fasting as treatment?

Did anybody use fasting as  a complementary treatment for CD ? I've heard that short-term fasts (24-72 hours) can be helpful. Any experience, successful or otherwise?

Post Edited (garry11) : 8/9/2013 5:01:12 PM (GMT-6)

Ive fasted many times for this disease but i feel the same as soon as i resort back to foods. I think it can generally feel better to give your gut a break but i dont believe it heals it.

I can't see how fasting would help Crohn's, really. I went without eating for 24 hours loads of times and it did not stop my Crohn's from progressing ever more severely. A liquid diet can be very helpful in the short term, but unless you can find a maintenance drug to take over the task of controlling Crohn's, the symptoms usually just come back when you stop the liquid diet (again am talking from personal experience).

Bowel rest doesn't really seem to help with Crohn's, as has been shown with elemental diets (where the nutrients are predigested into their simplest elements and absorbed in the upper small bowel) and intravenous feeding. For liquid diets, a non-elemental diet (eg drinks like Ensure) are almost as effective as an elemental diet in getting folks into remission - the problem as I said in my previous post is that the remission doesn't tend to last beyond the diet.

However, you can use an elimination diet to identify problem foods. The idea is that after going into remission on the liquid diet (hopefully), you introduce solid foods very slowly and carefully back into your diet, trying out a single food 2-3 days at a time. If you tolerate it, keep it in; if you don't, eliminate it. I never tried this, but I think it makes more sense than randomly cutting entire food groups wholesale. My theory is that strict diets like the SCD work by excluding 95% of all foods that most people eat anyway, so if you're intolerant to just a few things, SCD will probably cut them out.