The Physical and Spiritual Benefits of Water Fasting
Fasting is a Multi-tool
I haven’t eaten anything in three days and I legitimately feel great! Besides water I’ve had some tea, and toothpicks, but no food. It is one of those things that you have to experience to believe, but after three days of no food I feel good, and have plenty of energy for my usual daily work and physical activity. I feel like I’ve given myself a spacious pause on many levels: physically, mentally, and energetically.
I have fasted before but always for one day at a time. The neat thing about getting to the third day of fasting is it feels easy—you feel hungry for the first two days, but then the hunger evaporates by the third day as the body begins to switch over into ketosis: burning fat for fuel rather than food. The natural assumption I have made ever since I was a kid was that if you skip a meal, you get hungry, and then the more time that passes without eating the hungrier you will get each day. I figured if you went a couple days without eating you would become weak and overwhelmed by a terrible hunger like vampire or a zombie—able to think of nothing besides the next meal. It’s a nice surprise to have the firsthand experience that after the initial day or two of not eating your body seems to get the message, and say, “Oh you’re not eating? Okay buddy, I’ll leave you alone.”
Once you stop eating, your body waits several hours before it switches over to burning fat. When you eat, your body stores the calories as energy in your liver; this is like your body’s refrigerator. Once you go without food long enough, the body switches to thawing out food from the deep freeze—fat. Fat has a pretty bad reputation these days, but its original purpose was to be a supply bag of energy to get us through times when humans ran up against droughts, long winters, or streaks of not having any luck bagging a wooly mammoth.
In Neolithic times, having plenty of fat was like buried treasure.
The first day two days I felt hungry, and thoughts of food kept popping into my head like a song you don’t want, that gets stuck in your head. Yesterday I went for a long walk and I could feel the moment when my body switched over to running on ketones rather than glucose. I felt a blissful physical euphoria percolating in the limbs of my body—it felt like the golden sunshine of the day was becoming into a golden honey inside of me. Was this feeling physical or mental, emotional or spiritual? Yes, it was all of the above!
Long-term Fasting vs. Intermittent Fasting
This style of fasting— just drinking water for a full day—is very different from the intermittent fasting that is currently more popular, especially on the internet. In fact, if you Google fasting, most of the information that comes up is just about Intermittent Fasting, and not the much older long-term water fast. The idea behind intermittent fasting (also known as time restricted eating) usually amounts to skipping breakfast—it is popular with the same demographic that is into the ketogenic diet (a fad which peaked in popularity in 2017). I have nothing against intermittent fasting, it is reasonable that if you skip a meal you are going to end up consuming less calories on average, which is generally healthy for most people these days. It’s very easy to try—just skip breakfast, after a couple days your body will adjust and you no longer will be hungry until later in the day. But the kind of fasting I’ve always found more interesting is the long-term fasting, eating nothing at all for a full day or longer.
One of the main differences between intermittent fast and long-term fasting is that historically, long-term fasting has had a spiritual component, and been practiced in conjunction with practices like meditation, prayer, pranayama, and so on. Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, is all about the physical health benefits. What’s great about long-term fasting is you don’t have to choose one or the other, you can fast for both the physical and the metaphysical benefits. It’s good not just for shrinking your waist line, blood sugar levels, and inflammatory markers, it’s also great for meditation, contemplation and spiritual energy. Fasting truly is an incredibly versatile multi-tool.
The Physical Benefits of Fasting
The modern take focuses on the many health benefits of fasting. Once the body hasn’t eaten for a few days, it goes into the process of autophagy and starts breaking down old cells for new parts. It’s like when you finally get around to de-cluttering your basement or some room that has become overstuffed with junk. Storing way more fat on the body than is actually needed is the same as a hoarder who has stuffed their house with old junk that actually serves no purpose. Eventually this causes all kinds of problems, and the process of autophagy (which happens during long-term fasts) means clearing out that junk. Imagine your body as a house with workers who are tasked with bringing new supplies in and out every day—it’s only when you take a break from bringing in those supplies that the body’s workers get a chance to clean the place up, and take out the piles of junk that are no longer needed, including tossing out any broken machinery that needs to be replaced. Essentially a long-term fast gives the workers in charge of the factory that is your body a break from digestion long enough to clear out the old junk that’s been sitting around that could potentially cause disease. When you fast, your body does a selective inventory of what to get rid of.
Fasting has been found to cure all kinds of chronic disease (especially ones caused by inflammation), including diabetes, epilepsy, arthritis, asthma, migraine, high blood pressure, a host of skin diseases like psoriasis and eczema, and other autoimmune disorders, as well as a host of others. There is even evidence it can cure many mental afflictions, including some forms of schizophrenia (which modern western science labels incurable).
The Metaphysical Benefits of Fasting
I was disappointed to read an recent book on fasting that was informative, and exhaustive about the science but looked down on any spiritual aspect with snarky derision. During the chapter on the ancient history of fasting, the author made sure to mock the stupid Hindu and Christian monks who fasted as a spiritual practice, as being dumb for their beliefs. I suspect this was done in an effort to distance fasting from woo woo stuff—and make an argument that fasting was strictly sciency.
This division between the spirit and the physical, or the inner and the outer world, the microcosm and macro, is the rift at the center of much of the modern world’s problems. In a nutshell, when we pretend only the physical world is real, we cut ourselves off from the spirit, and become trapped in ego. You can look at the headlines of the news any day to see where this is getting us.
There is a rich history of fasting for spiritual purposes. It is referenced in every major religion. Buddha fasted, so did Jesus and Mohamed. Countless monks, mystics and ascetics have fasted throughout the ages. One of the most interesting elements of fasting is that it unites physical health and metaphysical (spiritual) health in one practice. In this way, it is like yoga—practitioners can choose for themselves how much and to what degree they want to focus on the physical or the spiritual aspect of the practice. Perhaps it is because in ancient times people did not have the same diseases which are largely caused by the over processed western diet—that they could appreciate fasting mainly for its gentle calming and elevating effect upon the spirit.
I always fast in order to still my mind. When I have fasted three days, I no longer have any thoughts of congratulations or rewards. When I have fasted five days, I no longer have any thoughts of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. And when I have fasted seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a body. My skill is concentrated, and all outside distractions fade away.
—Zhuangzi, 3rd century BC
As I finish my fast (I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow) I am excited for the many health benefits, preventative and curative that my body has enjoyed for the past 72 hours, but I’m also aware of the spiritual benefits. Fasting gently unmoors you from your routines. Without the typical three-square meals, the day loses some of its structure, and your spirit (inner world) feels light, the mind becomes expansive and floaty. It feels like you loosen your grip on everything just a bit, and can approach everything in life from a new, looser, lighter vantage point. At the end of the day, the most exciting thing about fasting is that it truly is a tool which benefits both the mind body and spirit in equal measure.