Starving For Good

Starving For Good

Sam Fraser decided to go hungry for a couple of days. His experience lead him to learn more about the history of fasting and its speculative health benefits.

Last week I didn’t eat for 48 hours. It was my first fast.For those two days I didn’t consume a single calorie. They were two of the most peculiar days of my life. By the end of my fast I wasn’t quite the empty skulled, staggering zombie I dreaded becoming when I began, but It’s hard to tell yourself it’s all for a good cause when your body is telling you that you’re slowly dying.

A fast is a prolonged abstinence from all food and drink except water (dry fasting involves abstaining from water as well). It’s not starvation and it’s not going without food on a Sunday because you drank copious amounts of booze the night before. Fasting is usually carried out in order to gain some kind of health, spiritual or mental benefit. Fasting supposedly provides a natural rest period for our bodies and brings about biochemical and physiological changes which would not normally occur during day to day dieting.

Fasting has a rich and diverse history. In many religions, fasting is seens as a means of spiritual renewal and a way to become closer to god. For example, Muslims observe Ramadan, a month of sunrise to sunset fasts focused on reevaluating life and to practise self-discipline, faithfulness, and empathy. The Buddha’s realised one of the central tenets of Buddhist practice—moderation —when he broke his near-death fast.

Fasting for medical reasons has a varied and at times controversial history. Renaissance doctor Paracelsus, one the the three founders of Western medicine, called fasting “the physician within”. Grecian philosophers Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and Hippocrates also praised the benefits of fasting.

Linda Hazzard was an infamous figure in 20th century fasting. Hazzard, the aptly named quack doctor, was convicted for manslaughter after one of her patients starved to death on a prescribed fast in 1912. While Hazzard had no formal medical training, she opened a “sanitarium” in Washington where she administered fasts lasting days to months where her patients survived on minuscule amounts of tomato soup, asparagus juice and orange juice.

Hazzard believed that the root of all disease lay in our desire for food and consuming too much of it. More than 40 patients died in her care. Hazzard even practiced in New Zealand for some years before she was charged with practising medicine under the title ‘doctor’, when she was not medically registered. A Whanganui newspaper picked up on her dodgy credentials before she was charged ₤5 plus court costs (equal to about $600 today), and was probably told to piss off back to America. Hazzard died in 1938 during one of her own fasts.

Despite this medical scepticism, maybe Paracelsus, Linda Hazzard, the world’s religious, and the naturopath hippies were onto something. Maybe there is something beneficial about fasting. The renewed interest in fasting over the last two decades would suggest so. The juice fast, intermittent fasting, and the 5:2 diet have all become extremely popular in the Western World for weight loss, digestive cleansing, or mental revitalisation. I decided I would do a Supersize Me-esque investigation and see what the hype around fasting is all about. I didn’t eat for a couple of days and kept a record of the ordeal. 

On the morning I began my fast I woke up at 9am with butterflies in my stomach. At 1.30 the flatties cooked curry and took the piss out of me. By 5pm I felt spacey, lightheaded, and a little vacant. At 7pm I felt even weirder. My body felt drained. I sat down and could feel a pulse in my stomach. Drying myself after the shower took a fair bit of effort. I was starting to feel detached, though I wasn’t thinking about food much. By 10pm my brain was working slower; I kept starting things and forgetting what I was doing. I felt exhausted. I found a nectarine tea and freaked out when I drank it. It felt amazing in my stomach. I went to bed.

My body felt weak. I started to think about planning meals and how much I think about what I’m going to eat next. The thought of eating makes me feel slightly queasy. By 1pm my limbs were becoming tired while my body was starting to feel ghostlike. I got an espresso from a cafe and got dizzy looking at the food. My stomach felt the size of a peanut. At 4pm I was tripping over words. I had a meeting at uni with my supervisor, and spent half a minute trying to remember the word ‘diverse’. I got home, relieved, at 7pm. I felt wasted, light and happy. I skateboarded. At this point I thought I would be a staggering zombie, decrepit and messed up. 

I broke my fast with some milk and a piece of toast. It was fucking amazing. I moaned and moaned and did it all so slow. I had a shower and got out feeling like I had taken a bunch of class A drugs. I was alert, wide eyed, and energised. I ate some wraps for dinner. It was the best meal I’ve eaten all year. I played around with the food in my mouth getting semi orgasmic about everything. I couldn’t stay quiet or sit still. Even if that fast doesn’t have any immediate benefits, it all seems worth it for how fucking enjoyable that meal was.

On the most basic level, fasting aligns us with our evolutionary history and primal existence. For the 200,000 years that our species have existed on earth, our food source at times has been abundant and at times scarce. Our bodies are adapted to pack on fat and muscle when food is around and to lose it when intake dwindles. We’re genetically geared to survive periods without eating.

There is limited evidence to suggest the popular belief that fasting ‘cleanses’ or ‘purges’ the body of ‘toxins’. These kinds of words, though medically ambiguous, are prevalent in the popular discourse surrounding fasting in health magazines and dieting websites. They come from the idea that fasting allows our bodies to clean itself. But the organs in our bodies are not dirty sponges that need rinsing out. They are self-regulating.

The prevailing medical opinion is that the benefits of fasting have not yet been conclusively proven. Further study may tell us more about the health effects of fasting, although medical research is often focused on curing disease and alignments, rather than preventing them.

There is at least some information pointing to various benefits of fasting. The most compelling research on fasting is carried out by Mark Mattson, head of the National Institute on Ageing. Mattson is the most cited neuroscientist in scholarly journals worldwide. Mattson's research suggests that by intermittently fasting twice a week, we could significantly lower the risk of developing Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. Mattson explains that the brain actually benefits from being stressed. When we are hungry or exercising, our brains are primally engaged - the activities mirror those carried out in the wild. Consequently our brains create new cells. As neurons grow, the brain increases its resistance to protein plaques - abnormal clusters of protein fragments which are linked with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. 

Another physiological process associated with depriving our bodies of food is ketosis. Ketosis is a metabolic process which sees our bodies switch our main fuel source from glucose (from broken down carbohydrates) to ketone bodies. When we fast, depriving ourselves of carbohydrates, our bodies become dependant on stored glycogen in the liver as energy. When these stores run out, we begin to break down fatty acids in our body fat, creating ketones. These ketones are released into the bloodstream and used as an energy source by our body’s organs.

Ketosis is a complex, adaptive process. It is controversial as a weight loss process in dieting. Many people claim to feel clear headed and focused during ketosis. Emerging evidence has suggested that controlled ketosis could be used therapeutically to treat a range of neurological disorders including bipolar disorder, headaches, sleep disorders and brain cancer. Ketosis’s potential ability to treat such a wide range of diseases lies in the physiological and biochemical processes that occur when ketones are used by the brain as an energy source. While the initial results of studies are impressive, larger clinical studies need to be carried out before we can start ditching drugs for diet as a means to treat neurological disorders.

The potential benefits of short term fasting are a little less understood. Many people claim to feel revitalised, refreshed and renewed after fasting. I didn’t feel all that different in the days after my fast. And anyways, after really giving my body a good scare it was hard to tell anyway. Avoiding Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's isn’t really on my agenda, nor is chemotherapy. So was it worth it?

Of course it was. My fast was an adventure, a totally bizarre departure from normality. In this privileged life, most of us haven’t intentionally gone a day without eating. The next meal dictates a massive proportion of our waking lives. Not eating for a couple of days is the best way to learn about these tireless mental contemplations. 

Leaving food for a few days allows you to come back to it with a revived understanding and appreciation for it. My fast prompted me to think about the origins of our food and its production. It taught me about the various physical sensations of hunger - how much we feel we need to eat and the connection between body and mind. Now, I’m trying to eat when I feel hungry, rather than relying on clockwork habits.

My motivation to fast wasn’t spiritual or for any health reasons, but simply curiosity. Every time I set out to do it, I would come up with some petty excuse not to. Eventually it took a sleepy midnight idea and an email to Critic pitching this story to actually lock it in. While I didn’t meet God or finish the fast as a revitalised new man, it was definitely a worthwhile and intriguing experience. So although my tale of hunger and feeling like a ghost doesn’t sell the experience too well, I hope my reflections do. Try it, fast. 

This article first appeared in Issue 13, 2016.
Posted 11:25am Sunday 22nd May 2016 by Sam Fraser-Baxter.