Fasting for fun and benefits, sort of

Back to the caveman. He and his family fasted through the winter and subsided on things that they could store. When that ran out, they foraged, and when that diminished, they fasted. And some of them starved.

Fasting has always conveyed a message of aesthetic purity and a feeling of being closer to God almighty. Riteeous people fast; bad people eat devil's food cake (of course). And there are times when many of us would prefer to be bad.

Fasting makes sense in a religious, spiritual, political, or health context (i.e. for medical procedures). Some health food proponents advocate fasting at various times of the year, but they always seem to be so expensive - and why is that?

The one common denominator in each of these is that they start and end at a specific time. Usually a domestic fast will not last more than 3 days. A medically supervised partial fast, also known as a doctor driven crash diet, is obviously longer. In both cases, lasting weight loss results are highly improbable without bringing about significant change in personal habits; that is to say, a lifestyle change. And three days of grapefruit juice will not do this.

I have never been able to stick to a fast for long. Hunger sets in within 3-5 hours and you want to steal the food of co-workers. But I can scale back, and I can also live without certain things: alcohol, simple carbs, cigarettes, pop, baklava, and lima beans. Anyone can live without lima beans. It's just a matter of what you are prepared to give up from there.

Most of the time fasts don't work over an extended period because they are not practical. No sooner have you abstained from lima beans, then they are all you ever think about. Aunt Bettie serves her famous lima bean stew for your birthday. Lima beans are the side dish on your first date. The world is full of lima beans, and all those other nasty things you were supposed to give up as part of your fast. And the world won't change, so you do. Fasts at our level were never meant to be taken this seriously. And they are very impractical weight loss methods. And long term maintenance of weight loss.

Still, many people find short fasts beneficial, particularly if they have digestive illnesses (i.e. food poisoning, constipation) depression, bereavement, flu, or if they are in childbirth. Some people intent on weight loss will run partial fasts - say, raw foods - for several days to adjust the system to less food, and being without meat. But it isn't meant to last.

Fasts, in effect, don't really have much practical application in long term weight loss, but the concept of "doing without", and adapting your situation to the real world, is an excellent lesson. Maybe that's why fasts have been around for thousands of years.