PROLOGUE: FASTING TO FIND YOUR BEST SELF
Almost everyone has some form of physical or psychological addiction to food. Maybe yours is candy. Maybe it’s beer. Maybe it’s bread and cheese; gluten and milk protein are both highly addictive. Or perhaps you’re hooked on potatoes. Do you find it impossible to imagine life without French fries? I’ve been there.
The point is, addictions and cravings are built into us, even if you’ve never had a problem with your weight. They are easily activated, and there is a trillion-dollar food industry—what I call Big Food—that is specifically designed to do just that. When you’re bored, you eat. When you’re feeling stressed, you eat.
Without being aware of it, I believed that even a single day without eating could leave me helplessly out of energy, which made me a prisoner to food. Going four days without food seemed a biological impossibility. This is how almost everyone in today’s society thinks. You can bet that if you ask ten people what would happen to them if they didn’t eat for a day or two, nine of them will say, “I’d starve.” They even believe those words.
There’s a fundamental difference between hunger and craving. Hunger is a biological message, and it is something that you can control. Craving is a psychological need, and it is something that tries to control you. The truth is, you can go a long time without eating, and you won’t suffer for it. In fact, you will thrive.
Fasting is a tool kit that helps you unlock biological resources hidden in your body, resources you probably never knew you had. Fasting can make you stronger and healthier, both physically and psychologically, by breaking you out of your food prison. It will free you from the burden of other people’s opinions about how you should feel and even of how your body is telling you to feel. Ultimately, it will help you live your best life—to be your best self, putting the most out into the world.
You can break away from the visceral feeling that if you skip a meal, or even several meals, you will be in danger—that you will be weak and miserable, unable to go on. You can overcome the feelings of fear, discomfort, starvation, terror, and loneliness, and replace them with liberation, power, and self-control.
Training yourself to confront your anxieties (about food or other things) and master them may be the greatest fasting benefit of all.
Fasting doesn’t need to be painful. It doesn’t need to be hard. It’s actually one of the most natural things you can do, because it is something that our species has naturally evolved to do. Fasting is a fundamental part of being human.
Intermittent fasting will set you free from hunger and all of the emotional baggage that comes with it.
Intermittent fasting enables you to put the amygdala and the whole reptilian part of your brain in its place, so that you can be more fully human, more fully yourself, less burned by your fears. When you start out, you might feel uncomfortable for a day or two. Then you will feel liberated.
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