Fast to feast on good health

Fruit fasting and intermittent fasting are popular because the benefits of giving your digestive system rest are many

- Charumathi Supraja

Imagine gaining health by stopping food for a few days—a period of rest, meditation, slowing down and just listening to your body while it is fed little or nothing. A lot is made of fasting because a lot happens while fasting. The pause button pressed on food (even if super healthy) allows the body to go into repair-restore mode. Fasting also builds inner awareness like nothing else. The body flicks switches, reversing conditions that you believed, or were told, are chronic. You gain insights, lose the weight of ill-health and learn strategies to build wellness in body, mind and spirit.

It’s no wonder that all or most religions advocate fasting during certain periods of the year or at regular periodicity. Fasting seems to be the common thread between Good Friday, Yom Kippur, Shivaratri, Ramadan and Paryushana, to name just a few significant days or festivals from disparate religions. Fasting has also been used as a peaceful but potent weapon against oppression and injustice, way before Mahatma Gandhi linked it in our minds with satyagraha and India’s freedom movement.

“Fasting establishes an environment within the body that reinvigorates its inherent healing abilities that may have been compromised (by)…poor nutrition, physical inactivity, chronic sleep deprivation, dehydration, toxin accumulation, chronic stress and overeating,” explains Goa-based lifestyle expert Luke Coutinho. He attributes the “remarkable mechanisms of healing” set in motion by fasting to “the resting of the digestive system.” The gut heals, inflammation subsides and “longevity genes are activated, he says.