It’s Wednesday, late afternoon. I haven’t consumed a calorie nor checked my mobile device since Sunday night. I am nearing the end of a 3 day fasting period. I’m doing two fasts at once – no food, and no phone. I’ve done these fasts separately before, but never at the same time. I’ve also never fasted from food for quite this long before. I had done a 60 hour fast before — that’s dinner to breakfast with 2 full days between. This time it will be 72 hours dinner to dinner. I’m about 70 hours in as I write this, and I am very much looking forward to dinner tonight.
I shared online that I was doing this fast and got a few questions to which I responded. Then my friend Phil said he was excited to hear my reflections, so I figured I should write down some reflections. Here goes nothing.
The most important thing I think I have to say about fasting is that I have done a few day+ food fasts in the past and I have always found them to be well worthwhile. As for why, I’m not exactly sure – it’s a combination of things I guess. It provides a nice reset on your diet. It can break any bad eating habits you may have accumulated and allow you to more intentionally start some new ones if you’d like. You can lose some weight pretty quickly, even though you might quickly gain half of it back. You can focus on hydration and develop better habits around drinking sufficient water through the day. Nothing makes me drink more water than when it is the only thing that I am allowed to consume.
Fasting from food for more than a day or two reminds me how it feels to be truly hungry, in a literal sense, but I also think this translates in a figurative sense as well. A lot of people don’t really know what they want a lot of the time, myself included. It may be because they don’t have any strong wants at the time, and that’s fine. Arguably, that’s great — it means you have everything you want. But you can refresh your memory on what it feels like to really want something by starving yourself for a couple of days. By the end, you will really want some food.
By default, a fast provides a change of pace from your typical day-to-day. That, in and of itself, is valuable. People can get a little too caught up in routines. Routines can be great, but once in a while, you might like to change things up a bit. Removing food and/or your phone from your day will force some changes, at least for how you live those days, at least in a couple of ways. Even if there are no secondary impacts, which there probably will be, I did not eat or go on my phone for the last few days. Typically I eat 2-3 times per day and check my phone countless times, spending hours on it. So these days were different. Compared to all the rest of my days in the last several years, these days were outliers. It’s good to experience outliers. And it’s good to step out of your typical day-to-day. It gives you some perspective on things. It allows you to see things with fresh eyes. At least, it does for me. Traveling is another thing that can do that. You may have had the experience of coming home from some travel and seeing things differently in your day-to-day life. It’s a similar phenomenon I think, resulting from the change of scenery, perhaps a change in culture, and the general difference in your days while you were away. I believe change for the sake of change can be valuable. Even intrinsically neutral changes can be positive.
Previously, when I’ve fasted from food, I’ve felt a sense of euphoria for some time. I did not really experience that this time, but it’s happened multiple times before. At a certain point, it feels like your body is really running clean. That has been the case this time. It makes me feel as though food is a burden on your body, and not having to deal with it, your body can really take out the trash. I believe there’s some science for this.
On the other hand, you might have low energy at times if you fast for a while. I only walked for exercise over the last few days but I walked a decent amount for about 90 minutes per day on average. I know that lifting makes me hungrier so I didn’t want to do that, and running to some degree does the same. I didn’t want to make 3 days of not eating harder than it was going to be already. Besides curtailing my usual exercise a bit, my energy for the purpose of working and reading and writing and whatever else I’ve been doing has been perfectly fine. My ability to focus has probably been better than normal, likely from the no phone.
I wrote more about doing a phone fast here but the main takeaways for me were two-fold. First, the day goes by slower. The first day felt a lot slower, but the next two as well. That is a great thing in my book. I would love for life to feel like it is going by slower. If you can make your perception of time slower, you can basically live longer. You might live 20 years less than someone else, but it could feel like twice as long. After a while, I suspect the perceived lengthening of my days by going phone-free would normalize, but more tangibly speaking, it is also saving me hours and hours of time spent on the thing, a lot of which I don’t think is well spent.
Second, I don’t miss it much — my phone, that is. I don’t think I’ll use it tonight, even though I could, and I once again plan to re-examine my use of my phone, deleting my social apps from it, perhaps trying to use it much less often for specific scenarios that involve leaving my place, and maybe also implementing the digital sabbath-like 24 hour no phone period over some stretch of the weekend which I’ve considered doing consistently for probably 7 years now but have only actually done for a few weekends in that time.
Another thing I’ll say on fasting is I think it is nice to do it at an inflection point. It’s good if you have the freedom and control over your time during those days to not have to do anything else, and to be able to do whatever else you want, or nothing. Fasting lends itself well to doing some deep thinking about some of the important things in life, if you want, but I wouldn’t go into the fast with an expectation that you have to do that. It’s good to make the fast itself the only expectation for those days, again, if you can. That makes it as easy as possible. If that’s your only expectation, then all you have to do is not do one or two things —in this case, consume any calories or go on your phone.
I should note that this was the first no food fast where instead of just drinking tap water I had a bottle of topo chico sparkling water everyday. I am generally not one to ask for sparkling when the waiter asks what kind of water you want at a nice restaurant, but it did provide a decent treat each day around dinner time. Next time I would try one of those flavored ones that still has zero calories like a Le Croix. Compared to water, anything sparkling with flavor is pretty exciting.
Lastly, I should have mentioned earlier but fasting is also a great exercise in discipline. And it’s relatively easy because it doesn’t involve doing anything, just not doing something. It’s a lot easier to not do something than to do something because not doing it is technically the default. So if you want to practice discipline, try not doing something. Try fasting – from food, from your phone, from anything that comes to mind. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck. It’s just about dinner time for me.
