Why I started fasting

For a long time, I have been interested in the physical capabilities of the human body as well as the spiritual. There are many crossovers to be found within the physical and spiritual realms and this has lead me to pursue spiritual 'technologies' as a means of improving physical performance.

This particular blog is focussed on fasting, although there may be others in the future that address other areas that I am interested in.

The first reference to fasting I remember reading was a book by T. Lobsang Rampa and concerned how his spiritual abilities became heightened when he fasted (I would have been around 8 or 9 at that point). That sparked an interest, which led me to pay more attention to fasting when I would encounter it in other sources: the bible, Hindu texts, turn of the century alternate health regimes etc.

For about 12 years I lived in the US, and enjoyed all of the wonderful cuisines and foods available which led to a point where I became very overweight. As most of the weight was accumulated gradually, it finally took a big aha moment (which happened when I returned to the UK on a vacation and heard various shocked comments about how large I was) to provide the impetus for me to do something about it,

The first thing I did was to start cutting down on junk food, and start exercising, but I also noticed that cravings were quite strong, so I needed to come up with a mechanism to address this. After lots of googling and reading, I finally decided that perhaps fasting would help - even if it only reduced my caloritic intake.

As my motiviation at this point was very high I decided to start with a daily fast, I chose Mondays, and would eat normally Tuesday to Sunday, and then just not eat on Mondays. Initially I suffered quite a lot with hunger pangs, cravings etc but I focussed on the change that I wanted to see (this is an example of positive motivation which helps build a lasting improvment - versus negative motivation such as no you cant eat that you big fat pig etc) and as the duration was relatively small I was able to get through the day.

On this subject, I find distraction to be a very useful method when fasting, and I will refer to this in a later post.

I continued this daily fasting for about 6 months, and then had to attend a business meeting out of town which included a business luncheon, rather than making a big deal out of not eating, I decided to eat with everyone else, and that act broke that particular cycle of fasting for a while.

Since then, I have fasted off and on for various lengths of time and for various reasons, some of which I will go into in later posts. For me having those previous successful fasting periods makes it much easier when I decide to start again - this is another reason that its very beneficial to always end a fast feeling like you could have gone longer. Success really does breed success.