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August 19 - August 28, 2020
Based on a paucity of scientific debate, many of us have been advised by “experts” to eat early and often.
Fasting strikes at the root of this problem. Done right, fasting lowers our insulin levels and helps reset our metabolism, without any harm to our health. Different lengths of fasts have different effects, but the basic idea is to deplete your body’s stored sugars until it starts burning fat. Some parts of your body, such as the brain, still need some glucose but mostly use an alternate fuel, ketones, which are made from body fat. Strictly speaking, there are no essential carbohydrates.
What makes fasting different from dieting is its intermittent nature. Diets fail because of their constancy.
The defining characteristic of life on Earth is homeostasis, wherein competing processes balance out in a state of equilibrium.
In the body, any constant stimulus will eventually be met ...
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Weight gain is not a uniform process. Average yearly weight gain in North Americans is about 1.3 pounds per year (0.6 kilograms), but that increase is not constant. The year-end holiday period produces a whopping 60 percent of this yearly weight gain in just six weeks. Most people then lose some weight after the holidays, but not enough to counter the gain.
We should not always be eating, and we should not always be fasting.
Fasting gives birth to prophets and strengthens the powerful; fasting makes lawgivers wise. Fasting is a good safeguard for the soul, a steadfast companion for the body, a weapon for the valiant, and a gymnasium for athletes. Fasting repels temptations, anoints unto piety; it is the comrade of watchfulness and the artificer of chastity. In war it fights bravely, in peace it teaches stillness. —St. Basil the Great
We wouldn’t dream of telling our kids, as parents did for most of the twentieth century, to eat only three meals a day with no snacks between. Does anyone still worry about spoiling their appetite? We act as if people had always had treats at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. and scarfed down a big bowl of Wheaties right before bed.
This grazing—that is, eating early, late, and often—is one reason we now have such a hard time fasting.
Why do we take dietary advice from a government agency that was founded to promote and subsidize the food and sugar industries?
Constant grazing and a diet high in sugar and processed carbs is a very recent trend. For millennia, people ate mostly foods that were only lightly processed. They fasted on some days. They ate moderately on most days—two or three meals without snacks in between. And they feasted just a few days a year. For much of this time, the restraint was a matter of necessity. Later, the pattern became a spiritual practice for every major religion, including Christianity. Our calendar still shows signs of this lost tradition. Now we eat our fill every day, offering our bloodstreams a constant stream of
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If we are unities of body and soul, of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, then we should assume that if fasting is good for us, then it’s good for us overall—body, mind, and soul.
We should instead want to get food off the throne of our lives, and into its proper place, where it can serve as a blessing rather than a curse.
The basic idea is simple: we need to become “metabolically flexible,” where we can easily run on sugar or fat, and switch from one to the other without feeling like a heroin addict going cold turkey.
Strictly speaking, to fast means to freely give up food (and sometimes drink) for some amount of time.
People often use the word “fast” to refer to something for which we already have good words: “abstain” and “abstinence.” For example, “I am fasting from eating corn chips during Lent.” Worse is when the word is used to refer to nonfood items. The Facebook “fast” is a glaring example.
In a sermon on prayer and fasting, for instance, Augustine—who was not an extreme ascetic—said, “Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, and kindles the true light of chastity. Enter again into yourself.”
It’s hard not to notice that Christians who have survived for centuries in persecution hot spots tend to have the most hard-core fasting calendars. Coptic Christians in Egypt follow a supersize version of the Orthodox calendar. It covers 210 days of the year and is sometimes strictly vegan, or even water-only. The Ethiopian Orthodox have some kind of fast 250 days a year (out of a total of 365)! Some of these are water-only fasts.
What about Chinese Christians? Yep, lots of fasting.
Neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin opposed fasting. But both criticized Catholic fasts for what they saw as their legalism and works-righteousness. They were convinced that Catholics were trying to earn their salvation by fasting and performing other disciplines. (This was not Church doctrine. Augustine had dispatched Pelagius’s view of works-salvation a thousand years before. Still, Calvin and Luther’s charge is understandable given the corruption of the times.) Both allowed that fasting, rightly framed, could be good. And many Lutheran and Reformed groups did fast.
But this is how entropy works in groups. It’s much easier for people to blow off than to take up a discipline.
I’m convinced that one reason the Church is so weak is that she has abandoned this ancient spiritual practice. It’s hard not to notice that a decline in fasting has tracked closely with a decline in holiness and faithfulness to perennial Christian teaching.
Our way of eating creates a near-constant need for food, preferably highly processed and carb-rich. Rather than moving from a fasted to a fed state and then back to a fasted state, we stay in the fed state for most of our waking hours.
most of us now run mostly on sugar all the time. This is not how God designed our bodies to work best. In fact, if our forebearers had needed to follow this eating pattern to survive, we wouldn’t be here. The human race would have gone extinct long before we reached our present age of food abundance. Why? Because for most of human history, our ancestors did not have a constant supply of carby foods and refined sugars. They had no refrigeration, for one thing, and couldn’t get fruit when it was out of season.
Like it or not, we’re apex predators, which means we’re at the top of the food chain. Our eyes are on the front of our heads—like tigers and wolves—not on the sides of our heads, like deer and bunny rabbits.
What we feel when it’s time for lunch is more habit than hunger.
It just means that our abundance has costs as well as benefits.
We need to find ways to prune the costs, while reaping the benefits.
If you read deeply in the paleo-diet literature, as I have, you’ll be tempted to treat agriculture as if it were a curse, perhaps the result of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden. This is unbalanced, and unwarranted. We should thank God for agriculture. With...
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Very few people in developed countries starve to death or die from food- and water-borne disease.
Let’s celebrate these gains even as we seek to mitigate the health problems these advances have fostered. Some of the problems are due to simple abundance. Some are due to how we have changed our foods through hundreds and thousands of years of plant breeding. And some are due to how we prepare and eat our food. For instance, there must be some reason that wheat and peanut sensitivity has gone through the roof in recent decades.
We now eat heaps of sugar, over twenty-two teaspoons a day on average—well over a hundred pounds a year! That’s over twenty-five times more than the average in 1700, ten times more than in 1800, and twice what it was in 1900. Just since 1977, when the government launched its crusade against food fat, Americans have swelled their intake of sugar by 30 percent. We’ve also swelled our ankles, necks, and bellies. For comparison, you can only keep about one teaspoon of sugar in your bloodstream. It’s toxic at much higher levels.
I thought real fasting—freely going without food for many hours or days—undid what I was trying to do with exercise and a healthy diet. Fasting would kick me into “starvation mode,” I thought. That is, my metabolism would drop into low gear, and my body would shed muscle and store fat. As a strength trainer in college, I taught this to fellow students trying to lose weight and get in shape. As a father, I taught this to my daughters. And for decades, I practiced what I preached.
Now, if you’re trapped in a box and go two months without food, you will lose lean mass—both bone and muscle. But that’s not fasting. It’s a form of torture prohibited by the Geneva Convention. More moderately, if you run a calorie deficit every day for months, you will be “hangry,” your metabolism will down-shift, and you’ll lose muscle. But again, that’s not fasting. It’s bad dieting.
In the infamous Minnesota Starvation Experiment led by Ancel Keys in 1944–45, subjects were put on low-calorie, carb-heavy diets for twenty-four straight weeks.
They started out eating a normal 3,200 calories per day for three months to set a baseline. Then, during the six-month test phase, they took in, on average, less than half that amount—1,570 calories per day. The men needed to lose a certain amount of weight every week, and the scientists found that it became harder and harder to get them to lose weight. (Remember this.) As a result, the researchers had to keep reducing the food rations. Some of the subjects ended up with portions of less than a thousand calories a day. For the better part of six months.
The men lost a lot of weight. No surprise there—that was the goal of the experiment. But a good chunk of what they lost was lean weight. Their body temperature also dropped by several degrees. They lost interest in sex—a sign of bad health, though perhaps helpful given their circumstances. Worse, they couldn’t think straight. They felt cold all the time. Both their strength and their endurance plummeted. Many became depressed and psychotic. And they fixated on food—even in their sleep.2 In other words, it was hell on earth.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, though, was not a test of fasting. It forced men to lose weight by giving them less and less to eat for half a year straight. If a subject stopped losing weight, the scientists would cut his calories some more.
Eating less and eating nothing, it turns out, have distinct, even opposite, effects on the body—at least in the short term.
Most diets work at first. That’s why there are so many of them.
Deep hunger is a biological impulse, like the impulse to breathe or sleep. You have short-term control over it—just as you can decide to hold your breath.
Would it surprise you to learn that a few of these otherwise healthy men had to be dropped from the study because they became delusional and did desperate things like eat out of the trash?
Muscle is mostly zero-calorie water plus protein.
Your body needs either glucose or ketones (made from fat) for fuel. It would use a good bit of energy just converting muscle protein to fuel. And for the trouble, it would get about 700 calories per pound of muscle burned. Compare that to fat, which packs 3,500 calories per pound. A pound of body weight stored as sugar—glycogen—has only about 400 calories.7
How does this work? During a fast, the pituitary gland boosts human growth hormone (the stuff many bodybuilders inject in their backsides to help them grow abnormal amounts of muscle). This not only helps our body burn fat. It also helps us spare muscle.
The fixation on calories is due, in large part, to the fact that scientists figured out how to measure calories in food before they understood how hormones regulate everything in our body. The temptation in science is always to treat what can be measured as the only important thing, and to treat the stuff that we can’t, or can’t yet, measure as if it doesn’t matter.
even though you have about a gallon and a half of blood in your body, you can only safely hold about a teaspoon of sugar in your bloodstream.
There are about eight teaspoons of sugar in one can of Pepsi!
As mentioned already, our bodies have two separate pathways for converting food to energy. One pathway converts carbs and some protein to glucose—a type of sugar that every cell in your body can use for fuel. The other one converts fats to ketones.
