What One Week of Fasting Taught Me About Hunger
A week-long fast. Doesn’t sound like something enjoyable *it wasn’t* but something about the idea caught my attention. From it, I learned quite a bit about my mind and body as it came to food and hunger.
It might be worth noting up front that while I’ve made a couple edits as I post this (April, 2021), most of my thoughts written here were actually recorded at the end of April 2020, as I ended this fasting period.
This time last year I initially was planning to do a 72 hour water-only fast to see how my body responded, to push off cravings and mostly just to challenge myself a bit during quarantine in April.
Yes, I understand that most people were challenging themselves on how many episodes of Tiger King they could watch in a row - apparently I’m a little different.
As I looked at my calendar, I realized that Ramadan was coming up at the end of the week and I decided to do some research.
I’m a bit of a history dork, and I love understanding how and why different cultures across different time periods approach life. I’ve always been intrigued by the way that fasting can benefit the body and how it’s been interjected into religion. “Sacrifice” always seems to be the word that’s associated with this.
Many religions practice fasting in some way and in years past, I’ve observed Ramadan to be one, if not the, most serious examples.
As I researched and learned a little, I found that for the 30 day duration of Ramadan, one is instructed to avoid eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset. While this might already seem difficult, remember that this isn’t done during the shortest days of the year - this practice is somewhere in the early summer months of April-June, where the days are long and hot.
No food, no water, just a renewed appreciation for your normal environment where both are attainable and for your body’s ability to continue on through your day without either. Religious aspects aside, I allowed my intrigue and naiveté guide me into a week-long commitment to feel these things.
Here’s what I found, in no particular order:
Your typical “intermittent fasting” is far easier. When you can sleep through half of your fast, that masks half of the conscious needs and half the unconscious urges disappear.
There needs to be a real intent to eat and hydrate before and after fasting - if not, you’ll suffer. I was waking up extra early (like, 4:45am) to make breakfast and chug water so that I could feel energy throughout the day.
I lost ~1 pound and gained it right back the next week - this is not (and should not be) about losing weight.
When you don’t have water, you don’t care much about food. Dry mouth and thirst is far more mentally draining than a stomach growl.
To that point, “hunger” is rarely hunger. I was going about 14+ hours without food or water and I really wasn’t very hungry by the end - what I was really craving was water.
Exercise gets put on the back burner, and it should, when fasting in this way. Any additional energy being used is getting taken from energy storage and when you’re not getting anything to replenish those stores, too much energy expenditure will feel terrible.
More than anything, fasting will probably affect the people around you. Social circles whether it’s family or friends, can become very confused or even offended when you disengage from the norm - there was a lot of explaining to do.
The mind is a wonderfully strong thing. When my mind was engaged, I didn’t realize the time or the lack of intake, but when it wasn’t, that’s all that was on my mind.
When I was all done, was it nice to wake up at a normal hour and not wait until 8pm to drink water? Of course. Still, the mental aspect of that week allowed me to appreciate another way of challenging myself. Maybe this type of fast isn’t for everyone but I think for everyone, some type of fast would benefit you in far more ways than you’d think.