My 400 Hour Lent Fast
And the Occult Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Cleansing
April 29th, 2026
That self-righteous and inappropriate photo of me in my underwear doing a Jesus pose was taken on Thursday March 12th, just before I broke a 400 hour water fast, which amounts to just under 17 full days. I weighed about 160 lbs at the time, down from my normal weight of 175. In addition, I had slept very poorly that night, I felt like death, I had hardly enough energy to climb out on those rocks, and, despite being in the sun, with no wind, and the air temperature being in the mid 60's that morning, I was freezing cold. In other words, fasting sucks.
Not eating sucks. Not eating for over 2 weeks really sucks. It's a marathon of suffering. Why? What's the point? Why would anyone do this? I'm not totally sure. But, having done various forms of fasting for several years, and longer ones like these most recently, I suspect that the reason for doing a fast has something to do with that Romans 12:2 quote by St. Paul underneath my photo (even though he wasn't specifically referring to fasting).
FASTING IN MODERN TIMES
Fasting is not much of a common practice nowadays. In fact, most people are doing the opposite of fasting, which is snacking. Snacks are probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to humanity. It's more than just frivolous indulgence - it's a cult.
We are all initiated into the snacking cult (as I was) by misguided parents and educators, who are under the impression that kids need to eat all day, grazing like cattle, as if they have four stomachs, on refined grains, out of season and geographically foreign fruit, and even more unnatural forms of glucose-based and nutrient deficient "food", having no sense of the digestive stress that it puts on the body, or the physiological and psychological dependency that they are encouraging, oblivious to the simple connection to the pervasive adult and child obesity problem, among other obvious and easily curable ailments impacting modern humans, and ultimately think depriving kids of snacks is cruel, unable to reconcile compassion with discipline. We do this because we're snackers too. Our parents are snackers, we're snackers, and so now our kids are snackers. It's a tasty, but vicious, cycle.
Not that I fully blame schools and parents for our blood-sugar spiking obsession. The high priests of the snacks cult, who are the people of the greatest influence in health, science, and media, and who are all working, in concert, to undermine our physical and spiritual fortitude, deserve most of the credit for this. They have conditioned us with little cartoons who advertise the snacks, for any of us who grew up watching television, which is pretty much all of us by now, that work on us subliminally in this manner: "Eating is fun!" and "Indulge! Indulge! Indulge!" And, as far as I can tell, the conditioning works.
The weakest among us succumb to gluttony, unable to resist the temptation of the cheapest and most easily accessible empty calories in the history of mankind. But, the rest of us are just as obsessed with food. So much so that we feel compelled to regularly take photos of our food and mass distribute them to everyone that we know, or have ever known, just to let them know what food we are eating. Even for those of us who are more health-conscious, and who are willing to make a more disciplined effort, we're just as snack happy as the slobs and the mindless indulgers. Our snacks have been re-branded as "energy" bars and "energy" drinks, which prevent us from running out of the "energy" that we need to lift whatever amount of weight, for however many reps, that we think we need to do at our gym workouts in order to be healthy, which we aren't. In fact, whatever the rectangularly coagulated frankenstein monster food that we just crammed down our pie hole, pulling into the parking lot of 24 hour fitness, and washed down with a lab-made protein powder concoction, before radiating our heads with air pods and our genitals with our 5G phones, under artificial lighting, at 10 pm, doing the same routine movements with no practical or meaningful or functional application to our life, is just going to cause digestive distress, rundown our liver, deflate our souls, and overall subvert our vitality boosting efforts.
The result of all of this snack conditioning is that, even though we are some of the fattest people to ever exist, as well as some of the most body-conscious, vanity motivated people to ever exist, across the board, we're afraid of running out of food. Therefore, almost anywhere you go now, there are snacks. People won't even leave the house without a snack, unless they know that the place they are going has snacks, which they normally do. But, before I get totally sidetracked, and make this article one giant rant on snack culture, it suffices to say that, in modern times, we like to eat, and we don't fast. This is a problem, for several reasons. But, the most obvious one is our physical well-being. That is, snacking is not good for us, which should be obvious, but isn't. Fortunately, some alternative health-minded people have recognized harmful effects of our historically unprecedented eating frequency, and are campaigning for a more disciplined approached. Thanks to them, there has been a small renewed interest in fasting.
THE RISE OF BIO-HACKER FASTING
"Intermittent fasting" has become a popular health practice in bio-hacker circles. Bio-hackers are like the modern day fountain of youth seekers, trying to figure out how to optimize their biological functions in the modern world, where we are at a disadvantage in many ways, but can rely on modern science and technology to still make it work, i.e. "hack it". These people often reject the conventional health advice and modern health-care system, which I appreciate, and they sometimes come up with some pretty good ideas, such as this one.
Grounded in anthropology and biological evolution, which I have some issues with but still concur with the conclusions thereof, bio-hackers argue that the human body is not well-equipped to eat all throughout the day. In fact, it's quite unnatural. The reason being is that, before refrigerators, grocery stores, indoor lighting, electricity, and other modern kitchen appliances, it was highly unlikely that any human was eating before 10 am or after 6 pm, for most of the year. For that reason, as well as how impressively dismal the results of not doing this have been, they argue how it is probably best for us to do as our ancestors did, and eat only in 6-8 hour windows for each given 24 hour period, or even skipping entire days of eating, up to several days at a time, which may have been common as well due to periodic food scarcity. Doing so will give the digestive system a rest, and allow the body to divert energy elsewhere, especially to cellular cleansing efforts. The result is that you will live longer, and that many of the common diseases afflicting modern society will not or no longer afflict you.
It all sounds pretty good! At least it did so to me. In fact, at the time I first learned of this, which was when I had more of the bio-hacking sensibilities, like 100% so, intermittent fasting made so much sense to me that, having gone my whole life eating three meals per day, with snacks and dessert in between and afterwards, I cut all that down to two meals per day, overnight, cold-turkey, and have never gone back. In other words, I started fasting.
MY PREVIOUS FASTING EXPERIENCE
I started intermittent fasting sometime in 2019, eating in 8 hour windows, which I still basically do, i.e. two meals per day. While adjusting to two meals per day was uncomfortable at first, I no longer consider intermittent fasting to be "fasting". Rather, I just consider it to be "not snacking," because after figuring out how to incorporate liberal amounts of beef fat and organs into meals, in my experience, there is hardly a need for three meals per day, and especially snacks, in order to adequately fuel a human body for it's daily activities. Of course, there are exceptions if you are a baby, pregnant, breastfeeding, have just lost a lot of blood, or cannot eat much food in one sitting due to old age, infirmity, or infancy. In which case, three meals is best, with minimal or, ideally, no snacking.
In addition to intermittent non-fasting, I have done some actual fasting as well. I have, many times, fasted for 24 hours, which I think is the minimum time to qualify for an actual water fast. I don't want to sound like a fasting snob here, but given that sunset to sunset is a common across traditional religious fasts, I think it's a valid definition. Anyway, I would do 24 hours fasts when the seasons changed, during travel days in order to avoid eating restaurant or take-out food, which is almost always cooked in toxic seed oils and made with other common low dose poison ingredients, as well as some random days here and there. At one point early on when I started messing around with intermittent fasting, I even tried one meal per day for about a month-long stretch.
I, of course, did all of this intermittent and day fasting for the ketosis, autophagy, and all of the bio-hacking jazzy terms that are supposedly the whole benefit of fasting. I thought this was sufficient to produce optimal health results, which I was hoping would be mostly hair-related, of course. Therefore, I strictly adhered to a 16 hour fasting period each day, during my first 5 years of fasting. So much so that, if I finished eating at 8:18 P.M. the night before, then I wouldn't have a morsel of food until 12:18 P.M. the next day.
I could push my eating window out to 18 hours, and even up to 24, but that was pretty much the extent of my fasting mettle. While theoretically I was interested in doing longer fasts, as well as had learned of accounts of others doing them, even people who I knew, who routinely did multi-day fasts, I never did more than a 36 hour fast, which I did once and hated. It was torture. However, having never gotten the health, or hair, results that I was hoping for from short and frequent fasts, I started to think about those long fasts a little more, and I started thinking about Lent.
MY PREVIOUS CATHOLIC EXPERIENCE
I grew up Catholic, or at least going to Catholic school and attending Catholic mass. However, despite doing so, I never considered myself to be religious. In fact, even though I was a Christian, although Catholics are generally the least religious of all the Christians, I always thought Christian people were weird. I still kind of do. The way that they talk about God and Jesus to me was weird. I didn't dislike it. It didn't make me uncomfortable. Rather, I just thought it was weird.
I was not opposed to being religious, though. I would have ideally liked to have been religious. I would have liked to have been interested in the Bible. However, during the late afternoons at St. Patrick's, when we had our religious studies period, my attention would invariably shift from the Bible story or lesson of the day, to seeing how many pages deep into my workbook the impression of me jamming my pencil into it would go. Furthermore, while my family did attend Catholic church services almost every Sunday, I would pretty much just watch the clock for the entire hour, in painstaking anticipation of being free to go play outside with my friends, who were also imprisoned in this so-called "mass." But, even though I was not the best Catholic, or maybe just a typical Catholic, I was still aware that each year there was this thing called "Lent" that happened.
Lent is a 40 day period, which starts in the late winter and runs through the early spring, when Catholics traditionally refrain from eating substantiating foods, like dairy and meat, in reverence of Jesus's 40 day fast, which he did before overcoming his famous "last temptation" by the devil in the wilderness. Catholics are supposed to fast from Monday through Saturday, which can take on various forms. Catholics can either not eat, eat only after 3 pm, eat only after sunset, and/or only eat vegan meals. The practice became more lenient over time, permitting the eating of non-milking animals, fish in particular, as subsequent popes adjusted the rules to suit their arbitrary dietary needs and preferences, as well as not discourage people from being Catholic. In any case, the fast ends on Good Friday, after a total of 40 "fasting" days have been observed. Then, the holiday culminates with Easter Sunday, which commemorates Jesus rising from the dead, three days after dying on the cross.
Despite being in Catholic school and Catholic mass during Lent, I never had much of an interest in Lent, nor was I aware of anyone seriously observing it. In fact, I didn't even know it was a fasting holiday. As much as I remember, nobody fasted, nobody ate vegan meals, and nobody made any special effort to eat fish. Rather, all I remember is that we were told that we supposed to give up one thing for the 40 days. Most people would give up chocolate or candy, i.e. something we probably shouldn't have been eating anyway, if they actually tried, and probably very few of them actually did it for the whole 40 days. I know I never did.
So, growing up, my overall impression of Lent was that, once per year, we all made a half-hearted attempt to subject ourselves to a trivial inconvenience, before the bunny came on Easter and dropped us off basket full of junk food in honor of Jesus rising from the dead. Then, after 5th grade, my family moved us to California from New York, which resulted in me not going to Catholic school anymore, my dad preferring to take advantage of the much better and more consistent California surf on Sunday mornings, rather than attending church service, and I never gave Lent much thought for decades to follow. That is, until I started fasting and actually reading the Bible.
LONG-FASTING BIBLE INSPIRATION
Having become disillusioned with modern science more and more, and having exhausted most of the bio-hacker stuff without amazing results, I began to seek out ancient wisdom for health guidance. While I had dismissed the Bible years earlier as a relic of an ignorant time, I started to get the impression that it wasn't so ignorant. While I used to believe that the Bible was a fantasy and science was the truth, now I pretty much believed the exact opposite (read the Heliocentrism: And the Fundamental Distrust in our Senses blog article for more on this subject). As a result, I started thinking about my health on a much deeper level, beyond the supposed autophagy and insulin resistance stuff I got from the internet bio-hacking echo-chamber. Lent, fasting, Jesus, Easter, the resurrection, and all the Catholic education that I dismissed long ago began to intrigue me on my health quest. And I started thinking about some questions:
Why did Jesus do a 40 day fast? Why is this accounted for in all four Gospels? Why is this paired with the overcoming of temptation by the devil? Why did Jesus start his ministry only AFTER this fast? Why, of all of the miraculous things that Jesus famously did, NONE of it happened BEFORE the fast? And why FORTY days? Why does that number come up in the Bible frequently? Why do Catholics fast starting 40 days (excluding Sundays) before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox? What's special about this time of year? Why is it that if they eat during this time, then it's vegetarian? How do people fast in other religions? What do they do? When do they do it?
Assuming that the accounts of Jesus were true, or at least more true than anything that science has come up with in last 150 years, and fascinated by the potential answers to these questions, I've done a few long fasts in the past year. Having never gone more than 36 hours without food, I did a 7 day fast last during last year's Lent. Then, part inspired by some fasting scripture that I came across in Isaiah 58, having finally read that far into the Bible, I did an 8 day fast at the beginning of November, and then a 10 day one after Thanksgiving. This all lead up to the 400 hour fast this Lent. And based on all of this fasting experience, I think I may some answers to those questions.
The ALCHEMY of the CATHOLIC LENT FAST
In modern Catholicism, nobody knows what's going on. There's an astrological wisdom underlying all of the traditions and practices, which all of us regular Catholics are oblivious too. For example, nobody knows why Jesus's birthday is on December 25th, three days after the winter solstice, when the sun rises again in the sky, and nobody knows why we celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, or even why it's called "Easter". Rather, understanding is reserved for the elite members of the church, or for those who seek out the esoteric knowledge that has been preserved more explicitly in cross-cultural spiritual disciplines, and happen to access it.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, unlike modern Catholicism, ancient wisdom has been preserved and passed down in a way to help us to practically apply it, and perhaps even understand why we do all this astrological-based worship in our own religions. In this philosophy, there are five seasons that the Earth goes through each year: birth (spring), growth (summer), harvest (late summer), decay (fall), and death (winter). Furthermore, this is the natural energy cycle which everything on the Earth goes through each year, including us, as well as each day, each moon cycle, and even over the course of our lifetime. Since all of life is constantly within a flux of multiple layers of this basic energy cycle, then this a pretty important thing to be aware of. It can either work for us or against us.
As we pass through the annual energy cycle, the changing of the seasons affects our mood, energy levels, behavior, and biological functions, whether we acknowledge that or not. For example, we are naturally more inclined to rest in the winter and to do more reflection (as in "new years resolutions") as the energy consolidates inward. Then, we feel more spontaneous, energetic, and care-free in the summer, as the energy expands out. Unfortunately, indoor lighting year round, gym memberships, unchanging work schedules, and grocery stores packed with tropical fruits and every type of produce year-round, interfere with our conscious connection with the change in seasons. Now it can be summer all year long! This is a problem. We need to go through winter. We need to go through the death part of the cycle every year. The Catholics, like the ancient Chinese, understood that value of the seasons, especially the winter, which is why they start their fast then.
Our month "February" has a weird name. What the hell does that mean? It comes from the Latin word "Februa", which means "to purify." It's also where we get our word "fever", which is the body's method of purification to help us recover from being sick, or at least that's what the prevailing wisdom was before the catastrophe of Germ Theory deluded our understanding of the underlying cause of illness (read the Why the Cure for the Common Cold would Kill You blog article for more on this subject). Anyway, February was the last month in the Roman calendar, as in Roman Catholic, i.e. the people who start fasting in February, which includes the weeks leading up to the spring equinox. During this old month of "February", Fat Tuesday always fell, and the Lent fast commenced. Why? What's special about February?
Winter is the season of death, which is not a bad thing. Rather, death serves a purpose. In a purification process, something, old, stagnant, and noxious has to be filtered out so that what remains is only the good stuff. Winter is the Earth's big purification time. All of the old decaying stuff dies off, which comes in the form of old animals dying, trees shedding their leaves, and plants preserving all of their life energy in a seed before decomposing into the soil. In this manner, all of the old energy gets recycled and repurposed into fueling new life in the spring. If there is no death, then there is no new energy for the year. That's bad for the Earth, and that's bad for us. It's not sustainable. We need to get rid of our dead energy each year too.
Fasting is like death. In fact, after so many days of doing it, the body starts to wither away, and we actually inch closer to death, physically. However, while the body gets weaker, the mind does not. In fact, it's strengthened. Rather, what is actually "dying" during this process is not you, but the lowest form of you, which is the you that is attached to all of your physical body needs. This death of the lower self, is the effect that I believe the Catholics were going for.
Hunger is our most base desire, and is what preoccupies the thoughts of our base self. It's our animal instinct for self preservation, the desire to live. It's natural, however antithetical to the goals of our higher self, which exalts self sacrifice. This is probably why the Jesus dying for our sins event is tied into the Lent holiday. By sacrificing our physical body through intentional starvation, we can detach the mind from its preoccupation with our base needs, our survival needs, which causes self-centeredness, anger, fear, and other dead spiritual weight. The mind can then be more free to reflect on how these selfish, albeit necessary, motives might be distracting us from fulfilling a higher purpose. This could include things like being stuck in a routine, doing meaningless work, being too busy to spend time with our friends and family, and otherwise ignoring the guidance of our heart, which is yearning for us to express our true self. The deeper the fast, the deeper the suffering, the deeper the death of our attachment to our physical life, and the deeper the reflection on what actually matters, and the more of our lower self, and all of that stale noxious energy, can die off to fuel the birth of a purer form of us, more focused on the ideals of the higher self.
So, what I think that Catholics were trying to do was synchronize their spiritual cleansing efforts with the natural energy transition from death to birth, winter to spring. They timed their sacrifice to start in the winter in order to go a deep as possible into the death phase, internally, and kill off as much lower self, as much old selfish noxious dead spiritual weight as they can, while everything old around them is dying as well. Then, by the time the spring equinox hit, when all of the flowers were blooming, and life was being reborn on the earth, the higher self that has been incubated with all that intentional suffering can burst out and be energized by all of the new life being born around it. It's an astrological amplification of the intended effect of fasting, which is spiritual renewal, by means of detachment to the physical world. Then, of course, there is the matter of the 40 days.
The number 40 comes up so frequently in the Bible, that it must be some sort of spiritual benchmark. Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Christian theologian, writer, and mystic from the 18th century, who noted how 40 comes up in Bible in the context of (1) a trial of some sort, (2) to signify completion of instruction, or (3) devastation or purging of evil. All three of those could apply to the challenge of a fast, and ultimate effect thereof.
Jesus may have been the "son of God", but he came in the flesh, and so He still had to contend with earthly desires. That is, he had a lower self. This lower self is a factor. In fact, gods struggled to contend with this lower self in "mythological" accounts. For example, there are many Greek and Egyptian legends of gods that involve sexuality, lust, demise by lust, and even them sexually pursuing human women. It's even in the Bible:
Gods having sex with human women? In the Bible? Yep. Gods can be tempted too. So, I think, just like all of us, fittingly, Jesus had to subjugate his lower self in order to exalt the spirit self. This is what gave Jesus all of his Jesus powers.
There are no accounts of Jesus performing any healing miracles BEFORE the 40 day fast and temptation, nor had He yet to go around stirring up all that trouble, pissing off mobs of sinners and the powerful people who would threaten to kill him, and eventually do so. So, based on this, I suspect that in order for Jesus to access the full extent of his "godly" powers, and righteousness, he had to do that 40 day fast. Meaning, it wasn't being a god incarnated in flesh that gave Jesus his godly abilities, but rather gaining complete mental control over the flesh, which takes the will of God, such as in completing a 40 day water fast, while resisting all temptation. Therefore, even though we are not gods, this actually might be something that we can do too. But, for what reason?
My REASON for FASTING
I'm a jerk. I'm a selfish jerk. It's not totally my fault, though. We're all jerks. We're all flawed. That's how it's supposed to be. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. The Earth is a place where we have been put to learn how to not be jerks. That is, we are here to work on ourselves. And to make things more challenging, we have been given these animal bodies, which make us fearful and fill us with selfish desires. This was the gift of the Lucifer, the god of trickery, mischief, and desire, and the serpent in the Garden Eden, who coiled around the spinal symbolism of the Tree of Knowledge and endowed to us our animal form to conflict us with the instinct for self-preservation, a necessary evil to facilitate our spiritual evolution. It is because of this instinct for self-preservation that makes it so difficult for us to stay focused on "the will of God", as St. Paul refers to it in the Romans 12:2 page quote.
The "will of God" are the higher ideals of the cosmological order of this world. This is, in essence, to put another's suffering ahead of your own. Ideally, we would all like to do this. We probably all agree that this is a good thing to do. However, it can be difficult to keep this is mind when we suffer greatly, ourselves. For example, we're hungry. We need food every day. Otherwise, we feel very uncomfortable, and eventually die. And it's not so easy to find food on the Earth. Rather, we have to work for our food. We have to toil in the fields all day just to get food. Then, we're expected to just give it away to someone who didn't help us get the food? Under the circumstances, we're not so inclined to share our scarce and difficult to acquire food, which we need to not die, with some stranger who didn't help us get it. But that's exactly what we are expected to do.
I am not very good at this. Not many people are. So, really, it's pretty normal to be a jerk. Some people are more of a jerk than others, of course. And I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I'm a normal jerk. But, despite where I would stack up in a giant jerk contest, I'm still a jerk, which is to say that I have selfish inclinations, that I'm fearful and flawed in many ways, and that I need to work on myself.
Ultimately, I have no choice in the matter. The cosmological order simply will not allow me to get away with being a self-centered jerk my whole life, which is to be obsessed with the needs of my lower self, to work purely for the sustenance of my animal body, to live in fear of losing my temporary animal life, and to forsake the wants of the spirit. Rather, the cosmic order will work, tirelessly, to influence me in subtle ways, trying to help my spirit realign itself with its higher purpose. So, I might as well go with the flow, try to figure out what the spirit world is trying to communicate to me, and do as they say.
Some of the cosmic influence might take the form of serendipitous happenings, events that are "signs" meant to guide us at a crossroads, or when we cry out to the heavens for help in hopes of an answer to one of life's many difficult questions. But, some of the influence of the cosmos is just built into our biology. For example, our physical bodies do not respond well to selfish thinking. In fact, these thoughts are toxic to it (even as much as pharmaceuticals). The reason being, is that our minds are not our brains. Our consciousness is not a random collection of thoughts due to synapses firing in a highly conductive cholesterol and protein glob in our skulls. Rather, the mind is the spirit, which is distinct from our physical body, given to us to overcome our animal nature in deference to the higher ideals of this world, or "the will of God", which include things like love, truth, brotherhood, charity, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. So, when our mind becomes fixated on thoughts antithetical to its higher purpose, which are those that serve our base self, our animal urges, and the pleasurable satiation thereof, then that will cause a systematic energetic disturbance. Our negative thoughts create negative emotions, and, over time, an entire emotional imbalance, which disturbs the etheric flow (i.e. life-force), which we then experience as "disease" in the physical body. That's how the system was designed to keep us on the right track, spiritually.
Of course, modern science explains most, if not all, of these diseases as being caused by age, genetic defects, and micro-organisms, and dismisses any "scientifically" undetectable energy interfacing between our soul-spirit and physiology. But, I that it's just them trying to sell us drugs. Instead, I think that disease is a gift. I think that we get disease because the universe doesn't want us to suffer. It doesn't want us to be disappointed in a mediocre life because we lacked the courage to take risks, in pursuit of a higher calling, due to cowardly self-preservation. That is depressing, and no way to live. So, since it won't stand by idly and let us not live up to our full potential, and be a jerk instead, it's going to try to get our attention. It's going to work to inspire us to correct our ways. To do so, ironically, it's going to make us suffer. But, it's going to make us suffer in a different way. One such way is to give us chronic diseases, that we struggle to overcome, in order to challenge our understanding of who we think we are, where we are, and what we are supposed to do in this lifetime, in hopes that we are inspired to seek the truth.
Male pattern baldness changed my life. I would never have gone 400 minutes without food, let alone 400 hours, if I had never starting balding way back as a teenager. Nor would I have even have stopped snacking if the FDA-approved poison that is prescribed for hair loss actually worked. Instead, I had to keep digging for a cure. Because all of the conventional interventions did not work, I had to figure out another way. That motivation and exploration has lead me here, to the extremes, beyond the limits of what material science can explain. After 20 years of suffering from hair loss, with all of the shame and insecurity that I felt from it, the cosmos finally got my attention. Discomfort is the best motivation. Through suffering we find our way. That's what I believe anyway. In any case, it's better to believe this than taking the drugs, which in my experience don't work, and severely damage the kidneys.
So, what's my purpose in fasting? I need an attitude adjustment. I'm too self-centered. I'm too attached to the material world, my material body, my temporary life, and it is stressing me out. That is, I'm chronically in a negative thought pattern loop where I'm never at peace because I'm constantly preoccupied with what I think I have to do to stay alive and keep things running smoothly. This, of course, mostly comes down to food. Do I have enough food? Can I buy enough food? Is it time to eat food? How long will it take to make food? If I go somewhere, can I get back in time to cook food, or do I have to bring food? I'm a slave to my food routine. And even though I eat extremely healthy food, it's this obsession with food that is ultimately causing problems. The stress thinking loop creates an emotional imbalance, skewed with worry, self-doubt, anger, frustration, and disappointment, which is causing deficiency, exhaustion, and stagnation in the etheric flow, which is manifesting on the surface as male pattern baldness and other supposed "age-related" ailments.
If you think male pattern baldness is hormonal or genetic, it's not. Read the rest of the website. It's caused by changing head shape, which is obvious once you look for it, and is very likely the product of negative thought patterns, which comes from the mind, aka spirit, which we have complete control over, but fail to exercise, as in my case. However, when I stop eating food on purpose, this throws a giant-ass monkey wrench into my negative thought pattern loop. I can't stress about food because I'm not eating food. I can't worry about my material body, or my material existence, because I'm intentionally weakening it to death. I'm no longer a slave to my lower self obsessions. And even though I feel like death, I get a taste of truly being alive, which is pure freedom, a full liberation of the spirit.
In any case, I've tried modern medicine, I've tried to "bio-hack" my issues, but it didn't work. So, now I'm trying starving myself for as long as I can, which I probably am going to have to do for longer than 400 hours in the future if I'm truly buy into all of this Jesus, lower self, higher self, cosmological order, spiritual crap. Nevertheless, I still got some interesting results; some hair-related, and some not.
MY 400 HOUR FAST RESULTS
People want to see results. No one is going to be interested in what you are saying or what you are doing, especially if it's Jesus related, or flies in the face of modern science and conventional health advice, as mine tend to do, unless you have results. In the spirit of such, I have a few such results from the 400 hour fast that I think are worth sharing:
NOCTURIA
For as long as I can remember, I have had to wake up sometime between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. to go to bathroom. It is RARE that I sleep all the way until daybreak without having to do that. Since coming off of the last fast, however, over a month later, I have had to wake up to use the bathroom TWICE. Furthermore, those were the two nights following an acupuncture appointment where I did a fair amount of blood-letting. The reason I mention it is because, in Traditional Chinese Medicine, blood deficiency is a cause of poor sleep, which probably happens when you intentionally bleed out a pint of blood or so. In any case, I slept trough the night more in the three weeks after the fast, than I did in the last decade. That's pretty weird. I doubt that it's a random coincidence. But, why would fasting do that?
Even though I have been touting fasting is a spiritual body detoxifier, I don't want to discount it as a potent physical body detoxifier. A long fast can give the body a chance to attend to some much needed maintenance work. In my case, I may have substantially improved my kidney function with this break from food. That is, I may have inadvertently "bio-hacked" a kidney problem. I may have given them time that they needed to rest and clean house to get back to working like they should. My kidneys were a wreck from taking ineffective and poisonous hair loss medications for over a decade, as well as the general toxic load from modern living. Furthermore, while I have been working on my kidneys for a few years now, having learned about this connection years ago, and thus have made many other detoxification efforts in this respect, though they probably helped somewhat, they did not quite have the same dramatic results on my sleep as this did, if my nocturia remission is indeed due to kidney detoxification.
A more energetic factor in this scenario is that I did my 400 hour fast entirely during the winter, which corresponds to the kidney organ system in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Thus, the winter is the optimal time to improve kidney function because of the seasonal energy synchronicity. So, maybe, since it's kidney season, my body diverted all of the surplus maintenance time to my kidneys. Or it may be that fasting is something that strongly affects the kidneys naturally. Who knows? It may have not even been any of this, but rather some attitude improvement, or working off a bit of my karmic debt, that the suffering from the fast did. In any case, it is the most interesting result. It is so nice not having to wake up to go to the bathroom. Good sleep is the gift that keeps on giving, in terms of health. There could be residual returns from this for years to come.
ECZEMA
Every time I that I have eaten bread, butter, sugar, cow dairy, or even salad in the past 5 years, I had a red rash break out on my face, mostly around the nose and in my eyebrows, beard, and mustache. Then, yellow scabs would form over for several days afterwards. This is what inspired me to do a 3 year-long first stage GAPS diet, an extreme elimination diet, in which I ate little more than a few boiled vegetables cooked in beef broth, and red meat. This was all I could eat in order to enjoy clear skin. Otherwise, whenever I would "cheat", and, for example, eat some homemade, hand-milled sourdough bread and raw butter, my face would break out that evening.
However, since coming off of the fast, I my diet has been almost entirely bread, butter, honey, yogurt, cow dairy, oats, egg whites, salad, wine, beans, and nuts (albeit all soaked and fermented), because I have committed to being vegetarian for the remainder of Lent. Despite exclusively eating all of the foods that I have avoided for the better part of 7 years, I have had MINIMAL outbreak. In fact, there was no skin disturbance for the first 10 or so days after I started eating. There are a few blemishes in between my eyebrows that have flared up once or twice, but nothing like in the past that occurred after ONE meal.
In this respect, I believe that fasting has a tonifying effect on our gut health. Fasting is the ultimate elimination diet, and will give the gut lining and gut flora the best opportunity to rebuild and rebalance itself. However, in the case of eczema, I think, like hair loss, it is mostly caused by an energetic imbalance, such as being in a chronic stress state of worrying about day to day bull crap, i.e. negative thought patterns. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, for example, eczema is caused by blood deficiency, which is caused by spleen weakness, which is caused by excess worrying. Given that my eczema comes back after about a week or so, which is when the euphoria of the post-fast eating bliss has pretty much faded, when eating has been normalized in my routine, and I start stressing about food again, then this checks out with my experience too. So, while gut health is important, being worry-free is better for our health.
HAIR
While my hair did not miraculously fill in at the bald areas, my hair did look better by the end of the 17 days, despite no protein intake. Here's a comparison from start to end:
Overall, my existing hair just kind of perked up. It got easier to style and looked healthier. The way I would describe it, though, is that my hair came to life. Why? If hair is just dead protein, how could it get better when not eating? It defies material science logic. However, it kind of checks out with ancient wisdom.
Hair is spiritual, because it is the first thing that the cosmic emanations that form this world touch on us upon their descent from the heavens. The spiritual power of hair is accounted for in the Bible, as Samson's strength is strangely claimed to be stored in his hair. This is similarly corroborated in Traditional Chinese Medicine in which it is theorized that we store much of our life-force, or qi, in our hair. Furthermore, in this discipline, hair is claimed to be an extension of our blood, which is our essence, or foundational life-force, i.e. something that would be healthier when our spirit has broken free from the fetters of our material desires. For this reason, it may be why in ancient artwork, gods, who are totally free from earthly constraints, are always depicted, for example, as having long, lush, thick, and flowing hair. Am I wrong? Are there bald gods? Was Jesus balding?
Overall, I get the impression from the philosophical remains of our ancestors that anything that tonifies us spiritually tonifies our hair, which checks out in my experience. But, I have to qualify these claims with one confession: It is of note that coming into the fast I had done an 8 week carnivore diet, during which my hair had already improved already, which it normally does. Though this was to immerse myself fully in the death phase of winter, as dead animal flesh contains the energy of death, and so it may be part of the effectiveness of my energetic synchronization efforts with the changing of the seasons. Whatever. All I can say is that I thought that my hair looked good by day 17.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
In terms of my overall attitude, I'm still a jerk. I still have jerk thoughts. I still get frustrated, angry, fearful, stressed, etc.. I'm not cured, by any means. Rather, I have more work to do. However, what I do notice is that I am able to catch myself when I have jerk thought or a jerk inclination. That is, I can think a jerk thought, or want to do a jerk thing, and dismiss it, or not act on it. It's not easy. Furthermore, I don't do it with nearly 100% success. But, I do it more now than before the fast. For example, when my 2 year-old daughter pees her pants because she has stubbornly refused to use the potty, and even threw a fit the last two times that I tried to put her on it, and is currently throwing a fit because she peed herself, while her new born brother just pooped, is crying because he's hungry, but my wife and I are preoccupied scrambling to get dinner ready, I can get pretty frustrated and angry in the moment. In fact, I do. The difference now is, even though I want to punch a hole through the wall, a thought creeps into my head just before I do it: "have mercy." And, more and more, I actually have mercy.
Getting angry is going to happen. Being an inexperienced two-child father is going to to challenge the limits of my patience and good-humor. But, if I can, more and more, make a conscious effort restrain myself from bursting out in anger, or blaming others for my current misfortune, then I think this is progress. I still fail. I'm still a weak, imperfect sinner. That's how it's going to be. There's no "cure". It's not that a fast will clear out all of our toxic thoughts. We're still in these animal bodies. So, we still have urges, physical and emotional. Rather, the effect of the fast is that by starting to control one base urge, and a major one at that, then it will start to give us the mental strength to exercise control over our other lower self urges. In this manner, divinity, or what we are striving for in our spiritual evolution, is not eradication of our lower self urges, but rather complete control over them.
In the spirit of all this, here's a list of attitude problems that I currently suck at, but I'm working on, and where I feel like fasting might be helping:
• refrain from complaining or blaming others for some trivial annoyance.
• being more appreciative of what I have.
• more apt to volunteer my help.
• willingness to give up or give away precious food.
• restraint from expressing anger and frustration.
• less stressed about eating schedules.
• less stressed about nutritional needs.
• more apt to break from my routine.
• overall worrying less and being more at peace.
I probably have to keep pushing to go longer, and to work on all the things on this list while fasting, which is very difficult to do when you are weak and hungry, and have been so for weeks. But, it may be that during our fast is when we can make the most amount of improvement in this respect. In fact, this is may be the meaning as to why the 40 days of fasting in the Jesus account is paired with overcoming temptation by devil. That is, although there may have been an actual devil character involved too, this temptation is representative of the self-preservation urges of our physical body that we need to overcome during the fast to make it effective. Meaning, if you are a jerk during the fast, then you are going to be just as much of a jerk after the fast, and so it's not going to do anything. It's just bragging rights, and a waste of time (read Isiah 58). Based on my experience, this is true. Sure, maybe you'll get some detoxification benefit out of it. But, that's bio-hacker stuff, which doesn't produce miracles, just mediocre results. That's my big spiritual tip, anyway. I have a few more practical tips too that might be helpful, in case I've sold you on long fasting.
A FEW LONG FAST TIPS
I did 400 hours of fasting, which is 16 and 2/3 days with only spring water and salt. Occasionally, I did water enemas to clear out the bowels. The reason being is that toxic matter still gets packaged and expelled through the digestive tract even when you are not eating. The problem is that no material food waste is pushing it through. Therefore, it needs some help. Otherwise, toxic matter will sit there festering for a few weeks, and you'll feel even worse. Maybe that's good for the spirit, but maybe it's too much toxicity for the body to handle and may actually permanently harm us. I figured that I was suffering enough, and so I did enemas.
Here are some, admittedly, affiliate links to enema kits in case you are interested in flushing out your colon during a fast, or regular maintenance, and want an example of what to look for: enema bag or an enema bucket.
In addition to the enemas, I would paint myself with transdermal iodine (affiliate), and do magnesium foot baths with either epsom salts or magnesium chloride flakes (affiliate). The chloride flakes are bit more expensive, but more naturally occurring. In my experience, both help about equally with sleep.
Overall, since these minerals did not go through the digestive tract, I reasoned that it wasn't really cheating, even though it could be. In any case, this really helped me sleep, especially the magnesium. Insomnia, at least for me, is worst part of the fast. After a few days I have great difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. Really, the terrible sleep that I get, towards the end of the fast especially, is what mostly discourages me from going longer. It's at least 50% of the suffering. The other 50% is split between fatigue and inability to stay warm. I have difficulty staying warm even in Northern California, where winter day lows are in the 30's and highs are in the 60's. Fortunately, there were some warm days during my fast this winter, which went from February 23rd to March 12th, but I still was uncomfortably chilled for most of the time. In addition, chasing a screaming toddler with a poop diaper, making meals, and cleaning up messes, adds to the suffering effect. 400 hours is a long time under the circumstances. Not to make excuses, but Jesus did not have to care for an almost two year old during his fast.
OTHER OPTIMAL FASTING TIMES
While fasting during Lent is perfectly synchronized with cyclical Earth energies to amplify the benefits thereof, it's still very cold in late February, even in mild Northern California where I am. This is probably why Catholics would do 6 day fasts, and then eat on Sunday. Without food during snowing cold European winters, you could risk dying, which is the metaphorical rather than actual goal of the fast, and thus not productive. The summer months rather, would be a better time to try for a long fast.
Fortunately, Catholics have a lesser known fast, known as the Apostle's fast, which occurs in the late spring and early summer. It's so much lesser known, that I just recently found out about it while researching some things for this article. The Apostle's fast relates to a Bible account of the pharisees criticizing the apostles of Jesus for not fasting, and Jesus told them that there would be a time to fast when He is gone. The apostles did just that, then went on to perform nearly the same healing miracles as Jesus did, along with pissing off the same bunch of people in positions of authority, in the Book of Acts. So, 50 days after Easter, when Jesus came back from the dead, Catholics commemorate the apostles doing their fast, and all of the good work that they did afterwards, with the Apostle's Fast.
I don't know too much about the calculations behind the length and start of the Apostle's Fast. But, this year it starts on June 8th and goes to June 29th. While, traditionally, this is not a straight water fast practice, it might be a good time to extend my fasting endurance from 17 to 21 days, and inch closer to full access of my healing potential. Or maybe it will kill me. I might need more time to recover before I attempt another long water fast. Fortunately, I found another option.
Another traditional fasting practice that intrigues me comes from the ancient Jain Indians. They would do 36 hour fasts, no food OR water, every 8th and 14th day of the lunar cycle (i.e. day after 1st quarter and full moon). For some reason they thought that the moon's energy at those times had spirit enhancing and physical body detoxification effects. I have a lot of respect for the spiritual perceptiveness of the ancient Indians, and so I'll probably give it a try. It's a good opportunity to get over the 24 hour hump, if you've never gone for that long. Trust me, 36 hours is not that long after you've done it a few times. Once you get accustomed to going overnight on a fasted stomach, then you'll break a big mental barrier.
CONCLUSION
Fasting was not developed not to lose weight, improve digestion, increase longevity, or otherwise bio-hack some physical body ailment as we apply it in our modern materialistic world with our modern materialistic world view. Rather, it was for our ancestors to help them stay connected to a world that was quickly fading away, the real world, the spiritual world. It was to help enhance their powers of perception in order to continue to see the true reality, or, in other words, to renew their minds.
Although St. Paul was not directly writing about fasting in this quote, it summarizes the whole point of it. The point of fasting is not to anti-age. In fact, it's almost the exact opposite. It's to get closer to death, so that we can actually live, because if you live in fear, then you are already dead. I think that's a quote from Zarathustra, a 6th century B.C. alchemist.
So, if you buy into all of this, we are in a pickle. We need a healthy physical body to do things that we are meant to do while still on this Earth. That requires eating (and eating animals), drinking, staying warm, and nourishing the needs of the physical body in various ways. HOWEVER, by the same token, anything that nourishes us physically sabotages us from fully experiencing and expressing a higher self, and vice versa, which is what makes life so challenging and confusing. We have to eat, otherwise we die. We have to eat animals, otherwise we will be malnourished (which is why veganism and vegetarianism are traditional fasting options, and spiritual life choices). However, eating brings our focus to the needs of our body, which are antithetical to higher consciousness, including the will of God. So, what do we do?
Based on the practices across religions, a solution is to occasionally fast. There are times when we eat, so that we can continue to live and learn what we need to in our lifetime, and times when we don't eat, which helps direct our mind towards focusing on "the will of God". I'm pretty sure that the "will of God" was what Jesus was going for on that 40 day fast. Furthermore, the whole irony of the fasting is that, although it initially weakens the body to point of near death, based on what Jesus did after his fast, it seems to strengthen us in ways that no amount of physical nourishment can.
I have been teasing the bio-hackers throughout this article, but I do not want to be too disrespectful towards them. They have some good bio-hacks. I've done them. I continue to do some of them. But, the best bio-hacker out there is not healing themselves or anyone else to a degree anywhere close to what Jesus did. No bio-hacker, fresh off of a three week sardine fast, for example, is healing lepers with the touch of their hand. That's beyond bio-hacking. That's accessing an ability deep below the physical layer of our being. That's the kind of healing that I'm interested in. It's miraculous level healing. Furthermore, that's the kind of healing that we are capable of.
Jesus was a god, but he was flesh and blood just like us. In fact, all of the things he did, he said we could do too. He even trained his disciples to perform the same healing miracles. They weren't gods. They weren't a bunch of Jesuses going around performing miracles. Rather, they were just regular dudes, like us, out there curing lepers and bringing people back from the dead. If these accounts are true, which I hope they are, and want to believe that they are, but at the very least have no faith in modern material science's ability to come up with any miracle cures to the likes of anything that are in these accounts, then that healing ability is within us as well. We just have to figure out how to access it.
The 40 day fast may be the ultimate bio-hack. However, as the Jesus story implies, we cannot fast with a bio-hacker approach. Rather, we have to fast our ancestors did, with purity of heart. We have to do it for the benefit of our neighbor, rather than for ourself. The magic is in the love. The alchemy is in the sacrifice. That's what the Jesus story is supposed to help remind the Catholics of each Lent when they fast. This is what I'm supposed to be reminded of when I fast. And until I have fasted long enough, suffered deeply enough, and detached myself greatly enough from the conforms of this world, and change my whole attitude, then my hair will continue to be a reflection of my shortcomings in this regard. That's what I believe, at least. That's why I made this website. That's why I fast, and that's why I will continue to fast... just not quite yet. I'm still hungry from the last one.