Eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-five days. That is the number of times that the earth has completed a full rotation on its axis since I was born. And in this period of time, which is both eternal (as far as my subjective experience is concerned) and inconceivably insignificant (when viewed from the perspective of oblivion), I have never gone a full day without eating anything.

I read in the news earlier this week that Rishi Sunak observes a 36-hour period of fasting every week, consuming only water, tea, and coffee from 5pm on Sunday until 5am on a Tuesday. How intriguing. I have heard of many people whom intermittently fast, perhaps eating an early dinner and then not eating until mid-day the following day, with the science appearing to substantiate the multitude of health and cognitive related benefits that this practice brings. Research from John Hopskins University has suggested that intermittent fasting can improve heart health, physical performance, boost verbal memory, and mitigate the risks of type 2 diabetes as well as obesity. I had not heard before, however, of people regularly fasting for extended periods every week.

Whilst I am sure that fasting can boost welfare, it was not the health-related impact that intrigued me. Instead, it was the immediate realisation that was triggered: that I have never known how it feels to wake up, not eat anything all day, and go to bed on an empty stomach. Intellectually, what an extraordinary privilege it is to have been born into a family and a position in a society that have ensured that for me. It is easy to say how grateful I am for the food that I have, but with no touchpoint of what it feels like to go without, is that not gratitude not merely just an abstracted idea? And experientially, what a strange thing to have never experienced sensations that have always only been a mere number of hours away, on the other side of my next missed meal. Sufficiently intrigued, I thereby decided to enter a 36-hour fasting period. From 8pm on Thursday evening to 8am on Saturday morning, I ate nothing and drank only water and black coffee.

Having now completed this period and having broken the fast, I have a number of thoughts and reflections that I would like to share. Firstly, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all, was that it didn’t at all feel hungry throughout the fast. On a typical morning, about two-hours after I have eaten breakfast, I start to get pangs of ‘hunger’ which make me start thinking about lunch. Paradoxically, I didn’t have any such experience yesterday. This may have been for a few reasons, first among which could be that I normally am in a state of calorie-surplus that my body welcomed the break. Conversely however, I intuitively feel it be more relevant that because I cognitively knew that there was no chance of eating anything within the period, my body didn’t deem it useful to send such signals to my brain. Or similarly, perhaps, because I knew there to be a clear end point to the fasting period that was relatively not far away at all. Whilst it may sound far-fetched that one’s digestive system could have any kind of cognition capable of computing this, extensive research of the enteric nervous system (which regulates our gut) may suggest that it is far more plausible than it first sounds. This system, dubbed the body’s “second brain”, is composed of the same chemicals and cells of the brain, and these two nerve centres (the ‘main’ brain and the ‘second brain’) are connected to each other by an “immense crosstalk”. We have no cognitive awareness of the internal regulation processes of our heart, our breathing, our sweating, or the filtering of our blood. There is so much going on within us that we have no awareness of, from a first-person perspective, and my experienced yesterday deeply underlined this.

I observed also the extraordinary extent to which are daily movements and thought patterns are dictated by food. I spend perhaps 20% of every day making food, eating food, and thinking about what food I will later make and eat. Through an evolutionary lens this makes total sense: food is imperative to our sustenance and survival, and beings who prioritised food more would be more successful in surviving and propagating their genes than others. But if we are privileged to have ready access to food, is it possible that our constant obsessing over it could be is an evolutionary holdover, like our appendices, our coccyx, and our ability to hiccup? Yesterday, I really felt like I had more hours in my day. I didn’t need to go into the kitchen before leaving or returning to my flat, nor did I spend time mulling over what I would eat for dinner. Of course I am not suggesting that we all stop eating or just consume all our calories and nutrients in liquid form. Food is an immense source of joy, and a wonderful source of unity between friends and family. But, going forward, I intend to be more mindful of the time I spend thinking about food when not cooking or eating, as well as potentially eating bigger meals and not snacking in between.

Regarding energy levels and cognitive capability, I experienced two very similar trajectories. From the moment of waking up (~12 hours into the fast) until about 8pm (exactly 24 hours in), I felt terrific. Clear-headed, present, ‘lighter’, more open and engaged in conversation, and far more concentrated. The coffee no doubt aided in this, but the fasting undoubtedly contributed too. Since adopting a vegan diet I have significantly increased the amount of carbohydrates I consume. A huge bowl of porridge, fruit and protein powder for breakfast, wraps or sandwiches for lunch, nuts and dried fruit throughout the day, and an enormous portion of pasta or rice with some kind of beans for dinner (often followed up by some banana and peanut butter on toast before bed). Whilst delicious and nutritious, slamming that many carbs and that much food inevitably acts as a drain on energy levels. Throughout the day, whilst talking, studying, walking and meditating, I felt markedly less sluggish and much more capable of cultivating sustained attention and concentration.

By the evening, however, my energy levels were seriously beginning to crash. I spent the evening at a friends’ house party, enjoying it throughout, but by 23:00 I was really starting to flag. Dancing became increasingly laborious (as did just simply standing up) and I eventually bode my farewells. After the 30-minute walk back home, I finally found myself tucked up in bed, craving the sweet tide of sleep to crest over my consciousness. I am usually asleep mere moments after my head touches the pillow but I was not so fortunate last night, with it taking nearly an hour for me to finally drift off. It was not a gnawing feeling in my stomach that precipitated this, nor an unignorable vision of a Bruce-Bogtrotter-esque chocolate cake hovering in front of my face, but instead a low-humming of mental activity and a general feeling of dissatisfaction. A peculiar sensation that felt rather alien, and one that meditation could not easily quiet. Whilst the science doesn’t appear to be conclusive, it does look like intermittent fasting can boost ease of sleep, whereas extended multi-day fasting can sometimes create struggle with getting to and staying asleep.

Most startling of the entire fasting experience, however, was the nature of my dreams last night. I am aware that there are few things less interesting than listening to others recount what their highly personal dreams consisted in, but the character and vividity of mine last night was absolutely stunning. I honestly do not recall experiencing a night of dreams as viscerally absurdist and intoxicatingly disturbing as these. I woke multiple times through the night and each time, when succumbing again to sleep, the dreams that awaited me where increasingly kaleidoscopically phantasmagorical. Whilst not aware before, I have since had a read about the long-established relationship between dreams and hunger in systematic studies, as well as in religious and historical stories, that highlights how hunger can produce “more vivid, bizarre, and personally significant dreams”. I do remain sceptical of the ontological claim that Jesus, whilst fasting for forty days and forty nights in the desert, conversed with the embodied devil himself. I have no doubts at all, however, that to him at the time it may have felt like the realist thing in the world.

Awaking this morning and anticipating the food which was soon to come, a smile crept across my face. It did take though a surprising amount of effort to get up out of bed and walk downstairs to the kitchen. Having mixed some protein powder with porridge, and having placed it in the microwave, I peeled a satsuma and popped a segment into my mouth. Immediately, my brain and whole body tingled with a huge flood of dopamine, quite different from how eating food normally feels. Rather than ascertaining pleasure from the taste or the texture or the appearance food, it instead felt like a base appreciation for the sustenance itself, accompanied with a profound sense of gratitude for the mindbogglingly easy access to food that I have enjoyed throughout my life. Of the roughly 100 billion members of our species who have ever lived, very few have enjoyed the food security that most people alive today enjoy. As Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 years) have rigorously illustrated, the modern history of humanity’s consumption of food is one characterised by uncertainty and instability.

The agricultural revolution that took place around 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent marked the beginning of humanities’ transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of agricultural and animal domestication. Farming (both sustenance and industrial) entails enormous personal risk, due to crop failures often resulting in starvation, but the enormity of our global population coupled with our dominion over nature has resulted in it being necessary. The logic of this transition was not an obvious move at the time, nor one representative of necessary improvements in the quality of life. History is rife with examples of the uncertainty that farming brings, and the past century alone has provided ample evidence of famine caused mostly by political malevolence and incompetence, but also through economic failings and environmental catastrophes. The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933, the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, and the ongoing famine in Yemen. Even today, in 2024, around 9 million people starve to death every year. Whilst many of us in the West do not worry about food security, even here it remains a highly relevant problem. More than 13% of the U.K. experienced food insecurity in June 2023 alone, simply because they didn’t have the money to buy food, and our country produced 9.5 million tonnes of food waste annually. Furthermore, more than half of the food we consume is imported from abroad. Were there to be a complete collapse in global supply chains, our supermarkets on who we depend for our sustained health may struggle to provide adequate resources.

But what ought we do about this? I must concede that I do think we are rather limited in individually addressing some of these concerns, but that is not to say we are powerless. We all have an ethical responsibility to aid in reducing the 821 million global people who go to bed hungry every night. Locally, we ought to support those struggling in our society by supporting local food banks, through donations of money and food but also with donations of our time. The mum of one of my best friends has given an extraordinary amount of energy, time, and love (as well as financial expenditure too) to do incredible service for others at her local foodbank. I believe we should all strive to be more like her – to be as generous as we think we can be, and to still strive to do more. Globally, many charities and non-profits have demonstrated themselves to be efficacious in reducing international hunger and starvation. The UN World Food Programme, Heifer International, and Action Against Hunger all seem to do efficacious work in providing sustainable long-term solutions to ending global hunger. The coolest of all, to me at least, is Give Directly, who enable you to send cash directly into the bank accounts of the world’s poorest people.

And what ought we do on a personal level, if the global and local institutions that we so dearly depend upon are in fact far more precarious than we all perceive them to be? I don’t think it possible, rational, or ideal for everyone to become entirely self-sufficient – we do not have adequate space nor skills, nor the sufficient desire through which to do so. Nor do I think it rational to all build fallout shelters and accumulate enormous life-time -sufficient stockpiles of food. Aside from being depressingly individualistic, in the event of global infrastructure collapse I would perceive there to be a myriad of reasons as to why such an approach would be merely fantasy. That said, I probably would think it wise to maintain at least some stocks in our homes so that we could at least sustain ourselves for at least a few weeks, if not a few months, if everything. And I think we should all make a much more concerted effort to not personally waste food and to encourage governments, restaurants and supermarkets to do so as well. Whilst “wonky fruit” may seem faddish and non-effective, changing norms around what food we consume and how we consume it will undoubtedly drive down the amount of waste we produce and, hopefully, the prices we subsequently pay for food prices.

Fasting for 36-hours was undoubtedly an, intellectually, experientially, and philosophically interesting experience, and one I would unreservedly recommend to those for whom it is. To cultivate gratitude, perspective, and differing subjective experience, I think it a fascinating thing to try. That said, a fast of this length is not an experience I will be seeking to replicate in its entirety anytime soon. I will, however, attempt to incorporate a regular fast into my lifestyle (perhaps a 24-hour period every fortnight), attempt to eat for the last time earlier in the evening, and at some point in the more distant future attempt a fast of a more considerable length. I am a great believer in pushing one’s personal barriers of perceived comfort and possibility, to better understand yourself as well as the nature of conscious experience, and fasting feels to be an effective means through which to do so.

As ever, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a beautiful day.