty simple. And then there's this idea too that fasting will open up the floodgates for spiritual experiences. So not only are you in this place of mental anguish, but then you're hyperspiritualizing whatever experiences that you have during that time. And like I said in the last in our last podcast, you know, if you don't, if you don't believe in demons, just fast for 10 days and you'll start believing in demons because you'll start

here. It's our scene stuff. And there's, you know, it's when you withhold nutrition. And when you put yourself in a state of mental anguish and mental and physical strain, you're going to have experiences that can be very easily labeled spiritual experiences that are purely physical reactions to the state of stress that you have put yourself in.

So let's talk a bit about just the dynamics of fasting for people who've never done it. I've done it. You've done it. My method of doing it was probably much different than yours. So like I said, I did not do it for religious reasons.

I did it for health reasons and for me it all started with a TED talk. I was watching, I love to watch these TED talks and one day they had one on fasting and it's positive effects on health.

I can't remember what it was called, but I watched the guy talking and he was a scientist of some sort medical health scientist and he was explaining at the cellular level how you can regrow cells through intermittent fasting and he went through the different methods of fasting, intermittent fasting, one of which you fast for an entire day.

You do not eat anything, but 600 calories for men, I think it's 500 for women. And then there was another method during the day, you eat during a certain window of time. You're allowed to eat pretty much anything you want, but then no meals between this window of time.

So that started me on my journey of studying how fasting worked and from there I think it was the American Diabetes Foundation had an article on fasting and that caught my attention because I was pretty diabetic at the time.

I started studying numerous health reports from other countries and some countries were saying this is the greatest thing ever. You can totally reverse everything from diabetes to cancer with fasting and that got my attention.

So I studied how it worked and then I toyed around with doing it. And first I tried, I thought it would be easier to do this little window of time thing where you don't eat from, what is it, 7 am, 7 pm, I think it is.

That was the hardest thing I've ever done. You are, there's a word called hangry, which is a combination of hunger and hangry. You are that way constantly when you do this. So I got brave and see mentally I had this image before all of this study that fasting is just simply you don't eat and you starve and you suffer.

Which is I think what I've heard people describe from what was international house of prayer. There's a lot of suffering involved. But when you do it the correct way and you do it under, the key is I did it under medical supervision.

I'm telling my doctor that I'm doing this thing and she's praising me. She says, this is great. This has the ability to, for a lot of people, it has the ability to reverse the diabetes if you're pre-diabetic.

And it has the ability to bring it into remission if you are diabetic. So it can be a good thing. So I started doing the one, the method where you fast for an entire day, every Monday and Tuesday, I would eat nothing, 600 calories.

So I'm eating like almonds and then I ate some, I guess it was white chicken. There's certain meats that you can eat and can't. The first two weeks was the most torturous thing I've ever done in my life.

But mentally, something happens after those two weeks because it's like this switch flips inside of you. And suddenly, when you go into the fasting mode, your body consumes your body fat and you're not hungry at all.

If you can make it through that first two weeks, you're not hungry. So I did it for, I can't remember, 44 days, I can't remember how many weeks until it went away, but there was a point in time in which it got, I was actually felt better during my fasting than I felt when I wasn't fasting.

And it was exercising, it was in the gym, it was great. So that's the medically supervised version of this and it can be a good thing. Now what I'm hearing from International House of Prayer, they were using it for a means to make the people feel the suffering because they wanted to show themselves, show more pain for Jesus, however they phrased it.

Which is entirely different thing than having a doctor watching you, making sure you're okay. Number one, making sure that you're not doing damage to yourself. And that's one of the questions I've had. Were there doctors on staff who were monitoring each of the people who were fasting to make sure they were okay?

I certainly know. There might, I think that they have gotten better since I was there because I think that there was, I don't know if there was lawsuits, but there were certainly, like I think I told this last week, there was a young infant who died because her parent, her mother was on restrictive fasting diet and she just wasn't, the child wasn't getting enough nutrition.

And so I think that IHOP has since adopted. I still don't think that there is probably doctors or any sort of medical nutrition advice. There are probably more warnings and there's probably, I would hope that the culture itself has eased up where there isn't that sort of social pressure that everyone's fasting.

I know that this was a huge thing, especially at IHOP. You, when you have young zealous students, where it's like everyone's fasting and then if you see, when you're, I hop you, fellow students at a pizza place or something, eating pizza, you're gonna, there's this sort of like, you've betrayed what we're all doing.

I know that that was a huge thing during my time at the International House of Prayer. I would like to hope that it's improved, but I'm not sure. But I think what you were talking like, I think that you were really getting to the heart of what makes it different between fasting where you're doing this intentionally with a doctor A, it's just you are, you have good, health-informed individuals who are alongside doing it with you and who, you know, you're not just left to your own devices and so there's a lot more wisdom in the way that you're going about it.

But also the intention is just wildly different and that really changes the fact because if you are fasting for health reasons, right? You're wanting to improve your body. You're wanting to be in a better state.

You're wanting to, you know, like there's a lot of people who will fast when you're trying to put on muscle weight or whatnot like you'll have times where you try to cut and you try to get healthier.

I think sometimes it's more about aesthetics, but genuinely it's about, you know, like, or generally it's about improving your physical state of being and that's fundamentally different than what it's done. What is happening at the International House of Prayer because what's happening at the International House of Prayer, it's not about improving your health it's an aesthetic, it comes from an aesthetic tradition of self-denial and that's 100% what it's about.

It's paired with a lot of sexuality. I remember I was at this young adult or young men's camp.

I can't remember if it was explicitly an International House of Prayer camp or if it was auxiliary, but to it, but it was this camp where a lot of young men were being trained to be warriors for God and it was the sort of like go out into nature, roll around in the mud and become more manly, sort of a spiritual experience.

It wasn't very spiritual, but that's how it was built like for it. And I remember one on one night, we were required to fast in order during that night that one of the pastors or one of the groups.

leaders gave a speech about conquering the flesh. And for the young men, it was about, hey, you guys all, you know, whether it's pornography, whether it's masturbation, whether it's having sex before marriage, whether it's, you know, oh, God forbid, homosexual desires. Like, this was the conversation. It was like conquering the flesh that we have all of these desires within us that make me, that make us evil, horrible, terrible people, and that we as sons of God need to overcome the desires of the flesh and need to conquer those things. And so, you know, fasting was

this sort of like exercise in a very aesthetic tradition of denying the self, and even like,

kind of in hatred of the self, because it's like, oh, I love God, and I love the spiritual aspect that he is drawing out of me, but I hate who I am. I hate this, this meaty, fleshy individual that I am, which when you have those ingredients, especially combined with young adults,

you're going to have an epidemic of eating disorders, right? Because there's going to be a lot of individual with body image issues who hate that they're a little bit overweight, right? Or maybe they're not even overweight. Maybe they're a fine, healthy way, but there's this such, this like fear and hatred around fat, that there are going to be a lot of different individuals who just start starving themselves, thinking that like, there were so many conversations that I had with different individuals, like I genuinely remember having many conversations with young men and women who had eating disorders, and they had no idea that even had an eating disorder because

it felt so spiritual, right? There was this sort of spiritual hatred of their own body, and this fasting experience was a way of like punishing their body, and they had no idea that they were just, they just had an eating disorder, and it had everything to do with like body image stuff, because that's the way that we talked about it in the international house prayer.

So there's this other element that we should probably bring into the mix, and that's the cultural aspects of fasting, because if you read the Bible, you're going to find many passages about fasting. It was a cultural thing for not just the Israelites or the new Christians, everybody in the area fasted. It was a way of life for many people.

And, you know, for a lot of people who were in very poor areas, they didn't have a lot of food anyway. So fasting was much easier when you didn't have anything to eat, right?

But there is a religious application to fasting, according to the Bible. However, in the Matthew, for example, it says, make sure your fasting is not seen by others, but to God alone, because this is a secret between you and God, that you're fasting.

So whenever I looked at the ladder rain's version of hyper fasting, I think Franklin Hall called it the atomic power of God through fasting and prayer. And they would all get together and they would fast, and you could see that, you could see that these people were fasting.

They were totally ignoring that passage that said, this is to be done in secret. Before I did my fasting for medical reasons, like I wasn't bragging that I was doing it, I wasn't telling anybody they should do it too.

I did, there were some people who were unhealthy that I said, hey, this might help you. You might want to look into this. But it was something that, for the most part, I kept to myself and nobody really could tell it.

Whenever you put this into the context of a group of people who are trying to not enforce, maybe that's not the right word, but to encourage many people in the congregation that you should be fasting, to me, that's a little bit awkward, because how do you make that apply with Matthew, what is it, Matthew 618, where it says, this should be done in secret.

Yeah, it becomes performative, it becomes this social thing that people are pressuring each other to do, it becomes a competition of who can fast the longest, that was a huge thing too. It was like, someone does a 10-day fast, someone else is like, oh, I'm going to do 15, and then it's 30, and then they go to the hospital because that's just too long.

Yeah, no, totally, and what built into that sort of doing it for the performance of it, there was a lot of hypocrisy with fasting. Mike Bickle himself would have these fasts that he would call, and he would not actually be on the fast, there are stories of him going and eating while everybody else was supposed to be fasting, because he gets to make the rules, so why not?

My dad was 100% like that, my dad could not fast to save his life. Like I said, last week he would find ways to walk up to the line. of breaking the fast so so juicing hamburgers so that he could drink he could he's only it's a juice fast so you're only drinking juice so he puts a hamburger in a blender and drinks it because he needs to eat and thinks that somehow that's that's helping but there was there was a ton of hypocrisy of people calling fast and then not actually doing it themselves and yeah again it

just it totally goes into that when it becomes a performative thing when it became becomes like a self-flatulating thing a a a a an act that is done because you think that it contends with the heavens I mean these are all the ingredients that regardless like there might be some people who are listening to this podcast who actually still do a lot of this these sort of behaviors and might disagree and think that it's worthwhile but I have just seen the effect of that I'm not even saying what's right or what's wrong I'm saying when you fast performatively when you fast and

do it for self like a set of reasons or when you do it for to contend with the heavens and bring in the ushering of the new kingdom all of all of these things will result in mental distress absolute physical distress genuine bouts of mania you said it yourself too of like when you first start fasting your blood sugar goes down so much and so you just become mean right like people are much less kind when they are food deprived and so when you have an entire community doing that you have a community of assholes that suddenly pop up because no one's been eating and so everyone

is just mean all the time and cranky um and yeah so if I so this is the this that's the fruit of those certain behaviors I obviously think stay away from all of them because if that's the fruit you know there's just not there's not a whole lot of good that comes from these that type of fasting which is distinctly different than some of the fasting that you've talked about or one thing that I was thinking about too is like I live in Los Angeles the land of different fad diets and you will have two people who are doing different two completely opposite fad diets like ones like

no grains and only you know nuts and this or something like that and someone has another that's like only grains and nuts and you're like okay not understand how this works, but I think that I'm actually pretty pro people doing any of these different weird diets because it just forces you to be more intentional about your health and what you're eating and to think about it.

And if you're doing it for the goal of being healthy, then I think that anything that pushes you to be intentional about that health is generally going to reap positive results. Obviously, there are some fat diets and there's some people who are fasting who probably shouldn't be and there's like wisdom that goes alongside of that.

But when it's for the purpose of actually edification of your body and soul, then fantastic. But that is largely not the type of fasting that I saw growing up. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the books page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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So let's talk a little bit about the weirdness of fasting, because this also interested me greatly. Once I understood what it was and how mine was medically controlled, which is the good way to do it, but once I realized that there were people abusing this for evil, I wanted to know why.

That's just how my brain works. The lex luthers of the world, how are they applying this, right? And so if you, if you study fasting and even some of the scholarly articles will mention this, there are, there were cultures in ancient history that abused fasting because they brought their bodies into a mode of survival, you know, you must survive, you must live.

And so your body is, your body is literally going into crisis mode when you're fasting long enough. And there were cultures that were doing this for spiritual reasons because once you get, once you cross that line where, where your body is now.

It recognizes that it's about to die. There are weird things that happen, some of which include having visions. There are people who can fast and they can give themselves visions by fasting. And spiritually speaking, it's not unique to Christianity.

In fact, if you read the Bible and you read about fasting and you understand the culture surrounding all of this, it's more as though it was a culture aspect than it was a commandment by God.

Because there is no commandment by God that says, you must fast. There are just people who are doing it because that was the culture. That's what they came out of. But there were people who were fasting to get visions to get hyperspiritual, into a hyperspiritual state.

And from a scientific standpoint, the way this works is very complex and unusual because as I mentioned, after you fast for a certain period of time, there's this internal switch that flips, that tells your body, okay, I was consuming food through my mouth.

Now it's like the camel's back that's on my gut. I'm going to start eating from this now and this switch flips and you literally start eating your fat away. But with that is all of the toxins that were in your body.

So your body starts consuming the fat, the toxins and the junk that's in your gut isn't something that you would ever put in your mouth. I mean, you did obviously, but if you were to see this hunk of toxic sludge, you wouldn't ingest it.

But your body is doing this and it's not ingesting healthy things with it. So chemically, it puts you into a state where your mind is not getting the correct nutrients and blood flow that it needs.

And the things in your blood, it's trying to purge all of those toxins out. So you literally get into this, I'm gonna say it's a false spiritual state because of all this toxins that's going through your head, right?

Yeah, I never went to that level to experience it, but I was really curious what it would be like because if you read about the ancient cultures and how they did it, the Native Americans, for example, they would go on these vision quests.

They'd go out alone in the woods. They would eat only, I would actually go through a fasting period, but they would try to eat only what they killed. And if they didn't kill anything, they were very hungry and many of them saw visions.

That's the reason they call it a vision quest. So when you take all of that knowledge and understand now recognizing that the lateral range movement, their focus was more on the signs and wonders than it was on the Bible and God.

They wanted people to get into this hyperstate where they could have a vision because they called it the spoken word. They're having new spoken words. This is... There's a new Bible that we're writing, it's a new New Testament that we're writing.

So they would want people to get into this state. One of the ways in which they could do it is through fasting, and if you fast long enough, but you have to do it the unhealthy way, not monitored by a doctor.

A doctor would tell you, no, don't do this. This is a bad idea. But they would go that direction because they wanted to bring forth the vision. So the next question I've had about all of this, what was that like?

Were people actually getting to the point where they were so nutrient-deprived that they were getting to a state of euphoria and having visions, et cetera? Yeah, there was multiple, I mean, one of the solemn assembly that led to a lot of IHOPs prophetic history was a 21-day fast that would supposedly happen.

That was before I was alive, so I don't remember anything from that instant, personally, obviously. But growing up, I remember Alan Hood, there were several times where Alan Hood had these long, prolonged fasting experiences that he would then have revelations afterwards.

And Alan is, I like Alan, and he's a man who I think is reckoning with a lot of the bad things that were happening at the International Aspirin and starting to come to terms with a lot of this, and he is spoken out against Mike.

But he definitely would do, I remember several instances where you could see it on his face, too, where he would go on these long fasts, and then he's a pretty tall individual, and he would just be sort of all skinned in bones, very gaunt, and he would, it's kind of that sort of like I went into the wilderness and I have come back with a vision, feeling. Mike would talk about doing that as well. Misty Edwards, she would fast, and you could see it on her face as well, where she would be heavily deprived of food, and then would have these

sort of spiritual songs that would come out of these experiences that were very mystical. And so it definitely had this like mystical feeling about it, and as a child and a teenager and a young adult, even I wanted to also experience those things.

And especially if you think about who Jedadaya is at 15, 16, 17, 18, I am in a community in which I believe in prophecy, I believe in visions, I believe that God speaks to people as clearly as I am speaking to you now.

But I haven't experienced any of that. I haven't had many dreams. I haven't had many prophetic words. I've had impressions and I've read my Bible and felt like the Lord was speaking to me through some of these Bible, but like I have not had this split the sky moment that seemingly my father has all the time and that Mike Bickel has all the time and that Bob Jones has all the time.

And so I'm in a state where I'm wanting these things to happen. I don't think it's happening. I of course think it's my fault because I just don't have enough faith. So how do I gain faith?

I deprived myself of food. I go on this sort of mystical journey on my own and there are several times when the one thing conferences would roll around and I would, I think I couldn't go for 20 days or anything like that.

I can't even remember how long the most, but in the sort of 10s, 12, 15 region, I can't even remember. I know that I made it over 10 at least once or at least twice.

But anyway, prolonged periods of time where you're just not eating at all and wanting to have these spiritual experiences and then I kind of would have some quasi spiritual experiences but truthfully, all of those spiritual experiences that I had while fasting were really horrific.

They're really terrifying. Like I would have waking nightmares. I didn't sleep well. It would all be very demonic in my sort of experience of it.

So yeah, so like it would just get weird. It would get super weird and then get super weird really quickly. And I don't think that this was done

maniacally, intentionally per say, but I think that there was this sort of, it's kind of, I think it's kind of like an abusive partner. There's a lot of abusive behavior that people will do, not really even knowing how it is abusive.

Like it's not a scheme that they're consciously trying to gaslight their partner or certain things but they develop behaviors that yield good results. So if you are Mike Bickel and you are saying some pretty extreme stuff about the end of the world and you're saying some pretty extreme stuff about to specific women and you're wanting them to believe that these prophecies that you and them or that Mike Bickel and these young women will be together at some point.

Like if you're laying the groundwork for some really problematic red flag prophecies and you recognize. is that, hey, this teenager that I spoke to was fasting when I spoke this word to her and she received it a lot better while she was fasting, then you were like, oh, maybe I should start having people fast more often because in weaker states, I don't know if it's a conscious decision of like, I am going to withhold food from an entire community of people so they will believe the thing that I'm about to say.

I don't know if it's conscious, it might have been. I certainly think that in Pentecostal history, there were characters like that, like Frank Sanford, for example, when he was doing his crews around the world on his ship, like he was purposely depriving the people within his on his ship from food because he knew if they had food, they would probably leave him and they would realize that everything that he's saying is absolute garbage.

But anyway, whether it's consciously intentional or not, it is the fact that these behaviors are very controlling behaviors. The fasting in itself makes people more prone to believe radical, crazy things. This is where, so this was the biggest thing when I was in my masters, I was getting my master's degree in philosophy, and I was writing about some of these religious topics and I would talk with individuals about some of my experiences growing up at the International House of Prayer, which was always really difficult because people have zero, like if you're in a secular world,

you have very little grid for any of the things that I'm about to, that any of my experiences growing up is always a very interesting conversation because it's hard to explain all of the dynamics of what I experienced.

And it is also really, really difficult to get secular individuals to care about the deceived, like to care about the Pentecostal community

who is being deceived by these charlatans, the Frank Sanford types, the Mike Pickle types, the Bob Hartley types, because there's this sense of like,

these individuals should have known better, right? You, it's like someone who signs up for those,

the email chain letters or those quick, easy gotcha schemes that are, clearly fraudulent now. Maybe it was different in the 80s and 90s when a lot of those things were not as popular, but your grandma gets sends $3,000

to the Prince of Nigeria. You're like, grandma, come on, like there's this sort of people being deceived. You see them as very gullible and naive. And I remember having a conversation with one of my professors because I was writing this paper and him and I were going back forth about this particular issue.

And I was like, I do not think that you can understand what I am saying in this paper until you fast for 10 days straight. And I was like, if you want to know what I'm talking about in this paper, you have to fast for 10 days straight.

And he was like, I'm clearly not going to do that. And I was like, okay, take my word for it then on this because it's just different. Like the red flags that you see from the outside looking in are so obvious and glaring.

But when you're inside of it for a variety of reasons, but fasting in particular, will just make the will power of the individual, it will so diminish the will power of the individual. And it will so sensationalize so much of what is going on within the community where you will start believing things that at the beginning of the fast, you never thought you would believe.

And I think that that's why it becomes to sort of transformational experiences. I get why it's a spiritual experience. A lot of people will go into the experience thinking one thing and they'll come out fundamentally changed.

But it's a powerful experience. And maybe sometimes that's used for good, but largely I've just seen it used for evil. You know, I've often thought about that as it relates not only to the light of rain, but also to international house of prayer, the level of confusion that people get into when fasting.

So when I was doing my non-spiritual fasting, I chose two days, but I wanted to experiment and see was there any benefit in three days? Because as I was listening, I think it was the TED talk, mentioned that some people do it for two days a week, some people for three, and I was like, well, why, what's the difference?

And what I found was that for me, from my body chemistry, I saw no effect on the third day. In fact, I was losing more weight just by doing two than I was three, which was really weird to me.

Why is that? You'd think you'd lose more weight, right? But anyway, so I chose the two days. One of the reasons why I chose two instead of three was on that third day. I entered into a state where my, on the second day, my brain was hyperactive.

I was thinking more clearly. I could run harder on the treadmill my like everything about me was better on that second day of fasting But on the third day it was the opposite. I still felt better and I could do you know, I could lift weights I could run like crazy but mentally and I work with my mind and IT mentally I was finding myself was a little bit slower to pull up answers out of my head So realize that this is probably not good for me to go that that third day So I've often thought about the leadership because a did they know that people

Who are fasting entering into a state of confusion and they will believe anything that you say yeah or be If they had fasted themselves They would have had to have realized this because if you've done it you realize this you know that you go into the state of confusion So the next question they came to my head Were they really not fasting themselves kind of like the Frank Sanford thing you mentioned had they just never done it?

And I know these questions are never be answered because you'll never get a truthful answer out of any of these days right But my opinion is that they probably did experiment with it. They probably knew that they could get people into a state of confusion But I doubt they continued it themselves because they did not want to lose their game that they had created you know So all of these questions were raised but for me I just simply realized that for me at two days is good Three days was no good and if I were to go beyond that I'm picturing a 20-day fast man

I might have believed this flying spaghetti monster if it was breached me behind a pulpit Yeah, I mean especially if you believe in any food related gods at that point you know Flying spaghetti monster would be perfect at the end of I might eat the god right exactly

Yeah, well and so one of the other big Things that set the international house prayer um separate from a lot of these other new apostolic reformation churches even or or just the

Charismatic non-denominational churches in general was it was 24-7 of course So you also had the fire in the night or you had a bunch of interns and young adults who were keeping the prayer room kind of alive and active during the wee hours of the morning And who would be there it was kind of their jobs to be there from like 10 p.m. to 6 a.m So In conjunction with fasting What's the other thing that you see in cult communities or in if you look at any any example of brain washing throughout history.

The two ingredients that you're always going to see are food deprivation and sleep deprivation. Like that's the attack, attack the physical body is the best way to brainwash the mind. Like it's just, it's pretty straightforward.

And so you had a bunch of different, you know, you had all of these young adults who were being brought to the international house prayer who were being required or firmly encouraged to fast and then actually being required to have night shifts,

which they were given time to sleep, but anybody who has ever done a night shift knows that really screws with your sleep schedule and it's just so much more difficult to have a good healthy sleep schedule when you are working at night.

Plus, they weren't giving them a lot of money. So how are you gonna pay for your living expenses? You might have a small stipend, but you certain no one who was like an intern at the international house prayer was making enough money to live.

So you were either raising support and if you didn't have support, you were having to have some part-time job to fill it. So if you're working at Trader Joe's and then from 8 a.m. to noon,

work in sort of a part-time job doing that, sleep from noon to 6 p.m. and then get up at 6 p.m. and go into the prayer room and spend the rest of your sort of waking day in the prayer room at night in this sort of like weird frenzy.

Of course, you're gonna have a lot of people who psychologically break and you're gonna have a lot of manic people

within that community. So was it a coincidence that Mike Pickle created a community that had sleep deprivation and food deprivation as two of its like main core elements? It probably wasn't. It probably wasn't.

That's probably a good indication that there was a cult leader who knew to some extent that he was building a cult and liked the benefits that came about of having a bunch of individuals who are a part of an organization who are in this constant state of mental fatigue.

I'm glad you brought that up because that really the point I wanted to drive home with this was exactly what you just said. So I studied fasting for the positive benefits and for somebody with diabetes, it can be very positive.

It can actually reverse it or bring it into remission. But there are a... of associated dangers within intermittent fasting. Not everybody's body chemistry is the same. So if you have, for example, if you're prone to eating disorders, and that's a condition that runs in your family, I think you mentioned this before, intermittent fasting can trigger the eating disorder, whereas you may go through your life absolutely normal, but once you start doing the fasting of any kind, you can trigger that, and then suddenly you've got a disorder for the rest of your life, and it's very very difficult to conquer that.

And also, as you just mentioned, this was the really the one I was gonna really hone in on. If your family has a history of mental health issues, the intermittent fasting causes a stress response.

When I mentioned that first two weeks, one of the things that you feel as you are, you're so stressed out, your body thinks it's going to die, it's going in survival mode, right? Well, that stress hormone that's really, what is it, cortisol, I think it is?

When cortisol is released, for a lot of people, it can be a good thing. It can make you, you know, the stress hormone sometimes makes people focus and hyper-focus, but if you have mental health issues, that stress hormone can also trigger other things that also may have lied dormant in your body.

So say you were, I don't know, say your family has history of depression or bipolar disorder that stress hormone may trigger it, whereas it may have been dormant the rest of your life. So it can drive you into mental health issues that you may never have experienced without fasting.

That's kind of the dangers of it. There are interactions with medications. And I have not yet, and you may correct me if I'm wrong, I've listened to quite a few different sermons by Bickel and others who do the fasting.

I've not yet heard any single warning about if you're on a certain specific types of medication, don't do this because you might die. I've never heard of this, but that's a big thing. And the other thing for me personally, the sleep disruptions that come from fasting, I could not do it long-term because I stumps I'm struggling to sleep anyway.

The intermittent fasting with the releasing of the stress hormone, it makes you where you have trouble sleeping. So there are people who, like, I don't have insomnia, but there are people who might have never had insomnia had they not done this.

So there's all, and there's a list, you can go online and find the risks of fasting, but there are risks that I don't think the church has worn the people before they started encouraging the people to do it.

Well, Anne's, I think that what we've been touching on a lot is that a lot of the risks, a lot of the things that start going bad with fasting, even if it started going bad, you don't have any system.

to know that it's going bad, right? So if you have a history of mental illness, like in the heartily family, you know, we got some, got some, got some history with some, some stuff there.

And so like, like if my, if my nieces, I would don't want to say this about that, but if my nieces started doing like fasting diets, I'd be like, let's be, let's be extra careful just just, you know, because that can trigger a lot of like mental health issues and, but if you're in the international hospital prayer and you have, um, disassociative identity disorder in within your sort of family history and those sort of patterns and you start feeling like a different person or you start having thoughts that don't feel like that they are yours or you have, you know, sort of intrusive

thoughts or if you start hearing voices or all of these different things, it's not going to be like, oh, I'm fasting and I'm probably having symptoms of fasting. It's, I'm fasting and now it's opening up a spiritual world to me. This is, I mean, this is, this isn't me talking generally about that. Those are all experiences that I had when I was fasting where I started feeling not like the same person and I felt very, um, fractured in my mental state and I thought that that was a good thing. I thought that that meant I was on the precipice of these divine revelations. So

the red flags that are associated with fasting aren't even red flags within this community to, like you said, with eating disorders. A lot of people, a lot of people probably who are still at the international house prayer right now or auxiliary sort of similar types of churches, they're, they're probably hundreds of different individuals who have eating disorders and don't even realize that it is an eating disorder because they've so hyper spiritual, hyper spiritualized that experience. A lot of people probably are having sleep issues. Again, don't realize that it's actual symptom of the lifestyle that they're doing, but think that it's some sort of spiritual

attack. You talk about Mike Bickle, never warning, hey, if you're on these certain medications, don't fast. Medication isn't talked about at the international house prayer. Like there's a long tradition in the panocostal community to not talk about medicine at all. You know, you have different, you have different levels of that. There are some who throughout history have been like very anti-medicine. And then there's some, it's kind of a mixed bag these days where if you do take medicine, huge, there's huge issues about taking medicine for mental health reasons don't if you there's no such thing as

ADHD there's no such thing as bipolar there's no such thing as like these were all not mental issues they were spiritual issues or something like that so if you took medication for those things that was stigmatized and even for physical issues it was kind of stigmatized of you don't really you don't really take medication and you just certainly don't do it openly so of course Mike Bickel isn't going to be talking from the pulpit about like hey if you are on these medications don't fast because a it's it's sort of this perfect storm of all of

these different elements of you have people who are sleep deprived you have people who don't have good knowledge around mental health issues you have a culture that actually stigmatizes medication for mental health issues you have this intensity and loathing and a lot of fat phobia and a lot of body phobia like your body hatred and that is that is part of this community so it kind of all coalesces to create this perfect storm of misery for a large group of individuals I think that so many people would resonate even people who are still huge international house

prayer supporters would hear the thing that I'm saying and be like yeah it was pretty miserable like I don't think anyone's like oh yeah yeah yeah I enjoyed that 21 day fast and what have brought me you know it just created so much misery it's like you're reading the playbook that I'm going by we did not compare notes before this conversation it's all off the cuff but the the last point that I was going to drive home which you somewhat did the combination of positive confession with intermittent fasting is deadly because so for me I didn't have I didn't

care about positive confession this wasn't a spiritual thing I did it for health reasons I knew the point in which I had gone too far and I could feel the negative things flowing I could feel it wasn't good for my body when I went too far with right if you're in the state of mind where you're doing this for religious reasons and then you entertain this notion of positive confession where you deny everything that's going on with your body well now when those negative things start when your body starts telling you hey you're you're doing the wrong thing here now you ignore that you're actually ignoring the signals that

God put in your body that tells you stop don't do this anymore yeah and that's really I find no Bible basis whatsoever for that there's nothing that tells a person In the Bible to continue fasting when your body is telling you don't do it.

It number one, like I said before, it's a cultural thing, but more than that, if your body is telling you don't do it, and the consequences of that, like I mentioned, can range from physical disorders to health issues to, you know, who knows what else.

This is a bad thing. This is not something that you should be doing. So for me, I was fortunate that I did it for medical reasons and didn't have that background. I feel really sad for people that were raised in this, especially children.

I can't imagine being a child in this, but so glad that you got out and hopefully, hopefully somebody who grew up in this who may or may not be, I don't know if they are, but entertaining the idea of continuing fasting after escaping this, think through it a little bit more critically is my advice.

Yeah, totally, and the one thing that I think to hammer on too, like if I had been told one thing 15 years old about in regards to fasting is like, don't hate your body, don't have this toxic relationship with your own physical body because it costs so much pain and mental, emotional, physical discomfort in my life because I internalized so much of the rhetoric that I grew up with and I wish I hadn't, I wish I had more than just not, I wish I had not gone on those fast.

I wish I hadn't internalized this sort of ascetic conquer the body by beating it into submission idea because it just ended up hurting me. Well, I'm glad we talked through it and I learned a lot on this.

I actually, I've not had these conversations with anybody else. Yeah. Very glad we did this and hopefully, somebody can find some helpful information in it. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.