Here is a spiritual exercise worthy of Lent:
Wait……… for an itch……… and then………. don’t scratch it.
It will start to feel like burning after a bit – your sensory receptors buzzing around the site – wondering why a reflex arc hasn’t been initiated yet to quell the nuisance. The itch may subside after a time, by doing nothing. False alarm; a clothing fibre flicked a follicle. My Lenten beard itches as I’m writing this – every turn of the neck spikes a hundred epidermal sites. I often find myself running my hand through it to temporarily quell the persistent prickle. Eventually, I habituate the sensation enough to not be irritated. Perhaps a more sinister plot is at work: fungal spores triggering the itch response so that once the skin is self-abrased by the unsuspecting giant, the spores and any other microbe in the vicinity may enter a warmer, moister climate and reproduce. But the most likely reason for skin irritations isn’t actually superficial. Rather, they are bodily responses to interior inflammation caused by the foods we eat.
Much of the last few years have been spent learning how to manage the diet of my middle child. For years her eczema had been getting worse, to the point where she couldn’t sit still and her focus was difficult to maintain for executive functioning. After topical treatments were exhausted, we began some exclusion diets for common food allergens like diary, gluten, nuts. If not for getting tested, we’d still be doing exclusion diets to this day. It turns out that she’s not only sensitive to a lot of food staples, but many of their common alternatives as well. After eliminating those, the remaining foods were of course amplified to fill out her diet. Unfortunately, even though they didn’t show up on the test for her, some of those foods I would later find out are universally inflammatory and thus her condition didn’t improve substantially until the last lectins were vanquished.
In the meantime, I began to re-evaluate my own diet. I like eating food a lot. But instead of restrictive diets, I preferred to excise the excess calories with exercise (which I also take some enjoyment in). One thing I didn’t enjoy was squeaking time for food into my morning routine – especially if I just ended up with heartburn for a couple of hours afterward. But I loved breakfast food. Even on those special mornings growing up when you slept till noon on a Saturday, I still couldn’t think about eating lunch food until I had some cereal with milk or toast with PB&J. In hindsight, I suppose it was my body’s low blood sugar telling me to rectify the situation with an abundance of disaccharides.
The thought never occurred to me until well into my 30’s to simply ignore the hunger pangs – like the itch on my chinny-chin-chin. So, three Lents ago, I decided to give up more than just dessert after dinner. I gave up breakfast (which is essentially the dessert you have before lunch). It was hard at first, but by lunchtime, I felt the same amount of hunger without breakfast as I did with it. That was a big clue to understanding how my metabolism operates. I shed 20 pounds that Lent and haven’t eaten breakfast since. It turns out I only need two squares a day at my age. But the health benefits of my particular fast go beyond cutting out the processed, candy-coated carbs that are breakfast foods.
The Maronite practice of fasting during Lent is illustrative: they don’t eat between midnight and noon. That 12-hour period is the minimum amount of time needed for your metabolism to switch from burning primarily carbs over to primarily fat. Of course, they’re likely sleeping before midnight and perhaps haven’t eaten since dinner, so every hour added on to the 12 is fat burning, whether you’re sitting down or up and about. The best part about that 12+ hour fast is that the fat metabolizing is evenly distributed throughout the body. To burn fat through exercise, you need to keep your heart rate up within a narrow range of frequencies for an extended period and the fat burned is nearest to the skeletal muscle being used. That’s fine and good. But without fasting, any deep tissue fat built up over time that now coats your organs and is associated with many negative health indicators largely stays put. Some fat can only come out from fasting, just like some demons can only come out by prayer and fasting (Mark 9:29).
The only thing you need during the fasting period is water, and more of it than you would normally drink. Since fat is more calorie rich than carbs or protein, the water used up in the hydrolysis reactions increases proportionately. I vividly recall a pep rally in high school where all the sports teams were featured as build-up for the main event. Out walks our five-foot nothing wrestler and defending Ontario provincial champion in the one-hundred-pound soaking wet weight class.
Principal: “What are you eating?”
Wrestler: “Nothing.” (cheers)
Principal: “What are you drinking?”
Wrestler: “Water.” (more applause)
He retained his title belt a week or two later (with a notch or two added on the inside).
The reason many people give up on fasting after a few hunger pangs is because they’re dehydrated and lethargic. If fasting is done properly, you can feel invigorated and warm by the excess heat being produced from the fat metabolism. Unless you’re a professional rugby player with zero percent body fat or one of those rare metabolisms that burn up everything eaten all day long and still look like a bean pole, you probably have excess fat to burn.
The problem is that for most people, as soon as enough time has passed for fat-burning to kick in in, they immediately switch it back off again by consuming carb-heavy, low nutrient breakfast foods. Fat is first-in/last-out, which means it gets stored by piling layers on top of each other. It’s a little disconcerting to think that the fat I added in my twenties is still there now – tucked away under fat I stored in my thirties. Adaptively, fat is meant to be stored for a season or two, not a decade or two with more added all the time. Our bodies plead for carbs as the metabolic path of least resistance, but if there are none to be had, you can always live off the fat for a while. For thousands of years, our bodies were trained by feast and famine. The West now has neither and we’re fatter than ever.
Fasting is not a fad. It’s not the nutritionist magazine flavour of the month. Sure, it is more in vogue today because we understand the science behind it, but there aren’t any products to profit off of. By choosing not to eat for a period of time, you are following a ritual as much as a regimen. Fasting not only sobers the body but sobers the mind. Feel hungry every day. Use that hunger to get outside yourself. Traditional fasting doesn’t seek as its end a better beach body. Donate the breakfast you don’t have every day to the children who don’t have any and offer up your sacrifice for the millions around the world who are hungry. And if you can’t do it with a smile, you’re probably not doing it right.
“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” (Matt 6:16)
Jim Davis has a comic where a distraught Garfield gazes downward as he grabs his belly prior to commencing the next reluctant diet: “there will be a whole lot less of me around”. To fast is to diminish – literally and figuratively. Humility is the desire to decrease so that others may increase. The spiritual life begins where I end. God isn’t asking me to be a better person, like some peddling self-help guru. He wants me to be a new person. He wants me to be incorporated: Jesus Inc.
If “you are what you eat”, eat less of the world and commune with God – the best way to break-fast.
https://catholicvote.org/nba-player-faints-during-game-reveals-he-fasts-regularly-as-a-part-of-catholic-faith/?mkt_tok=NDI3LUxFUS0wNjYAAAGSmeOPvWQHOn_9rBdIiznUgywayX-nDESg_A37mNyOg4rcVNeOp8HrE3-6c4e9hrzZlhTb7DXsLw5g2rqej_u0Q-uoMgqhxWBHiBHfFoo3
Bismack Biyombo knows how to fast
A wonderful reminder as we near the end of Lent. Blessings from Texas!