Fasting

Before it became a productivity tool, a longevity hack, or a branded protocol with a trademarked name, fasting was just something we did. Not by choice, but by design. Before Uber Eats and grocery stores, before caloric abundance and 24/7 availability, human beings went without food all the time. The body didn’t panic. It adapted.

What’s now marketed as elite discipline was once the baseline. Fasting isn’t new. What’s new is the assumption that eating constantly is normal.

And yet, while hunger is largely optional for many, countless cultures have preserved fasting practices – sometimes daily, sometimes seasonally, and often without needing a scientific explanation to validate them. So why are we, in the modern industrial world, so averse to skipping even a few meals?

For decades, the nutritional mainstream told us that not eating would slow our metabolism, cause muscle loss, or send the body into “starvation mode.” Advice to eat three to six small meals a day was pushed in fitness circles, corporate wellness campaigns, and diet magazines alike. Intentionally not eating was framed as disordered or dangerous, unless it was accidental or due to poverty. The idea that abstaining from food could improve health was treated like heresy.

Now that fasting has returned to popularity through biohacking blogs and Silicon Valley podcasts, it’s easy to forget that it’s not a new trend. And depending on how you use it, it can either restore balance or deepen dysfunction. As with everything – it’s the dose that makes the poison. 

What You’ll Find Here:

We start with fundamentals. Not to dumb anything down, but to unlearn the strange mythology that’s grown around fasting.

• What is fasting? At its simplest, it’s a state where the body transitions from using immediate energy (glucose) to mobilizing stored energy (fatty acids and ketones).
• What happens in the body during this process? Hormones shift, cellular repair ramps up, appetite hormones recalibrate, and cognition often sharpens. But all of this depends on the starting state of your body and mind.
• What doesn’t happen: spiritual enlightenment, permanent fat loss, or instant health. Those are marketing side effects, not physiological truths.

Fasting, done well, is about giving the body space to do what it already knows how to do, without interference. You don’t have to treat it like a spiritual ritual or a war against food. You can just treat it like a tool. And like any good tool, it depends on the hands that hold it.