A Memoir · Eight Years · 16 to 24 hours
This is an explanation and a thought process — eight years of intermittent fasting and how it became the focal point of a lifestyle. Fasting has impacted three areas of my well-being: mind, body, and spirit. It has done things for me that no medication, no diet, and no fitness plan ever has.
A quiet that medication never delivered. Thought moves differently when the fork is down — cleaner, straighter, less crowded by craving.
Consistent energy. Small cuts closing faster out in the lumber yard. Skin clearing. The day stops feeling like a climb up from lunch.
Church taught me restraint has a shape. Fasting gave that shape hours, weight, and a discipline I could carry through a Tuesday.
It began because I was working in the Menards lumber yard one morning, stocking fresh oak that had just been delivered. Around six a.m. I felt a sharp pain in my jaw, and within minutes a headache like I had never felt before. Both sides of my lower jaw throbbed so hard I could hardly keep my eyes open. Turns out both of my bottom wisdom teeth were simultaneously digging into my jawbone and rubbing against nerves.
What should have been a single surgery stretched into three. Each visit, the swelling won. By the time it was over I had spent about six weeks on soup and mashed potatoes — effectively one meal a day — and I was losing weight relatively quickly. Not knowing the science, I assumed I was burning more than I was putting in. But the real question was quieter: is this good for me? Is eating once a day okay?
The rest of this book is my experience on why that question was answered with an astounding yes.
Marginalia · §4
In 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his work on autophagy — from the Greek, “self-eating.” Somewhere around the 16 to 24 hour mark of a fast, your cells begin to identify damaged, dysfunctional, and dead material and recycle it for fuel.
No pill does that. No supplement does that. No diet plan I had ever heard of does that. The answer was already inside me — I just had to get out of the way and let the body work.
“When the body is not focused on digesting hundreds of calories every few hours, it has the time and the energy to work on everything else going on inside you.”
— from the manuscript, p. 14