Fasting
 

So, I'm being a bit of an odd one this week I think. I'm trying fasting as a self improvement method. I'm trying it for several reasons. 1) I've started to eat too much, and I think my mind is starting to trick me into thinking I'm hungry, so I'm trying to remind myself what hunger really feels like. 2) I'm also using it to remind myself of what it means to go without. It's forced on my part, but my body can't really tell the difference. 3) Every time I feel hungry I remind myself of my lifes goals and recommit to them (that's a fun one actually, and I get to remind myself often so I'm definitely getting that whole "repetition" thing in.) 4) I've always thought mild aestheticism sounded like an interesting way to find some spiritual enlightenment, so I thought I'd give it a try.

So, yeah, don't know why I feel the need to justify myself, I guess I figured people might wonder.

The real reason I'm writing is because I was wondering if anyone here had experience with fasting? I know there are several forms (like Lent or Ramadan). I grew up in a culture were fasting meant starving yourself for a day. I don't like that form though, it just makes my stomach hurt.

So I'm trying something else. I'm just having two or three dinner roles per meal, plus some tea. And then water whenever I want to drink it. I'm doing it for two days. So far it's been, uh, interesting? I hesitate to say fun, but I have learned a lot, which is nice.

Anyway, back to the point. Anyone else here know of any other forms of fasting? Or perhaps you have your own opinions on reasons to fast? Just wondering...

That's interesting.

"Bread and water" used to be a punishment. Not because of the starvation aspect, but because it resulted in severe constipation. Beware.

Closest I've come is a couple weeks of the "don't eat anything white" diet.... as in eliminate the carbs. You can lose weight, but boy was that a miserable way to do it after the first few days. Then there was military basic training.... eat all you want but you have 8 minutes to do it and it takes you 5 to get through the chow line. Then you jog for half an hour. Lost 35 pounds on that one!

Good luck... and do keep us posted, I'd like to know how it works out. Beer provides all the spiritual experience I am capable of absorbing (cause I am really shallow).

The only fasting I do is when I get engrossed in whatever I'm working on and forget to have lunch. I usually make the mistake of neglecting my fluids as well so I get pretty light headed due to low blood pressure.

I'm not sure about fasting specifically but caloric restriction is suspected to increase your life span.

Eating less may be key to living longer

Yeah, in reality it's more of a metaphysical thing than anything else. As time has progressed I've become fascinated by how my body reacts to varying stages of hunger. To be blunt, I've never had to go without whatever food I want for any length of time...so it's been interesting to be sure.

More than anything, it's been a good reminder thus far of what I can do without. Even more interestingly, it's really brought home to me how much more you can enjoy something when you make it special. Food has become such a common thing for me... By restricting my eating down to two roles per meal (at three meals a day)-- well, you'd think I'd be sick of rolls. But in reality, they taste even better than they usually do.

Also, it really has helped to remind me that my body doesn't mind being pushed around as much as I tend to imagine it would. It makes me think that my physical limits are farther off than I suspect. This is especially important for me because I usually will avoid large amounts of work because I worry it will "stress me out". Maybe that was all just a load of bull----. Who knows?

One more day, that's all I can say about it now. We'll see how it goes.

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Aesthetics and aestheticism aside, surely you mean asceticism? :cool:
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Having been infected by religious memes, I once fasted a week completely, took nothing but water. Even at the time, I was unable to detect anything whatever in the way of 'spiritual' benefits.

You already said that this isn't what you mean by fasting (in my opinion you're talking about dieting, not fasting), but I would warn other that, should you do a complete fast like that, be very careful how you come off it.

I also used to come fasting to the Eucharist, as in no breakfast, the sole effect of which was to make me very short-tempered.

What and interesting thread to find in here! I applaud you. I have been thinking of something a little similar at the back of my brain for some time now. (He says as he is eyeing-off the home-made chocolate chip cookies and cake sitting on his desk) Mostly for me it is related to the fact that I'm always hungry and consequently eat lots of stuff that ends up making me feel not so great - short term and long term. It's been far too long since I dieted (and for me "diet" means to eat healthily, not a weight-loss thing).

My only advice would be - eat something better than a dinner roll, that's just empty carbs with almost no other nutritional benefit. Have some steamed broccoli or a few carrots or something!

@ ArticStone -- Um...oops, yeah, you're right :). Though I suppose I could do it for the beauty of the thing.

@ Woodsman -- Wow, only water for a week? That's pretty hard core! And yeah, some people would say I'm not really fasting unless I go without completely, and that's fine. Call it whatever you want I suppose. I'm calling it fasting because I'm doing it for reasons other than just my health.

I should point out, I'm not really trying to starve myself, I'm just trying to make myself very hungry. Thus far I think I've ridden the line pretty well. I've been more hungry than I have been for quite some time (possibly ever), but the small amount of food I eat has allowed me to keep my faculties quite nicely. Like yourself, I don't see the point in this practice if it wrecks my mind and makes me irritable.

Also, thanks for the "getting off" advice. I'll be sure to start on lighter stuff tomorrow morning rather than jumping in with bacon and eggs or something like it :).

@ blubbernaut -- My wife has talked to me about using something else as well. I actually want to stay new the "empty carbs" range. I just want enough nutrition to keep me from becoming excessively weak or irritable. That being said, she's asked me to use wheat rolls next time so that I have a bit of real grain in me (as opposed to the highly processed roles I'm eating this time.)

Overall the practice has been quite helpful for resetting my mental limits on what it means to be "hungry". I've found that my body is becoming okay with being hungry as well. So, as far as health goes, I really think a good fast (at least what I would call a fast) can help one to stop over eating, simply because it resets your limits.

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Last night I learned something very interesting about myself. I was feeling quite hungry around 11:00, and almost broke down and ate and extra role, but I stuck to it and got myself to go to sleep hungry.

Now, this isn't empirical, but I did discover two things. 1) I slept much better than normal. 2) When I woke up I was no longer hungry, which surprised me. I had thought that I would wake up even more hungry than I had gone to sleep! I know this isn't necessarily how it works (I've read about people being so hungry they can't go to sleep, and sleeping does little to alleviate the problem). But as a personal experience...again, it's done a lot to remind me just how far I am from actually starving.

And as always, the fast still serves as a continual reminder that I need to improve myself (I told myself when I started that I would use my hunger as a reminder that I need to improve). It got me motivated to go to the library and get a book I've meant to read: Good to Great, which is ostensibly about creating a good business, but has a lot of personal application as well. I've read most of it by this point. It's been a good experience. It's been reminding me that the only way to get anything done on this planet is to work at it relentlessly. It's a good book if you haven't read it...

An interesting read for you Jay: http://www.latimes.com/features/heal...,2287067.story

I'm hypoglycemic. If I tried fasting I'd get really bad results.
When I was young I'd fast to go to communion. After Mass I'd be very unwell.
When I worked in the field it was sometimes difficult to get lunch. Those afternoons were filled with errors, bad temper and worse decisions.
A fellow-sufferer told me of a long road trip she made. At the end of the trip, and without having eaten, she found herself doing laps of the town because she couldn't decide where to park. Making a simple decision was beyond her. Just as well no emergencies crossed her path.

Warragul. I have a similar tendencies. But I find that if I can slowly get used to eating less (but still regularly) and eating much better quality and low GI food, then I find I get much less of the problems with dropping blood sugar. I experience a much more even energy level throughout the day. Pretty hard to make that transition though.

experience with fasting? sure one month every year :)

So how muslims fast during ramadan is we'd wake up before sunrise, eat a LITTLE, some do eat a lot, but i find no need, a bowl of cereal is more then enough along with 2 glasses of water, and then eat again at sunset. But thats just the physical aspect to it, we'd also fast mentally, try and better yourself, actively stop doing "bad things". Again when you break your fast dont over do it, stay away from fried foods. You'll notice during the day you get pretty burpy as the body is detoxing itself.

If you have any muslim friends you might wanna ask them to tell you more, especially since ramadan is a few weeks away, its much easier when you know others are not eating too.

fasting i found is also a great way to control...desires should we say, as your focus is on the whole bettering yourself and the hunger aspect which makes you relate to those who are less fortunate then yourself

Yeah, this is one of the more interesting things about fasting to me. It seems like in every culture where there is fasting, it is almost synonymous with learning self control. There are usually other meanings assigned as well, which change quite a bit by culture, by self control always seems to pop up somewhere.

Fasting during the day for a whole month, eh? I've never actually known a muslim in real life (I've lived in Utah and the Bible belt, so chances weren't that good). But, I do read AppleGeeks, and one of the authors is muslim. So every time Ramadan starts all of his readers know because there are usually several comics referring to it. Some are serious, some have to do with him hallucinating that he's seeing a squirrel that tells him he should eat ;). It's routinely funny and informative.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of the kinds of fasts I know about I only know about in theory, through a book or the like. I grew up in an LDS family (mormons) in LDS communities. I usually would go out of my way to find non-LDS friends, but it isn't easy. And over the last...7 years now? I've lived in Utah, so LDS culture seems to be all I'm familiar with. An LDS fast is simply for two meals, and it focuses on two things. 1) Self Control, 2) Humility regarding the poor (in fact we are asked to give the money that we might have spent on those two meals to the poor so they have more food to eat.) Not a bad fast, a bit short, but not bad :).

Thus, all of my experience with other types of fasts comes from the media. For example, I learned about the type of fast I was recently doing by studying buddhism (which I basically have to do on my own out here...). I've only heard about Ramadan from AppleGeeks and an article I read about Kareem Abdul Jabar (and now Kel101!)

I suppose I'm writing this as if it really upsets me. It doesn't, it's more of a...disappointed feeling? I'm just curious about how and why other people fast. I want to be intimately familiar, you know, walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Maybe I'll give Ramadan a try too then...

not sure if this really counts as fasting, but growing up in a catholic community it was always common not to eat meat on fridays and on certain times of the year. but then I moved to the US :D

Well, different cultures call different things fasts. With this in mind, I usually say a fast is: "anything that constitutes purposefully depriving yourself of some form of food or water for a sustained period of time for some spiritual/philosophical purpose." I've often thought that Lent was a bit of a fast too, though I suppose I am mostly unfamiliar with it, so it's hard to say...

Ramadan seems particularly grueling here in Australia as it is just as we go into summer. It seemed a bit cruel for the girls at my wife's school to go without water when they had to do sport in 30 plus degrees celcius.

Edit: Actually according to Wikipedia it is August - September this year so not so bad. I didn't realise it changed due to differing calanders.

In comparison Lent seems pretty light weight. When we were kids it was giving up lollies or something for a month.

well it goes back 10 days a year..so soon for you guys it will be in winter..for us it will be summer which means very long fasts indeed :eek:

Is there any, I dunno, extra blessings or piety involved in doing Ramadan during the summer months? Or is it just all the same? (I should point out, I fear I may be entirely missing the point of Ramadan, so forgive me if I don't understand...)

I guess on that basis you'd get heaps of points for fasting at the poles when the sun doesn't set.

Maybe we need an "Interesting but useless religious facts" thread in the interests of cross-cultural understanding. :D

Not that I'm suggesting religion is useless. ;)

The polar Ramadan "day" was standardised by fatwa ages ago. When the sun doesn't set at all, the fasting "day" is, I believe, 19 hours.

of course not, you wouldn't want stale beer for the rest of eternity ;)

We are not turning this into a debate about the merits of religion, period.

@kel101 I still would like to know if there is any cultural significance behind a summer ramadan, and if it's somehow treated differently than fasting in the winter months.

That was not my intention at all. I merely wished to clarify before anyone took offense that the "useless" in my suggested thread title came from the existing "Interesting but useless facts" thread title rather than from my opinion of religions in general.

I guess the need to clarify in the first place is the very reason religion is a taboo subject around here. Though my own beliefs lie somewhere between agnostic and atheist, I'm still interested in where others are coming from and my suggestion came from curiosity rather than malignancy.

that wasn't what I was trying to do at all, it was merely a pastafarian joke :rolleyes:

I began a fasting ritual when I was in my early twenties for several reasons, although overeating was not one of them. I had recently graduated from art school (paid my own way by working long hours), was rather poor, and decided to embrace and explore the asceticism that I couldn't avoid. It was a practical as well as spiritual decision.

I fasted one day per week, drinking only water. I didn't eat a larger than normal meal the night before or the morning after, because that seemed to violate the spirit of what I was doing. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

I also owned no car, washed my clothes by hand often, but not exclusively (to pay for the laundromat, I often gathered loose change while walking or biking to work), exercised regularly, and read voraciously. I became vegetarian (not vegan) partly to save money and partly to teach myself a new way of cooking. I was attempting to improve myself while accepting the limits of my existence.

It was ultimately very rewarding. I learned to be more responsible, rational, generous, and compassionate. I'm in my early forties now, with a wife, and two young children (for them, I gave up strict vegetarianism). I still try to live simply, but I no longer fast regularly. Maybe I'll try it again.

@fazstp & FelixMC -- Ah, okay. As you were then!

@capitalj -- That's really interesting. I can understand you're comments on practicality, but even more than that, I like the idea of doing it just to learn something new about yourself and the world around you. I think I often forget that you don't always have to do something for a higher purpose, but sometimes you can do it just for the experience itself...

I tried being vegetarian once when I was a teenager. I wanted to do it for a week just to know what it would feel like. Oddly, the only thing I remember is my dad giving me scriptures that talked about how eating meat was okay. And, as much as I tried to explain myself, it never seemed to get across that I was just curious about what it was like... As far as lasting effects, I'm not as big a fan of red meat as I used to be, but that's about it... Maybe I should try that again, see if it has an further effects :).

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in art school is that limitations force you to be more creative. And to me, learning about myself and the world around me is a sufficiently higher purpose because it makes me a better citizen of the world

Oh how I baffled (well, still do to some extent) friends and family. It was as if they forgot that they ate vegetables, too, particularly around holidays:

And waitstaff regularly gave my salad and water to my wife, and her steak tips and beer to me, despite having taken our orders personally.

People forget that not being forbidden isn't the same as being required. And people forget that not everything is about them. My vegetarianism was a personal choice and not a moral judgement, and particularly not a response to the choices of others:

It alarms me how common it is for people to view the choices of others as inimical to their own, as if my tabouli somehow makes their sirloin go rancid.

Anyway, my first experiment with vegetarianism was to go a full month without eating meat or junk food, then go back to my previous habits for comparison. It turned out that I preferred a vegetarian diet, and junk food had become too sweet or salty for my taste. It still is, mostly. And I felt healthier, but since I was already in good health, that was a pretty subjective conclusion. Now that I am older, however, my annual checkups have better results since I switched back to a heart healthy diet with minimal meat intake. My younger brothers are on heart medication - but I am not.

I doubt I'll go back to strict vegetarianism. Bacon is too yummy, even if I only eat it a few times per year. Fasting, however, I am strongly considering.

I don't know if you'd call my vegetarianism a moral choice. I just can't help but think of the living creature that was killed to bring the meat to the table. If someone gave me a cow and a bolt gun and asked me to help myself I couldn't do it so it seems hypocritical to allow someone else to do it on my behalf. I do cook meat for my wife and kids though. My daughter especially is too finicky to get a balanced diet from my vegetarian meals.

I know what you mean about other people feeling that my choice reflects on them but I make no judgements about other peoples' dietary choices.

It is a bit odd how people will sometimes assume that since you do things a certain way, you therefore think they are doing things the wrong way. But let us re-imagine capitalj's dialogue from before:

On some things the difference makes no difference.

I would suppose that it really comes down to a sense of morality being attached to a decisions. With my parents, I think they were under the impression that I was becoming an environmentalist (and the joke was on them, I already was, and yes, I know there isn't necessarily a connection between the two, they just felt that way.) They must have thought I was going to become very judgmental of them as a result, and perhaps they were preemptively defending themselves? I dunno, I might be assuming too much.

I do try very hard not to be judgmental (I'm not perfect at it, I know that...). I wish it were possible people wouldn't assume I was going to judge them because I have a difference of opinion with them. I wish we could all understand that we can't possibly know everything, so why go around having solid opinions like we do? Oh well...

At any rate, fasting has been a great experiment. I'm thinking of turning it into a bi-weekly thing. What do you guys think?

Biweekly, semiweekly... those words made me hesitate even before the usage of biweekly came to include the the definition of semiweekly (twice per week).

If you were abstaining from all food during your fast, I would say once per week should be the limit, but you are simply restricting your food intake. You might want to consider a slightly more balanced meal that a few dinner rolls if you are increasing the frequency of fasting.

It will be interesting to see how your fasting affects the rest of the week. To this day, I am be happy eating the same foods every day, and in smaller portions. It makes shopping easier. But it makes my wife crazy - sometimes she can't enjoy her breakfast because she is tired of watching me eat oatmeal every single day, year after year, switching to yoghurt only during the warmest weeks of the summer. I enjoy oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar, and cinnamon enough that eating it every day is indulgence, not moderation. And it's good for me.

In my life, I try to differentiate between moral choices, personal decisions applying to and affecting oneself, which can be freely made, and moral judgements, which apply to everybody and must be cautiously made, preferably by consensus. Although I have soapbox moments, I prefer to focus on my own life, where I have a better chance of making the correct decision.

I don't know why, but I really like this statement, especially the latter sentence

Brett

@capitalj -- When I say bi-weekly I mean "every two weeks". I don't think I could handle any more than that.

Ahh, the "proper" usage.

Well, in my experience, fasting is not truly meaningful unless done regularly, but shouldn't be done so frequently that it becomes detrimental to your goals and health.