Fasting and health
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 tastes like nothing you will be able to describe to your grandchildren. Eating on waking is for infants and invalids. The word for the midday meal means the breaking of a fast.
The year is 1909. You are a suffragette in Holloway, and they have taken your clothes, your name and your letters. You stop eating. It is the one thing in the cell that is still yours. After 91 hours they let you out rather than have you die on their hands. Within months they are holding women down and forcing tubes into them, because an empire has found out it is frightened of a person who will not eat.
The year is 1921. Your child has seizures, sometimes thirty in a day, and you have stopped sleeping. A doctor in New York puts children like yours on a fast and the fits cease. You sit by the bed through the first quiet night you have had in two years. The Mayo Clinic works out how to hold the body in the same state with food and calls it the ketogenic diet. Fasting, this year, is a hospital treatment.
The year is 1944. You are seven and you are not hungry, and your mother stands over you until the bowl is empty, because a voice on the wireless has told her that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The voice was paid for by the company that made what is in the bowl. She does not know that. She loves you, so she watches you finish it.
The year is 1985. You are told to eat little and often, to keep your metabolism burning and your blood sugar steady. You carry something in your bag in case. You have not gone five hours without food in your adult life, and when you try, the feeling frightens you, because you have been taught it is the start of something going wrong. You have never been heavier, and you assume the fault is yours.
The year is 2016. A Japanese biologist is given the Nobel prize for showing what a cell does when it is not being fed. It takes itself apart and rebuilds from the good pieces. The repair only runs when the food stops.
The year is 2026. You mention that you do not eat until midday, and somebody asks, kindly, whether you have spoken to anyone about that. The school runs a breakfast club with a cereal logo on the banner. And the best-selling medicine on earth is an injection that makes you forget to eat.
You did it before the hunt, through the fever, in the cell and in front of God. It sharpened you and it mended you. It was the one protest nobody could take off you. It was free, and you never needed anyone's leave.
It was taken from you at the breakfast table, by somebody who loved you, on the advice of somebody who was selling something.
This year they are selling it back. Once a week, in a pen, for life.
https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2120922915466006821?a=j_jI4us_7_BdxvO_N-g&s=20
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