Reflections On My 21 Day Fast
I have been off my fast now for almost a month. Yet it, as fasts will do, impacts me greatly.
Fourteen years ago, I went on a thirty day fast. It was just one month out of the past fourteen years. Yet, to this day, I see the impact it had on my life.
For one thing, I no longer taste my food while I am cooking. I cooked for a number of people the whole time I was fasting, but, of course, I couldn’t taste anything without breaking the fast. So I quit tasting stuff, and to this day, still have trouble remembering to do so.
The same with this one. I was on the fast this time for twenty-one days. I drank what I wanted, but didn’t drink much with sugar in it.
I lost over fifty pounds on the twenty-one day fast. Twenty of that has come back in just general living. But I had been on the Atkins diet for a couple of months before, so this probably sped up the weight loss.
But it came at a price. I was cold the entire time (it was February, which didn’t help me much warmth-wise), I had a runny nose, my back hurt, I had tremendous bowel distress along with a weird kind of diarrhea and I had a lot of severe muscle cramps. It was not enjoyable.
But with the help of God I did it. I know he had to be there for it to have been done in the first place.
Yesterday I went to the doctor for a check-up. The nurse and then the doctor noticed right away that I was thirty pounds down from a couple of months ago. Both asked why. I told them about the fast. You could tell that the nurse was having trouble processing it. She finally asked, what do you eat on a fast? I replied, nothing. That is why it is called a fast.
The doctor was fascinated by it, that someone would voluntarily go without eating for three weeks.
They didn’t really understand why I had done it and I had trouble telling them in a way that they could understand.
But I learned some things. For the next several days, I am going to talk about what I learned on my fast. If I had learned nothing, it would have been worthless. I believe that it was not.
So here goes.
What I learned in a physical sense from my fast.
1. I learned again what hunger is. There were several times near the end when I was truly hungry. You can always tell the difference between real hunger and mouth hunger. Mouth hunger wants a pizza or grilled cheese sandwich. Real hunger will look at almost anything as desirable. Real hunger will eat anything. Several times at night, I felt a almost desperate need for food. It is not normal, after all, for a person to go without eating. Americans are so well fed that a person can go two weeks before the first real hunger pangs can set in. I feel for the children in bad circumstances that have to go to sleep with hunger pangs. Mine was different, of course, I chose mine. They did not.
2. I learned what it means to do without. In a fast you do without something that is so basic that you many times do not even think about it. You go into a well stocked pantry, which I have, and take nothing for yourself. You invite people over for supper and eat nothing. You are sitting and watching a movie and eat nothing. You do without. This tends to make you realize that most of the stuff you have is not really all that important. I always admired the guys who could live in a room with little or nothing. I think I could. I would not put Ella through that, but I could do it. The stuff I own is not that important.
3. I lost a lot of muscle tissue. I was afraid I would, but I couldn’t exercise for the muscle cramping. So that meant I lost a lot of muscle. I did this back in 1997 too and took a while to get it back. The same seems to be so this time too. Since I always liked being a big strong man, this kind of hits me below the belt.
4. I learned loneliness. There is a camaraderie that comes from eating with others. That is totally missing in a fast. On the last fast, as well as this one, I stood in a grocery store buying food for my wife and for some guests that were coming for a prayer night. As I stood there in the midst of American plenty, something that almost looks like a warehouse for gluttony, I knew I was the only person in that place who had not eaten for several weeks. You are alone in what you are doing.
5. I learned that people’s perceptions of you are changed. Others see you as weird. The guy isn’t eating. How can you not eat at all? Something isn’t normal with this. We are worried about you and don’t want you to get sick. What is the first thing you are going to eat? After a couple of weeks, people get a little scared of you. You are accomplishing something that they could never even think about doing. And they are afraid of what you are doing and by extension, you. It sets you apart.
I will have more later as I process this. I came off the diet to my father’s death and the funeral. We drove nine hours there and nine back. I came off my fast to a counter full of cake and stuff that people had brought to us out of love. It was a hard way to come off a fast. You really need to do so easily, but I was not able to.
But all in all, it was a good fast. And I intend to do a similar fast sometime soon.
