Day 59: faster.

I’ve always had a weird fascination with the evolutionary, spiritual, and philosophical significance of fasting.

It is so deeply rooted in our biology (the whole purpose of storing fat and glycogen in so that it can be “eaten” when food isn’t available, which we have to assume was fairly often, given the complexity and efficiency of those systems), in our religions (fasting as a spiritual obligation, a way of getting closer to God, a sacrifice, a path to purification or mortification, or a way to get the attention of the eternal for the purpose of receiving an answer or a blessing is common to basically all of the world’s major religious practices), in medicine (Greek, Chinese, and Western medicine all used fasting to cure disease—and interestingly, experiments are now being done on fasting as a way of stopping the spread of cancers), and even in schools of thought (Stoics fasted as a means of “voluntary discomfort” to build their willpower;  Pythagoras believed that fasting made him more insightful and able to concentrate) and politics (hunger strikes are a time-tested way of bringing attention to your favorite revolutionary idea. Are you listening, Antifa?) that it’s interesting to me how rarely we think about fasting in modern-day America.

Perhaps it’s because fasting is so diametrically opposed to the way in which we treat food in our day to day lives. If there’s a line, and at one end of the line there’s “eating nothing for days, weeks, or months on end”, then at the other end of the line there’s the Standard American Diet—too much food too many times a day.

SAD----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Fasting

Although fasting has a long, long tradition to back it up, in today’s world, the very thought of fasting, in fact, seems sort of…crazy. Your thoughts race; you imagine what your friends will think. WHY would you do that to yourself? HOW are you going to deal with the hunger pangs, and the grouchiness, and the lack of energy? Isn’t not eating DANGEROUS? Are you developing an eating disorder? What are you going to do about the fact that your birthday/Thanksgiving/the company picnic/New Year’s Eve is next week? You HAVE to celebrate with food on [fill in the excuse], right? What are you going to say to people about why you’re not eating?

The more I’ve thought about fasting, the more I’ve wanted to try it—or at least a watered-down version of it. Why? Partly because the very idea that people DON’T do it, and are afraid of it, and will judge it, makes me want to try it because I’m ornery. Partly because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how undisciplined my mind is—how much I just let it do its own thing, coddle it, allow it to jump from branch to branch chasing shiny objects, and what a HUGE problem that is for my productivity and stress level—and I think that forcing such an out-of-the-box discipline on it would be good for it. Plus, fasting is supposed to be good for clarity, which would be welcome at this time of year. And partly as a reset for my eating habits, which tend toward the “for pleasure” rather than the “for fuel”. Last time I seriously restricted my diet (on a 10 week medically-monitored liquid diet 15 years ago), one of the effects was that when I went back to eating, everything had more flavor (in fact, sugary/fat/salty food was so intense that it was unpleasant) and I couldn’t eat very much of it.

So yes, this is all leading to me saying that I’m going to try a semi-fast for a couple of weeks. I say semi, because I WILL be eating—but only a single food, a la Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) in his book Presto. I won’t starve. I won’t die of malnutrition, or collapse from a vitamin deficiency, or have seizures, or develop anorexia, or any of the other things you’re about to warn me about. And it’s only for 2 weeks, not forever. And I’ve done all my research, and there are no negative long-term health effects. So, no, I will not be worse off at the end than I am today. Don’t worry about me.

What I will do, I hope, is bore my taste buds half to death. Go back to being able to taste and enjoy simple, non-sweetened or salted or buttered food. Develop some mental toughness. Maybe find some focus. Experience what it’s like to not have endless choices and not have interesting food to eat and not be on the “one long meal interrupted by work” diet that my contemporaries enjoy but my ancestors couldn’t. Be strong in my ability to keep commitments.

In other words, make a change that’s about more than just food; that’s about what thousands of years of fasting practice has meant to generations of human beings. Sacrifice, purification, curative power, self-denial, and discipline interests me as much as the ‘fast’ itself. It’s the reset that counts.