If we had been planning a mini-break at a leper colony the responses could not have been more dubious. “You’re doing what?” asked friends. Yes, we wanted to spend a week fasting. Pull the plug on consumption-crazy modern life and give mind and body a cleansing rest.
The idea of forgoing meals is a real horse-startler. It can only mean that you are either developing serious food issues or have joined the sort of cult that involves dressing unstylishly and dabbling in bizarre sex or bioterrorism.
In Western religious circles, fasting has fallen far from favour. In the late 1960s even the Catholic Church backed away, making abstinence from meat on Fridays merely optional in England and Wales. The reason? Friday fasting marked out Catholics as outsiders.
To fast successfully, it is best to avoid society — not simply for fear of being lynched by suspicious crowds but also because you must evade temptations such as your fridge and the open-all-hours shop around the corner. A retreat is what you need. My wife Kate and I headed for the wilds of Devon to rent a converted blacksmith’s forge in a three-house hamlet called Whitehall. The nearest store is two miles’ walk across boggy fields and, when you are sapped by a water-only diet, that is a marathon.
I had been fascinated by the idea of fasting since teenagehood, when I had seen a Sunday-afternoon TV programme in which a bunch of middle-class mendicants spent a week gently starving under the guidance of a bearded guru. The guru did not seem necessary, as I had Kate as my soulmate and cellmate on this strange voyage into abstinence. Would we stay the course? Would we faint, freak, find nirvana, or would one of us kill and eat the other? Whatever the outcome, fasting puts us a nose ahead of the health fashionistas. Self-starving is starting to make a comeback in the developed world. At the New Life Health Centre, Massachusetts, visitors pay more than £1,000 for five days in a basic room on a liquid diet claimed to fix everything from obesity to arthritis. At Japan’s first detox hotel, Fasting Arena in the Nango Mountains, guests pay £150 a night to be fed on enzyme-rich vegetable soup, fruit juice, herbal tea and water.
Medical researchers are clambering on the everything-banned wagon. Last year, scientists from the University of Crete found that cholestorol levels drop by 9 per cent among Greek Orthodox Christians who fast three times a year. The levels rise when the fasters resume eating but not to the original levels.
Scientists at the US National Institute of Ageing believe regular one-day fasts may lengthen life span and toughen resistance to toxins, though they have experimented only on mice. The footballer Sir Stanley Matthews believed it worked — he used to forswear food on Mondays.
The food-free revolution has yet to hit the high streets, though. When we scoured local bookshops for a guide to fasting, the least unhelpful answer was: “We had something in last year but there’s no demand.”
Fortunately I discovered a fasting plan by the naturopath and nutritionist Michael Van Straten in an old file of cuttings: start day one with a melon breakfast, uncooked-veg lunch and salad supper, to give yourself an organic raw-energy start. Then two or three days’ water only. Then break the fast by repeating day one, to get your stomach moving again. Simple, eh? By the end of day one, and my third raw-food meal, I was looking forward to starvation. Crunching through piles of greenery flavoured only by olive oil and lemon juice has no appeal for Madras-addled tastebuds. It proved a powerful kick start, though. Neither of us suffered the gnawing food desperation we had feared.
Instead we drifted into mild lassitude, punctuated by stomach rumbling periods of food-fantasising. Then came the vague headache and mild nausea — we had been warned of these signs that the body is starting to burn toxins and withdraw from stimulants. Painkillers were off-limits so the only answer was to drink gallons of water and take regular naps.
Regular naps also helped to solve the great fasting question — how to fill the vast expanses of time liberated by not shopping, not cooking, not eating, not digesting and not washing up, let alone not obsessing about where to go for that evening’s meal. No matter how sophisticated we think ourselves, the microscope of fasting reveals that we are little more than eating, burping and excreting organisms.
We had come prepared. I had taken a pile of motorcycle magazines and illustrated histories of the Second World War. Kate had watercolours and intelligent novels. Mostly, however, we tinkered with the fire and played Monopoly.
When Kate became somewhat over-emotional about my four houses on Coventry Street, we realised how fasting can affect the psyche. The world slows, quietens, expands; nerve endings become as raw as the food you aren’t eating. I can’t claim any great revelation, but boy did I have some strange dreams. One phantasm involved being put in charge of the universe and, predictably, making a lash-up of things.
Running a cosmic system may not be easy but then neither, frankly, is fasting. We had planned to go three days foodless but in the end settled for two. The Van Straten guide said this was OK and we were becoming a bit bored. Ahem, we had also been told of some very good local restaurants. So on the morning of our fourth day, we made a raw-melon breakfast.
And sat in front of it perplexed. That eating thing, putting food in your mouth, chewing and swallowing, seems odd after even only two days’ starvation. This was fasting’s practical revelation: that mid-morning crisis where you are just going to die unless you have a flapjack, chocolate bar or five-course meal? Purely illusory.
A fast is an effective fire-break between old habits and new. That week I didn’t touch booze, fags or caffeine; no problem — my body was preoccupied with the perplexing absence of food.
John and Kate stayed at The Blacksmith’s Forge, Whitehall, through the country cottage agency Helpful Holidays 01647 433593; www.helpfulholidays.com
SPIRITUAL SOLITUDE
A silent retreat at Gaia House in Totnes, Devon, a non-denominational organisation based in an old convent that teaches Buddhist meditation and provides a rare chance to explore one’s inner life.
