Fasting and health
Sama Hoole @SamaHoole · 21h The year is 30,000 BC. You wake hungry and there is no breakfast, because there has never been breakfast. The children are still asleep by the fire. You get up and go out on an empty stomach, and by the second day without a kill your head is clearer and your eyes are sharper than when you were fed. You do not think of this as going without. It is how mornings are. The year is 400 BC. You are ill, and the physician on Kos sits by the bed and tells you to stop eating. To feed a sick body, he says, is to feed the sickness. You find you did not want food anyway. The dog in the yard does the same when it is poorly. It lies down, turns its head from the bowl, and gets up when it is well. The year is 1250. You eat twice a day, the first time near noon, and you fast on something like a third of the days in the year. It is hard by the fourth week of Lent and nobody pretends otherwise. But the whole village is doing it with you, and when Easter comes the roast...