Can Fasting Help Me Think Clearly, and How Do I Start?

This might be unpopular in wellness circles, but skipping a meal doesn't make you a better person. Neither does eating all day.

Fasting has a modern side now, all apps and eating windows. It also has a much older side, slower and more careful. Yoga and the Hindu scriptures used fasting for centuries, mostly to give the body and mind a rest. Done with care, it can quickly show you how much of your eating is hunger and how much is habit.

Done badly, it shows you what a 4 pm headache feels like. So this last post of the week is about doing it sensibly.

I know because I once did it badly. One February morning I read about autophagy, saw that the man who named it had won a Nobel prize, and decided right after breakfast to try a fast. Radish-stuffed pancakes, a full water bottle, and I locked myself in my room. For the first eighteen hours I felt nothing. On day two I sat in the same room while my father ate his dinner, and it was easy to ignore, because it was only dal and chapati. I kept telling myself the fast was going well. Then I noticed I had spent hours wandering around the house doing nothing, just proving to myself that I was fine. I broke it at forty-five hours. What stuck was a line I wrote that week: I can't expect myself to wake at five when my late-night dinner was deep-fried noodles.

So fix the plate before you test the willpower. Discipline won't stick to a body you feed badly at the wrong hours.

The word itself tells you what fasting is for.

The Sanskrit word for fasting is upavasa. It comes from upa, near, and vas, to dwell. So it literally means staying close. The idea is that when you put food aside for a while, you spend that time close to something else: your attention, your breath, whatever you hold dear.

That's a good test for any fast. If it brings you closer to something, it's working. If it just leaves you hungry and grumpy, you've only skipped a meal.

The best-known fast in Indian tradition is Ekadashi, the eleventh day of each lunar fortnight. Many families keep it with fruit, milk or a very light meal instead of eating nothing, and the Sivananda tradition has long encouraged it as an easy weekly or fortnightly practice.

A student once fasted too long.

The Chandogya Upanishad, the same text that told us the mind is made of food, has a story every fasting fan should read. Shvetaketu's father tells him to fast for fifteen days on water alone. At the end, he asks the boy to recite the Vedas he'd studied. The boy can't remember a single line.

Then his father tells him to eat. When he does, his memory comes back, and his father explains with a picture: a big fire that has burned down to one ember the size of a firefly can't burn anything. Feed it and it blazes again (Chandogya Upanishad 6.7).

I love this story because it works both ways. The mind depends on food. And, a few thousand years before today's debates, it shows that long fasting dulls the very thing most people fast to sharpen.

Swami Sivananda reached the same conclusion from experience. In Practical Lessons in Yoga he says that fasting is discouraged for yoga students because it produces weakness, but that occasional mild fasts are highly beneficial, because they rest the stomach and the intestines. In Mind: Its Mysteries and Control he is blunter about the other side: too much fasting brings extreme weakness, and then you can't do any sadhana (daily spiritual practice) and you can't think. His practical rule for a yogi is to avoid both extremes, luxury on one side and severe tamasic (heavy, dull) austerity on the other.

The Gita warns against starving yourself.

The Gita agrees with the father. Krishna says yoga isn't for someone who eats too much, or for someone who doesn't eat at all (6.16). In chapter seventeen he's blunt about extreme austerity. People who practise harsh self-punishment that no teaching supports, driven by ego and desire, tormenting their own bodies, he calls demonic in their resolve (17.5 and 17.6). That's strong language, and it's aimed squarely at starving yourself in the name of discipline.

Instead, the Gita describes austerity (tapas) in three parts: of the body, of speech, and of the mind. The austerity of the body is things like cleanliness, simplicity, non-violence and respect for teachers. The austerity of speech is words that are true, kind and not agitating. The austerity of the mind is a settled mind, kindness, silence and self-control (17.14 to 17.16). Missing a meal appears nowhere on that list.

A short passage from the Autobiography of Swami Sivananda shows how he treated his own students. He writes that he used to advise them to take great care of their health, and says: "You can't live on grass, water and air alone." Take nutritious food, he says, learn to relax, don't overwork, and regulate your energy. The founder of a tradition of renunciation, telling his students to eat properly and rest. I had to read that twice.

The craving stays

One verse in chapter two has become my favourite on this. Krishna says that when you stay away from something, it leaves you alone, but the taste for it, the longing, stays. Even the longing goes only once you've seen something higher (2.59).

It's the most honest thing I've read about fasting. You can take the food away and the wanting stays exactly where it was. If you fast and think about nothing but lunch, all you've done is move your attention to your stomach. The practice is to watch the wanting rise and pass, and learn that a craving is a wave you don't have to ride.

Patanjali says something similar. Among the niyamas, the personal disciplines, he lists tapas, and says that through it the impurities are worn away and the body and senses reach perfection (2.43). For him, austerity is a way to get clear.

Here is an easy way to start.

Before the steps, one thing from the Sivananda books: change slowly. His note of caution in Mind: Its Mysteries and Control says that sudden changes in food are a mistake and that the system should accommodate any change without a hitch. A first fast should follow the same advice.

If you want to try, here's the easiest version I know:

1. Leave a clear gap overnight. About 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. Dinner at 8 pm, breakfast at 8 am. For most people this is already a fast.

2. Drink water or warm water through the gap. Thirst often feels like hunger.

3. When you feel a pang, wait ten minutes. Notice where you feel it, and what the thought attached to it says. Then decide.

4. Try a light day once a fortnight. Fruit, milk, or a very simple meal in place of the usual. This is the Ekadashi way, and a good place to start.

5. Break it softly. Never end a fast with the heaviest meal of the week. Start with something light and warm.

6. Stop if you feel dizzy, weak or unwell. Eat. Nothing in the tradition asks you to push through that.

Fasting isn't for everyone. If you're pregnant or breastfeeding, have diabetes, take regular medication, are underweight or elderly, or have ever had a difficult relationship with food, please talk to your doctor before changing how you eat. The overnight gap is usually fine, but it's worth a five-minute conversation.

So what did this week cover?

Over these seven days we started with the gap between knowing and doing. Then we found prana (life force), the energy underneath willpower. We looked at what drains it, what tops it up, why sleep is the thing everything else leans on, how food becomes mind, and why fasting needs care.

If there's one lesson, it's this: look after your energy first, and discipline gets much easier. Trying it the other way round rarely works.

Here is your assignment.

Choose one thing from each day and keep it for a week:

• Day 2: write your energy score at 4 pm.

• Day 3: fix one energy drain.

• Day 4: put one top-up in the calendar.

• Day 5: set the wind-down alarm.

• Day 6: eat one meal slowly, seated.

• Day 7: try the 12-hour overnight gap.

These are six small things. None of them needs willpower to start, and each one gives you a little more of it back.

Where to read more

The Sivananda-tradition books behind today's piece:

• Practical Lessons in Yoga, Swami Sivananda (on occasional mild fasts)

• Mind: Its Mysteries and Control, Swami Sivananda (the note of caution on food and fasting)

• Autobiography of Swami Sivananda (his advice to students on health and rest)