I experimented with fasting once. I had a chirpy colleague who was a big evangelist for it, and I was feeling laggardly, and so I thought why not give it a shot? All I had to do was not eat, and I do that by accident sometimes! It went surprisingly better than I had expected. I did feel more alert. But the big shocking thing for me was this. When I went to bed that night, I would have intrusive thoughts of food. I’d be lying around thinking “I gotta remember to prepare for that meeting tomorrow… CHEESEBURGER… I already have the numbers in a spreadsheet so I just need to put them into a graph…. FRIED CHICKEN…” and so on. It was a little uncomfortable, similar to what it’s like to hold your breath for a little longer than you’re accustomed to. “This is quite bearable,” I thought, “But if I’m like this after not eating all day, I’m going to be deliriously with hunger (SAMBAL STINGRAY!) when I wake up tomorrow morning…”

I woke up, and I was not hungry. And then I had the creeping, uneasy realization that hunger for food might not actually be all that different than cigarette cravings. They go away after a while. There’s a substantial psychological component. Sometimes people read something like “there’s a substantial psychological component” and interpret it as “its all in your head”, which in turn has connotations like “it’s fictitious with no correspondence to reality” and “you’re lying”. I don’t mean any of those things. I mean that our habits, beliefs, identity, etc have physiological consequences. I do now believe that moderate hunger can be endured and will eventually dissipate most of the time, like how a healthy crying baby will eventually go back to sleep. Eventually.

There’s two things I want to get at here. One is, fasting helped me “see the Matrix” of hunger. Two is, seeing the ‘Matrix of hunger’ does not stop me from feeling hungry. This is the tricksy thing I want to really get into, and get better at navigating, and translate into skilful action. There are still occasionally days sometimes where I find myself contorted by my hunger. I receive it like a text from my body that then puts me in a state of moderate distress. Or sometimes– actually this happens for me more– I ignore these signals without any forethought, planning or preparation, and then I begin to disassociate, and make increasingly worse decisions that I’d subsequently be disappointed with later on.

Either way, I’m really glad to at least now have a decent model of hunger, food, energy and so on that makes sense to me, even if I don’t necessarily use it well at every moment. I am able (at any time, theoretically) to take a moment to evaluate the situation I am in, and ask if I could do anything to make things better.