The man who shaped me into who I am today is the late Dr. Michael Mosley. Ten years ago, after 20 years of what we used to call “business lunches,” I had swelled into a whale of complacency.
I was put on Mosley’s 5:2 diet, which involves eating a maximum of 500 calories for two days a week, and eating mostly what you like (within reason) for the remaining five. I gradually lost four stone, but it seemed a bit too much and people said I looked sick and like a “geography teacher at a sports day”. So I gained another stone back and stabilised on a 6:1 maintenance diet.
I know that last paragraph makes me a candidate for the world’s most boring dinner party guest, so let’s move on to the more interesting point: Mosley called this a “fast diet.” In my old job, where I was basically talking nonsense for lots of money (and lunches), I would have called this terrible branding.
Fast sounds like it means rapid, as in crash dieting. In fact, fast means intermittent fasting, known in religious communities as abstinence and self-denial. Historically, in monastic communities and elsewhere, weight loss was not a priority. Fasting was about repentance, turning away from the world to be closer to God, and mental and physical preparation for great religious festivals.
This has always been a mental practice, and I’m here to tell you, it works with the Mosley diet too. Yes, there is a mind-body connection. At a routine check-up, the nurse took my blood sample twice because she couldn’t fathom that, given my self-described flâneur lifestyle, I couldn’t have the cholesterol levels of a vegan extreme marathon runner (well, sort of). So not only do I feel lighter, I feel better.
To many people, faith or not, the spirituality of fasting may sound a little strange, a little reclusive, or a little too ascetic. But to put it more bluntly, feeling hungry a few days a week is simply a good thing.
This is a far cry from solidarity with the hungry people of the world. On fasting days, you can wish for a full English breakfast in the morning. It also has nothing to do with false piety. I once heard someone solemnly recite, “I will live simply, so that others may live simply,” to the point that even hunger makes me feel sick.
But fasting, whether God’s grace or not, increases our joy and gratitude for food (and wine) the remaining five days of the week. It also focuses the mind. Fasting brings with it mental acuity. The sequence of the Nazarenes’ 40-day wilderness fast from their baptism until the beginning of their missionary work is no coincidence.
Mosley’s fasting diet needs no apology for following such an ancient tradition. Fasting was strictly practiced in Judaism, as prescribed in the Hebrew Bible. It has been known for a very long time that fasting is good for us.
Fasting was a regular practice for the apostles, as recorded in the Book of Acts, and has a very pleasing resonance with Mosley’s 5:2 in the Didache, a short collection of early Christian rules written probably in the first century A.D., which lists two regular fasting days, Wednesday and Friday each week. Those who choose these days in 5:2 would do well to know that they are following that tradition.
It is a spiritual danger that the practice of fasting can become a false idol. The law of the fast is more often broken throughout the Gospels, such as in Jesus’ movement illegally picking grain to eat on the Jewish Sabbath and in the parable of the Pharisees being condemned for their hypocrisy in currying favor with a miserable tax collector because they “fast twice a week.” I never observe 5:2 during the holidays, which is ironic considering the origin of the phrase.
The enemy of fasting is obviously complacency. Fasting is relatively easy if you work mostly from home. It’s not so easy if your job is exhausting and burning your energy (though I did manage to fast in a high-pressure job in Canary Wharf and it was, in fact, essential).
Ultimately, it helps with prayer. Coincidentally, Mosley comes from a family of preachers, but he admits, “The closest thing I have to a religion is fasting as a dietary intervention.”
I think he was really close. May God comfort him.
