DR BRIDELL’S logical and rational & poetic and beautiful & completely guaranteed DIET
#7: “Fasting and Slowing”
By the Mysterious Dr Bridell

Author's note: This is the seventh installment of a column that explores a new diet based on spiritual rather than physical paradigms.  It is arranged in "bite-sized chunks" that come to you each Friday and that build on each other.  The first few concepts sound deceptively simple, but require discipline and commitment (and practice) to implement—and they lay the foundation for the more enlightening and revealing concepts to come.  Your challenge as a participant is to put the principles into practice each week as they come to you.  If you missed any of the earlier columns, catch up by clicking here to go to the Bridell archives.  And remember that Dr Bridell appreciates feedback and comments as well as questions which you can send to him by clicking here

For centuries, for millennia, for ever—fasting has been associated with mental and spiritual clarity and with a cleansing and purging of the physical body.  It can also help with the development of discipline that will make the “eat-half diet” really work.

As hard as it is to divide the food on your plate and eat only half of it, it is even harder (twice as hard?) to eat none of it at all.  Periodic fasting re-calibrates your appetite, your sense of self-control, and even the size of your stomach.

In order to formulate the specific fasting challenge I want to give you, let me define the terms and the timetable.  For our purposes here, let’s define fasting as going completely without food or drink for twenty-four hours (that sounds familiar to you Mormon readers doesn’t it!)—essentially missing two meals and going from dinner on one day to dinner on the next day without eating anything in between.

I challenge you to do that once a month.  (You probably already are....but start seeing it as part of your diet as well as part of your spiritual regimen.)  Pick a day. I do it the first Sunday of every month.  You could choose the third Wednesday; it doesn’t matter (although I prefer a Sunday because it’s more likely a day when you’re not working and because of the spiritual aspects of fasting—which we will get to in a moment).

There are ten (mostly beneficial) results of this kind of a once-a-month fast:

I.     It clears out and rests your whole physical system.
II.    It focuses your mind.  You will think with new clarity about many things.
III.   It enhances your gratitude of appreciation (not just for food but for life at large).
IV.  It makes you more humble and more dependent on nature, on the earth, on God.
V.   It fine-tunes your priorities and makes you more capable of separating the things that matter from the things that really don’t.
VI.  (Being candid) It can make you feel nasty and short-tempered.
VII.  It can make you feel too weak to do anything.
VIII. It calms your mind and slows you down.
IX.   It gives you perspective as you think about and plan the month ahead.
X.    It makes Dr. Bridell’s eat-half diet seem easier.  (After fasting, eating half seems like a luxury rather than a deprivation.)

          Two negatives out of 10 isn’t bad, and numbers 6 and 7 tend to fade as you get more used to fasting. 

           Let’s focus on number 8 for a minute—partly because I like the play on words, “fasting causes slowing.”  Think of some phrases we hear often these days (maybe say often):  “If I could just slow time down a little,” “There are not enough hours in the day,” “So many tasks, so little time,” “If I could clone myself maybe I could get everything done.”  Of these frequently-heard sentiments, one of them may actually be feasible—the first one.  We will never have more hours, more time, or a second self, but it really is possible to slow time down a little.

        When we get stressed and frantic and run around madly trying to get everything done, time seems to speed up just to frustrate us more.  But sometimes, when we are calm and introspective, time seems to slow a bit and become more peaceful in its passing.  One of the best ways I know to obtain a peaceful mind is to fast.  During a fast one feels less nervous energy, less tendency to rush or to worry about detail.  It somehow becomes easier to have perspective, to see the big pictures, to focus in on what really matters.  And as this happens, time seems to slow down.  Even a slightly clearer mind and slightly slower time are well worth the little bit of hunger you’ll feel during a regular monthly fast.  As a matter of fact, the hunger itself is a good thing, too.  While you are fasting, hunger confirms that you are, at that moment, the master over your appetite for food.  Your appetite says eat.  You say no.  Hunger confirms that you won.

         A little hunger also enhances our sense of gratitude and our empathy for the third of our world who feel it all day and who go to bed feeling it every night.

        And if you are a person of spiritual inclination, fasting seems to be the perfect accompaniment to prayer, making spiritual contact with The Higher Power seems more direct and more natural.

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Remember to send your comments and feedback to Dr.Bridell@Meridianmagazine.com