Is Fasting Good or Bad An Overall Look

From a Letter to a Friend    

It seems that your pre-occupation with Fasting, especially Dry Fasting, has worked me into a similar pre-occupation with evaluating the Pros and Cons of such Fasting.  You know, while I never dry fasted, back around 10 or 14 years ago I used to do 3 to 5-day fasts.  At the time I was trying to lose weight.  You see, before that I used to be an avid amateur runner – 10ks and Marathons and all of that, but most of it was just doing the Training.  Back then I was living in a desert community that was pocketed in mountains on all sides, and many of the mountains were cross-hatched with trails, and there were detailed geo-graphical relief maps for the entire territory, and the soil was dry and sandy and so even when wet the trails didn’t become slippery, and so it was natural to train as a Trail Runner.  I was in such good condition that I could run none stop up mountains, and then down again.  Running Down a mountain is kind of like Poor Man’s Skiing – the idea is to carry as much speed as possible, so on sections where the sides of the trail rose on both sides, one could carry speed by going back forth off the trail – traversing – one would really have to be ‘in the zone’ for that kind of rough terrain fancy footwork.   But you can imagine how many calories I was burning up doing all of that.  Then I relocated to where the trails were dull and slippery, and besides, that is when my hips began to disintegrate (osteoarthritis) and so I could take much less exercise, and so I fattened up.  Fasting was a good way to lose weight fast but still be able to eat to satisfaction on none fast days.  But since then I gradually learned to be satisfied with smaller portions. Fasting no longer seemed necessary. 

When I was fasting I did notice that it was easy to become light headed.  Almost any exercise that would cause an increase in the breathing rate would cause one to get light-headed to the point where there was a real risk of going feint or swooning (losing consciousness and falling down, and then coming to only so you could count your remaining teeth).  So you would have to be careful in taking any exercise or doing any Yogic Breathing Exercises.  I have a feeling that what a lot of Yogis attribute to Fasting in regards to Spirituality is just the ‘High’ of being that close to Passing Out.

Also, I can’t believe there is much reliable science based research on Fasting (mostly because the Universities won’t fund their own Research anymore but wait for Interested Sponsors, but since Fasting can’t be bought or sold there are no Interested Sponsors who would be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for controlled studies).   So what we know about Fasting comes from people who may have either some indirect financial interest (New Age Hype) or an emotional interest (Fasting is my Last Hope).  And a lot of the Pro-Fasting Narrative may be propaganda from the Past.  You see, Fasting developed within Ascetic Communities and Monasteries and among individual Ascetics.  With the Individual Ascetics, their primary Work for each day would have been to go out Begging for Food.  Of course, they would meet with resistance and often be chased and teased by the village children.  So, there would be the tendency to ‘skip a day’ and relax, and since they needed to Save Energy, that would naturally blend into the idea of doing Still Meditation (all this stuff works together, you will notice).  Also, if one eats regularly every day, then one will look well fed, which makes it harder to get food from begging.  I myself often encounter Homeless People who are holding up signs that solicit for money, and I have a natural tendency to scoff at any homeless person who is fatter than I am,  since it looks as though they are actually thriving on it.  But I dig into my wallet when I see somebody who was careful enough to cultivate that “skin and bones” look.  So, the Individual Ascetics may have actually been fasting in order to create the right “look” for themselves – the ‘Look’ of an Ascetic.  Who would give money or food to anybody who did not ‘look’ the part they were playing?  Even their own self esteem would require that Lean and Hungry Look, as it might be the only thing they ever manage to accomplish in the ‘Spiritual Realm’.   

Then we come to the Ascetic Communities and the Monastic Institutions.  Anytime we have a number of people gathered together it is likely that eventually Somebody will take charge.  Especially this is true of the Monastic Institutions.  In many Societies the Monasteries, whether they at first wanted to or not, became the dumping ground for Illegitimate Babies (a young maiden would have an ‘accident’ with the stable boy and it would be decided to keep her under wraps until her baby arrived and then she could go back to being a Virgin again, but something would have to be done with the baby.  Poorer people would simply ‘nose pinch’ it and toss the body into the river, but well to do people would find placing the baby in a monastery with a modest endowment would be less traumatizing for the young girl involved).  So many Monasteries turned into Warehouses for people.  In these times and economies the Orphans were orphans for life – without extended family connections there would be nowhere to go and nothing to do.  The Cities were as yet not the dumping grounds for extraneous Humanity that they have become in our Era, and vagabonds would likely be enslaved.  So child Orphans would become Adult Monks and Nuns.  This also applies to many of the Monastic Institutions across Asia.   Well, the Administrators of these Monastery Orphanages were necessarily on tight budgets.  And food must have been one of the scarcities.  So of course it would be discovered that people could actually go for days at a time without food without it killing them right there and then.  And then, if these Inmates were perpetually malnourished, then they would endeavor to save their energy, whereby they would make much less trouble.  Again, we would have the development of Still Mediation, which must have started as just staring at the walls in a state of blank lethargy, but from that it evolved into being a positive Virtue, much like it’s original cause – the Fasting.

Yes, of course Fasting was not honestly presented as a Fiscal Necessity (or a Fiscal Convenience for Administers who might have thought of skimming the savings into their own pockets).  The Narrative was created that supposed that Fasting had Spiritual Benefits.  That Narrative has since been adjusted to fit with Today’s more secular thinking by saying that Malnutrition is somehow the Healthy Choice.  But that is easy enough to refute.   We can suspect that the historical Slave Owners and the Early Industrial Factory Owners experimented with Money Saving Fasting but it obviously proved to be detrimental to their “Human Capital” and so feeding schedules were set up to maximize productive potential and longevity in their ‘assets’.   That meant that Slaves and Workers were assured of eating several times day.  So it seems that the only Interested Groups in History that think that Fasting is good are those who are in the business of warehousing people from cradle to the grave, and who would actually tally up benefits if the Life Expectancy of their charges could be significantly reduced.

Oh, but, yes, apparently there is some anecdotal ‘evidence’ that Fasting can be “cleansing”, particularly ‘Dry’ Fasting where water is withheld.  Dry Fasting is obviously a fad of new creation.   Water has never historically had the price or scarcity of Food and so there could not possibly have been any interested incentive for making people unnecessarily thirsty.   But I have heard it said that depriving the body of water somehow reduces Inflammation.  Now it makes me wonder whether this reduction in the Body’s tendency towards Inflammation isn’t what is meant by the vague term “cleansing” or appearing to have been “cleansed”.  Well, Inflammation is not necessarily a Bad Thing.  Indeed, Inflammation has its beneficial purposes.  Inflammations fight off the vectors of Disease, and often inflammations at imperceptible levels will swoop in and destroy nascent Cancer Cells – as soon as a Cell’s chromosome structure distorts enough to make it appear to be more Foe than Friend, then an Inflammation will set upon it like a pack of hounds and destroy it, accompanied by only the slightest of fevers.  Oh, and I read of studies that said that people who go six years without complaining of getting the Cold or the Flu are twice as likely to come down with a Cancer.  So it seems paradoxically that Only Healthy People Get Sick!  The Body has to have Healthy Reserves in order to retain a Working Immune System that is capable of putting up Intense Fights every now and then.  They used to say that one of the first Symptoms of AIDS (an immune deficiency disease) would be a long spell of extraordinary ‘Good Health’, and only when Foreign Pathogens had made severe and unchallenged inroads into the Body would the ‘Illness’ begin to show, but still with no ‘Fever’.  The Patients would die from being too Healthy.

Also, of course there have been no studies about this, but when we just think about it, haven’t a great many of the Ascetic Saints died of Cancer.  Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna, Sai Baba of Shirdi.  But yes, the Fat Spoiled Predator Gurus (the Smirking Buddhas!) are mostly smitten with Diabetes (There is a God!).

Now, particularly about Dry Fasts, well, the Kidneys tend to clog if there is no positive fluid flow through them, and these ‘clogs’ constitute ‘damage’ and more times than not I have heard the doctors say that “Kidney Damage is Irreversible”.   Of course I am not a Doctor, but we only have to look around to see how relatively common it is for people to somehow end up on Dialysis Machines for the rest if their lives.  But even if you do not outright blow out a kidney or two, there is the real danger that by restricting your fluids that you will be inviting Kidney Stones, which I have heard is the closest thing to the pains of Giving Birth that a man can experience, but then Kidney Stones don’t come with any much awaited happy ending… except for the relief to be back to the same normal condition they were at before they stopped drinking enough water.