As I entered the church on Good Friday, 16 hours into the Benedict Challenge’s final 40-hour “black fast” the weight of the looming scripture readings hung heavy in the air. The unflinching accounts of Christ's betrayal and torture, punctuated by the poetic prophecies of Isaiah's Suffering Servant, convicted me with an immediacy I could not escape.

Midway through the lengthy service, my overtired 2-year-old son starting acting up. On the one hand, this providing a welcome excuse to step outside into the balmy Huntington Beach weather. But his older sister was quick to follow, and as I chased two restless kids around the courtyard, the priest's voice, amplified through the outdoor speakers, continued to proclaim John's uncomfortable passion narrative.

There was no evading it.

I found myself all-too aware of my own weakness – not just the fasting-induced fatigue of two skipped meals, and dread of going to bed on an empty stomach, but the spiritual weariness that comes from having my own shortcomings as a parent laid bare before a crowd of devout churchgoers. Feeling powerless over my rambunctious kids, a part of me wanted nothing more than to get in the car and drive away – to plug my ears to the challenging message of taking up my cross and forgiving those who would persecute me.

Somehow, we made it through the 2-hour long service, but as the day wore on, the reality of my self-imposed fast began to set in. By 8 pm, I found myself facing a choice: lose my patience with my 2-year-old, who was refusing to lie down in his travel crib, or break my observation of the black fast with a glass of water.

In the end, I chose the water. It was a small concession, but it felt like a failure nonetheless to live up to the admittedly high bar I had set out for others to follow.

With Jesus's haunting words from the cross – "Oh Lord, Oh Lord, why have you forsaken me" – still ringing in my ear, I tried to reframe my own sense of weakness and inadequacy was as a small act of participation in the sufferings of Christ. The crosses I bore that Good Friday, though incomparable to the agony of crucifixion, were an invitation to unite my struggles with His, to trust that even in moments of apparent defeat, His grace is sufficient. But if I’m honest, the comparison rang hollow.

It wasn't until Monday, on the ride back north, that I could begin to see my Good Friday experience through “Easter Eyes.” The difficulty of those hours, the sense of helplessness and frustration, had been a preparation for the season of renewal that was to come. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, I had been slow to recognize that Christ was in my midst, even as as had been opening the scriptures and revealing Himself in the breaking of the bread on Easter Sunday.

The title of this post refers to the fact that the Resurrection is not just a historical event, and certainly not just a holiday in which we overindulge in mediocre milk chocolate candy. It is a radical new reality that should remain with us throughout the year.

Every moment holds the potential for new life and transformation.

Welcoming Buttermilk (And Biscuit)

This truth was brought home to me in a tangible way when, on Saturday evening, we received some unexpected news: our new cow, Buttermilk, whom we were planning to pick up the following Tuesday, had calved two weeks early.

The arrival of Buttermilk and her calf (whom we named Biscuit), was a concrete instantiation of the Easter message. The same God who had conquered death and risen from the tomb was now blessing us with the gift of new life in the form of these gentle and majestic creatures (Dexters – a small Irish heritage breed known for producing creamy milk in smaller quantities than a typical dairy cow).

In The Benedict Challenge, I wrote about fasting as a kind of crucible – a period of affliction and testing that precedes an encounter with the divine, and a renewed sense of mission and purpose. Throughout those 40 days, I strained my ears to hear the faint whispers – intimations of a coming revival, in which I sensed I was being called to play a small but vital role. This grassroots uprising, I came to believe, would begin in the humble soil of Northern California and ripple outwards.

Now, on the other side of Easter, I feel a deep confirmation of this sense of purpose. I can see all the different threads of my life – the writing, the publishing, the daily rituals of milking and mucking – being woven together into an integrated vocation, where every project is oriented towards a single, unifying goal.

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To put it simply, that goal to become the best dang homesteading, holistic-health writer and independent publisher this side of the Mississippi. Or the other side, for that matter. It's to take the things I'm good at – the wordsmithing, the big-picture thinking, the ability to distill complex ideas and multiple perspectives into simple, actionable steps – and hone them to a razor's edge.

Beyond this, I want to do it with my family, as we go against the grain of modern society with a shared vocation of maximally independent farmsteading. We want to get back to the basics – to the simple rhythms of planting and harvesting, of nurturing land and animals and watching them grow. We want to teach our kids about the sacredness of creation, our responsibility to steward it, and about the true value of things that can't be measured in dollars and cents.

Over the past 40 days, I've started to see glimmers of this vision coming to life. I've connected with kindred spirits in the Bangor area who share this vision of a rural revival, of a return to the land, and a renewal of family and community. My wife and I are on the cusp of publishing our first book together – a beginner's guide to buying and cooking beef in bulk – and it feels like a sign, a confirmation that we're on the right track.

Subscribers will get a preview of this book beginning next week, and this Substack will remain a testing ground for my writing on diverse topics, all under the umbrella of Living an Abundant Life through Faith, Discipline, and Stewardship. This theme will guide all my upcoming writing projects, including my most ambitious undertaking yet – a training manual for the "JFK 50," aka the 50-mile march or Kennedy Challenge.

Now that Lent is over and I am back on a normal eating schedule, I find myself reinvigorated and ready to embrace a more vigorous training regimen. While I didn't entirely put aside physical challenges during the fasting period, I did scale back on cold swims, distance runs, and intense exercise. Now, I feel a certain leanness and cleanness post-fast that provides a strong foundation to rebuild strength and endurance in preparation for this year's 50-mile march.

As part of this process, I'm revisiting my collected health and fitness writings, previously compiled in the book Hormetics, with an eye towards making important revisions based on the wisdom I’ve gained since 2020.

Turning the Page on the Benedict Challenge

There is something beautiful about the fact that the 40 days of fasting is followed by 50 days of feasting in the Easter Season leading up to Pentecost.

If we have fasted well, we will be inclined to feast well – to savor and appreciate our food, to be nourished by less. We will attune to the daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of God's creation and redemptive story. But it takes practice and grace. It takes a willingness to stumble, to start again, to rely not on our own strength but on the abundant new life that Christ offers us.

For those who missed out on participating in The Benedict Challenge this year, fear not! I've been gathering feedback from the beta cohort to refine and improve the program for next year. Interestingly, the most common question that arose during the weekly check-ins wasn't about managing hunger or low energy, as I had anticipated. Instead, many participants struggled with the transition back to eating, finding it challenging to nourish themselves adequately within the designated eating window without slipping into patterns of overindulgence. In response to this feedback, I intend to place a greater emphasis on the "refeeding" protocol in future iterations of the program, perhaps even including specific recipe ideas and meal preparation tips to help participants break their fast in a balanced, mindful way.

Another change I'm considering for next year's Benedict Challenge is to move away from assigning specific daily and weekly scripture readings. In retrospect, this approach felt somewhat forced and disjointed, making it difficult for participants to fully engage with the biblical context surrounding the fast.

Instead, I've come to appreciate the wisdom of the Church's pre-existing prayer and scripture program for Lent, which includes daily readings and the divine office, a practice of praying the psalms at regular intervals throughout the day. Rather than attempting to “innovate” or introduce arbitrary forms of self-discipline, the true spirit of The Benedict Challenge lies in allowing these traditions to guide our Lenten experience.

If you did participate, I would love to hear your feedback. Get in touch! Or join us for this Friday’s final call – reflecting back on the experience and discussing how will carry the lessons from the experience forward into the next 50 days and beyond.

And now, without further ado, here is the concluding chapter of the Benedict Challenge.

Epilogue: Easter Eyes

The celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday represents a pivot point. As we emerge from the darkness of Good Friday and the penitential season of Lent, we have the opportunity to view life through a new lens.

Theologian James Alison uses the term “Easter eyes” to capture this post-Resurrection perspective. When we see the world with Easter eyes, the reality of renewal and rebirth becomes tangible. Food tastes richer, blue skies and flowers seem brighter, and old wounds and resentments lose their sting.

If we have prayed and fasted with our whole body—our whole being—we experience the reality of the resurrection. Just as Spring arrives to awaken the dormant earth, our spirits now long to stretch and grow toward the light of Christ. As we transition back to normal eating, we carry the fruits cultivated through fasting into everyday life. There is a transformation of our desires and identity away from death-based patterns towards a new life in Christ, “who is light and in whom there is no darkness” (1 John 1:10).

Breaking the Fast

As the playwright George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Any fool can fast, but it takes a wise man to break a fast.” When ending a lengthy fast, we must proceed thoughtfully, and I would be remiss to neglect this topic.

After a period of fasting, the body downregulates digestive enzymes to conserve energy. Suddenly introducing heavy foods can overwhelm the gut and cause discomfort. Those partaking in the traditional Paschal feast should take care to reintroduce nutrition.

To prepare your stomach for a meal, there are a few things you can do. First, add a tablespoon of psyllium husk (Metamucil) to a cup of water and let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes before drinking it. Second, drink some lemon water before eating to help trigger natural digestive enzymes.

Also, eating a small meal about 6 hours before your larger meal can also help prepare your stomach. Dr. Jason Fung, who helps obese and diabetic patients to cure their metabolic syndrome with long-term fasts, recommends including some cooked non-starchy vegetables with poultry or fish for your first meal. Be aware that people often struggle with consuming raw cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, dairy products, eggs, and alcohol. It is also recommended to avoid processed carbohydrates, which can cause a sudden and significant insulin spike.

What Comes After Easter?

As the 40 days of Lent comes to an end, the real adventure of integrating fasting into everyday life begins. Determine a plan aligned with your needs—whether an eating window, intermittent fasting routine, or seasonal multi-day fasts. This will help you prepare for next year’s Lent.

St. Benedict urged his followers to “love fasting” as much if not more than the feast. Once we are adapted, fasting grants freedom from old compulsions and amplifies our capacity for presence. We don’t need to white-knuckle through hunger, but can relax into a graceful rhythm of fasting—a keepable habit.

My Easter prayer is that you may see in every shadow the bright shoot of renewal awaiting discovery. Let us both feast and fast with joyful ease.

“They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” Matt. 23:4

I've laid out a difficult program – a template for advancing incrementally but rapidly towards One Meal a Day fasting. And when I ask myself if I've followed it in the way I ask others to, I have to admit that the answer is no.

The biggest area in which I've failed is my decision to allow myself caffeine – against the better judgment of my past experiences of "white-knuckling," which left me fatigued and with a bad taste in my mouth regarding fasting.

Coffee and tea certainly make it easier to power through the work day and forget about hunger signals. But they also put the body into an excessive state of alertness—one people usually associate with adrenaline but which is, in fact, more related to cortisol.

I've found myself going to sleep later and waking up more tired.

The other area I've fallen down is in not snacking between meals. On standard days, when I've been nominally eating two meals (lunch around 1pm and dinner around 6pm), I've found it difficult to exercise willpower once the initial "seal is broken." Once you pop, you just can't stop, they say…

If you read the last installment on hunger or the whole book, you'll be familiar with why that's the case from a physiological point of view.

Today's installment examines the question from a psychological perspective, borrowing a few key ideas from James Clear's popular self-help book Atomic Habits.

I'll let the post below speak for itself, but I'll make one comment for those who are adhering to the program but finding, like me, that it feels unkeepable at times. If you are failing to observe the rule (fasting window, plus no snacking), or relying on too much caffeine to make it to your eating window, you might want to pause at the current level. This week has been 18:6 – 18 hours fasting and 6 hours of eating. It's important to listen to your body and not push yourself too hard too fast. Sustainability is key to long-term success.

Doing this will still prepare you for the final week of OMAD, leading up to the final Black Fast before Easter.

I have realized that there is a big difference between going from 3 meals to 2 meals, and 2 to 1. In the next edition, I will change the structure to start off more gradually. A gentler approach in the beginning may help more people stick with the program and achieve their goals.

Also a reminder that since today is Friday, you can join the weekly check-in call tonight at 5 pm PT. These have been a real blessing for me, and I hope, for others on the calls. You don't have to struggle alone!

Lastly, this is the final regular chapter of the book. Next week, I will start to mix it up and post on other topics, including the subject of my next book - How to Cook a Quarter Cow (A Guide to Buying and Preparing Beef in Bulk) - co-authored with my wife Emma. Stay tuned!

And now, here's a sample of Chapter 6 of The Benedict Challenge, on keeping habits.

SMALL HABITS; LARGE REWARDS

“Whoever is faithful in small matters will be faithful in large ones.”

– Luke 16:10

The popularity of self-help books points to two common assumptions about modern people:

1. We need help.

2. No one is coming to help us.

Ergo: we must help ourselves.

Since the decline of the fasting tradition within Catholicism, even those who profess obedience to the Church find themselves with no practical guiding authority or rule when it comes to fasting. In a way, this is a blessing. It means that our sacrifice will be voluntary rather than coerced.

In his own time, Jesus rebuked the religious authorities for their legalism. The Pharisees were so focused on following the letter of the law that they neglected its spirit.

“Follow Jesus, not rules” is a popular Protestant slogan that could be applied to both the Pharisees and certain elements of the Catholic Church when it becomes obsessed with rules to the exclusion of pursuing genuine holiness.

On one level, this critique has merit. We must always consider whether we are fasting as a humble sacrifice or a prideful accomplishment—checking a box on the holiness scorecard.

Yet, on another level, the lack of a clearly-written rule makes our challenge of recovering the ancient fasting tradition much more difficult. Imagine that your doctor required that you fast before a life-saving procedure to maximize the odds of success—you could go a day without food easily. Yet when there’s no authority telling us what to do, we find every excuse to yield to the first temptation.

One way to think about a rule is as a box or container that constricts our freedom. The late Benedictine monk Adalbert de Vogüé, however, suggests a different guiding image. A rule, he says, is like a stake that upholds a plant:

“Does not every Christian and every religious have a permanent need of a rule that arouses, directs, and supports their efforts as a stake directs and upholds the plant?”

De Vogüé connects the rise of Protestant critiques of Catholic tradition—and the disappearance of external norms—with the abandonment of fasting itself. Figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin were so concerned about the potential misuse and insincerity of fasting that they decided to abandon the practice altogether. Catholics were not far behind. Rather than fasting for Lent, we give up chocolate or Netflix.

“The absence of any serious set of laws calling Christians to fast,” writes de Vogüé, “is not one of the least deficiencies of the post-conciliar church amid the rediscovery of so many riches.”

Today, the stake upholding and directing our behavior is gone. No one from the Church is monitoring our behavior or enforcing the rules—especially when it comes to the old fasting rules. We are left to stitch together our new discipline from the tattered remnants of tradition.

Of course, in addition to these remains, we have new self-help gurus who are eager to fill the vacuum in self-discipline with their own frameworks and rules on everything from fasting to habit formation to productivity. Within this self-help genre, there is much fluff and nonsense. However, modern psychology also offers some valuable gems and insights that can assist us in establishing a sustainable rule of fasting.

The Parable of the Seven Spirits

Whenever I read an inspiring and motivational program for self-improvement, I often think of the parable of the house swept clean.

The Pharisees are questioning Jesus, asking him for a “sign” that he is the Messiah. He sternly tells them no sign will be given them and instead answers them with a somewhat cryptic cautionary tale:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’  When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

At the risk of over-secularizing, I like to think of the impure spirits, or demons, as bad habits. They are destructive patterns of behavior over which we exercise little control.

Have you ever found, upon adopting a new practice or “life hack”—say, journaling or a new diet—that you begin to experience some beneficial results? Maybe some newfound freedom. For a while, it seems like you are winning the battle against our demons.

However, unless your new practice becomes rooted within you at the level of your identity, these habits rarely stick. Worse, the false sense of security and progress can cause the pendulum to swing back, and swing back hard.

“I’ve been so good lately,” you say to yourself, “I deserve a little indulgence.”

Before you know it, you’re eating ice cream straight out of the pint.

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For me, anything over 16 hours of fasting daily is a genuine challenge. You might be able to “white knuckle” it through one or two days of One Meal a Day per week. But fasting daily requires a different mindset. You must learn, as St. Benedict said, to love fasting.

Part of that means learning to distinguish between genuine hunger and false biological signals, the subject of today’s post. Here I should probably give a caveat that even with its health benefits, fasting can be a stressor. If you are already under a great deal of stress, you might instead focus on the discipline of prayer during Lent, while taking a more gradual approach to fasting. This is a process of discernment.

Once you are adapted, even daily fasting should not feel like a constant struggle. Yes, you will face fleeting moments of hunger (especially in the presence of food), but it should be a joyful experience on the whole. If you are trying to stick to the letter of the challenge and are daunted by the prospect of increasing the fasting window yet again, you can always modify your rule to allow yourself one or two small collations, for example.

And now, here’s a sample of the 5th chapter of the book, on hunger and hormones.

“And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry.”

–Matt. 4:2

The Gospel of Matthew informs us that after fasting for forty days and nights in the Judean desert, Jesus “became hungry.”

How hungry?

The Greek word for hunger here, prospeinos, implies painful, desperate hunger. That’s more or less what you would expect to feel after fasting for over a month. What’s strange about the wording here is not that Jesus was hungry but that it implies he wasn’t hungry for the first 39 days.

We know from stories of shipwrecked sailors and starved wanderers that the human body harbors far greater stores of energy than we credit it. A man recently survived for multiple weeks at sea with nothing but a few mustard packets.

As we saw in the last chapter, once the body shifts gears into self-consumption as fuel, hunger sensations fade. Paradoxically then, feelings of hunger actually tend to decline the longer one fasts—at least up until a point.

Very few of us face actual danger of starvation, or becoming “prospeinos.” A person with average body composition maintains enough body fat to walk from San Francisco to Los Angeles without ever stopping at In-N-Out for a snack. For most of us, it’s safe to fast for multiple days. And yet when we skip breakfast, we say, “I’m starving!”

Even Benedictine monks, despite their ancient fasting tradition, now permit breakfast after modifying their Founder’s rule.

It seems that hunger today wields disproportionate power compared to eras past, when fasting was commonplace. Jesus’ 40-day deprivation exemplified a body in tune—sensations of hunger arose only at the point of genuine metabolic need after total exhaustion of energy stores.

In contrast, modern people struggle with even a brief overnight fast—often snacking right up until bedtime and eating immediately upon waking. We seem to have lost the ability to tell legitimate hunger from fleeting cravings. Is this a moral failing? Or does it instead arise from a biological imbalance in our hunger signaling apparatus? Understanding the science of hunger can aid us in navigating our fast and distinguishing true hunger from mere cravings.

Resetting the Appestat

Scientists speak of the “gastric-brain axis”—communication between the digestive system and brain mediated by hormones that regulate hunger and satiety. The part of your unconscious brain located in your stomach connects nutrient status signals to higher brain centers, calibrating how much you eat.

In a healthy person, this cross-talk is carefully tuned to balance energy needs and storage, delivering fuel on demand through tight hormonal feedback loops. The human body has an elegant, intrinsic mechanism for regulating appetite and weight centered around this gastric-brain dialogue.

In his book The Power of Appetite Correction, Burt Herring refers to this mechanism as the “appestat.”[1] Think of a home’s thermostat and heating system. When indoor temperature dips below the defined zone, the boiler fires up to replace lost heat. Once warm air returns to the preferred range, everything switches off again until the next cycle. Our metabolism works the same way regarding fat accumulation. Its goal is keeping body fat percentage within a narrow target “set point.” If intake consistently exceeds energy needs, the appestat should dial up heat production and activity levels and reduce hunger. And during periods of deprivation, appetite should spike while metabolism slows to conserve reserves.

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Alright, without further ado, here’s a sample of the 4th chapter of the book.

A few years ago, a woman in my parish shared a story of miraculous healing—the kind you don’t hear every day. She had been diagnosed with a benign but sizable tumor, which required invasive surgery for removal. In preparation, she turned to a time-honored tradition within the church. She prayed and fasted with her husband and the priest of the parish for one week leading up to the procedure.

To the doctor’s surprise, on the day of the procedure, he found that the cancer had already shrunk from the size of a fist to that of a pebble, meaning that a much less invasive surgery was required.

He was at a loss for words, yet science and medicine are slowly beginning to catch up with the ancient wisdom that has long been known about fasting and its healing powers.

While this book is not primarily about the physical or health benefits of fasting, there is a danger in dismissing these benefits, especially when they coincide with spiritual objectives or serve to manifest God’s healing powers.

Fasting, as we have seen, is a bodily discipline—an embodied prayer—that helps us master our physical impulses and align our actions with our highest calling. We have also seen how an extreme penitential view goes against the views of the early fathers, including St. Benedict himself, who called on monks to embrace fasting out of love—not fear of retribution.

St. Paul refers to the Body as a temple—something sacred. Fasting, as we will see, is a way to purify the temple—to clear out the junk that may be obscuring our vision or weighing us down—to make room for more fervent prayer and devoted works of love.

Healing for the Whole Being

After transitioning to One Meal a Day, Adalbert de Vogüé described the profound sense of well-being he experienced:

“The last phase of the twenty-four-hour cycle, just before the evening meal, is marked by euphoria. A sense of freedom and lightness pervades my entire being, both body and mind.” (emphasis added)

This language—speaking about his entire being—suggests a transformation that goes beyond mere physical weight loss into the realm of mental and spiritual rejuvenation.

He observed, “In the afternoon, digestion saps the incomparable lightness characteristic of fast days.”

Some are uncomfortable putting fasting as a spiritual practice into the same box as scientific explanations or physical benefits.

But De Vogüé felt comfortable talking about the underlying biological reasons that fasting aids in our spiritual life. He notes that the brain, which oversees digestion, gets a reprieve during fasting:

“During a fast, the digestive system increasingly rests. Around ten hours post-meal, contractions halt, and hunger subsides; a few hours later, glucose production shifts from intestinal absorption to glycogen stores in the liver, initiating a self-sustaining energy circuit. This autonomy from external food sources fosters a nonviolent, detached state.”

This self-sustaining state, known as “autophagy” (self-eating), was identified in the 1960s and gained recognition with a Nobel Prize in 2016. During fasting, cells form autophagosomes, vesicles break down the oldest, most degraded proteins and recycle them into immediately usable energy within a cell. Autophagosomes are like Marie Kondos of the body—experts in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

All life evolves within a forcefield of stressors—from the harsh elements to other conditions of deprivation and scarcity. Most of these stressors are cyclical or acute. We labor under the hot sun but then rest in the shade of night. We feast on the bounty of the hunt or harvest and then fast in preparation for the next.

Paradoxically, when you eliminate these cyclical stressors, the body ceases to function optimally, and in the extreme case, disease results. The body atrophies and allows the proliferation of all kinds of unbenign growth that would normally have been trimmed away during the hardship period in the stress cycle. Without some amount of stress, the body never has to “dig deep” and instead accumulates this intracellular junk, which accelerates the aging process.

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“When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” - Nehemiah 1:4

These words? What words? I wondered.

When we first meet Nehemiah, he has a pretty good job as a cupbearer for King Xerxes of Persia. Then, he gets word of some serious problems back in Jerusalem. Although many Jews had returned home after being freed from captivity in Babylon, they were already in trouble again. Their city's walls were crumbling, and parts of it were on fire. This news hit Nehemiah hard. Moved by the situation, he decided to take action. He started by fasting and praying, asking for guidance. Then, he made up his mind to go to Jerusalem and help rebuild the city and protect his people.

A few verses later, he prays “Give success to your servant today.”

Going one layer deeper, I decided to get some help from ChatGPT with this one, looking up the Hebrew for the word success:

The word "success" (Hebrew: הַצְלִיחָה, hatzlichah) in this context suggests not just material or personal success but success in fulfilling God's will and purposes. It indicates Nehemiah's desire for his actions to align with divine intentions.

An article on Chabad.org says that hatzlicha means “to identify your own personal path and realize your unique purpose; in other words, to achieve whatever you alone were created to accomplish.” In contrast, the English word succeed implies a kind of following after—suggesting “a mimetic approach to success.” We seek material wealth and possessions because we see that others seem to desire them.

This gets to a key distinction for anyone participating in the challenge this year. On Ash Wednesday, the journal included a space (two full pages!) to write about your sense of purpose and vocation, or calling:

“What mission do you believe God is calling you to? Alow yourself to dream big and write out your wildest aspirations. Consider how this mission aligns with your talents and passions. How can you serve God and your fellow man through your unique calling? This sense of purpose and vocation may evolve over time, but exploring it can provide guidance as you begin your journey.”

During the check-in call on Friday, a small group of us discussed whether framing this Lenten discipline as a “challenge” is appropriate. One of the participants recommended an excellent podcast episode from the Catholic Gentlemen on a book called Jesus' Way: The 46-Day Lenten Journey. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book and I will stand by The Benedict Challenge as the best plan for Lent.)

However, I came away from the podcast with a more refined sense of what I want these 40 days to be about.

Our culture praises white-knuckled discipline and rewards the hustle and the grind. That’s not what this challenge is about. The speakers in the podcast reminded listeners that Lent is more like a boot camp for the real challenges of the spiritual life, which come afterward. It’s a preparation for an encounter with the risen God on Easter.

Keep this in mind when reflecting on your vocation. Success, following Nehemiah’s framing, means being steadfast enough to accomplish God’s will in your life. It involves trusting and asking for additional graces that we don’t usually ask for because we don’t usually feel like we need them.

When you fast, you must learn to ask – in prayer. This is excellent training, and it’s why I included the question about vocation on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday.

Of course, it’s not too late to hop on the bandwagon. The shortened first week was just a warm-up. Starting Monday, we shift from a 12-hour eating window to a 10-hour default eating window (still no meat on Wednesdays or Fridays, and just one meal on Fridays). To get started, sign up for the quick-start guide, and be sure to answer the journal questions for Ash Wednesday before the second week starts! Especially the question about your vocation.

Join the cohort

If you’re not ready to commit to the full 40 days, you can sign up for the test cohort and get an abridged PDF at no cost. I am hosting brief check-in calls every Wednesday and Friday to answer questions, share the struggles, and talk through whatever else is on people’s minds. We had another great session on Friday evening, and I look forward to seeing some new faces this coming week.

Below, I am reproducing the next full chapter of the book for paid subscribers. You can also order the paperback book to access the material in print form with the accompanying journal. I hope you enjoy this free excerpt and that you succeed in whatever God is calling you to do this season.

– Charlie

CHAPTER 3 - THE DECLINE

“The regular fast is always possible to one who wants it and is impossible to the one who does not want it.” – Adalbert de Vogüé

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday—the two remaining fast days required by the Catholic Church—stand as bookends for the 40-day period of Lent, which culminates in a feast on Easter Sunday. On these fasting days, Canon law prescribes just a single meal. This rule would demand a real, albeit limited, sacrifice on the part of the faithful if it weren’t for the two “collations” or small meals that do not add up to a full-sized meal.

Exemptions are thoughtfully provided for the elderly, the infirm, and those who are pregnant or nursing, yet a more liberal provision for “dispensations” effectively broadens these exemptions, potentially to anyone seeking them. Adalbert de Vogüé reflected on this phenomenon with a sense of loss, remarking on the near absence of true fasting in contemporary Catholic life—a stark contrast to its vibrant observance in the Muslim world during Ramadan.

“The true fast is practically absent from Catholic life these days,” he lamented.

De Vogüé passed away in 2005. However, had he lived a few more years, he might have become aware of the recent surge in enthusiasm for fasting for health reasons.

Puzzled by the failure of his own monastic community to adhere to the fasting guidelines established by its founder, St. Benedict, de Vogüé penned To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience with two purposes in mind.

His first goal was to examine various explanations for the erosion of the fasting tradition.

His second, more personal aim was to share the insights he gained by recovering the practice according to the ancient tradition—a journey he describes not as a burdensome penance but as a pathway to peace and joy.

De Vogüé vividly describes his joy and doesn’t shy away from explaining the physiological effects, such as the cleansing effects of “autophagy” (which will be discussed in the next chapter). However, his main focus is on the benefits that switching to OMAD brought to his prayer life and intellectual work– primarily writing and studying, including the research that supports his comprehensive history of fasting in the Church.

A Brief History of Ancient Fasting

De Vogüé’s history begins with the works of Philo of Alexandria. Philo, a distinguished historian and philosopher of the ancient world, shines a light on the Therapeutae, a group of proto-monks nestled in the quietude of Egypt between the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. Esteemed for their intellectual and spiritual rigor, these early ascetics “found so much delight in feasting on wisdom.” This Jewish philosopher sect meditated on scripture during the day and saved their meal until after sunset.

Why? “For they judge philosophy to be worthy of the light and bodily needs worthy of darkness,” Philo informs us.

De Vogüé’s exploration continues with the Christian Desert Fathers, renowned for their rigorous asceticism. Following their Lord, they withdrew into the desert to confront demons and refine themselves through prayer and fasting. In solitude, their ascetic practices were not for the eyes of others but served as a means for internal transformation.

Figures like St. Anthony and later St. Pachomius, who is credited with founding cenobitic (communal) monasticism, embraced disciplines that surpassed the One Meal a Day regimen. They sometimes ate only every other day and, during certain seasons, abstained from all cooked foods except bread.

De Vogüé highlights that such extreme discipline did not lead to physical decline; rather, he notes a pattern where the most devout monks often surpassed the typical life expectancy of their era.

St. John the Hesychast (509†), who fasted from Monday to Friday for at least three years, lived to be over 100 years old.

A long life was a byproduct of fasting. The goal for these Desert Fathers and Mothers was union with Christ and satisfaction of their deep hunger for the “daily” bread spoken of in the Lord’s prayer. The Greek word for daily used here, epiouision, carries the meaning of “supersubstantial.” It appears nowhere else in the Bible, and most scholars even reject the common translation of “daily.”

This supersubstantial sustenance would become especially crucial during the harrowing period of the fall of the Roman Empire. Monasticism became a way of survival when civilization was being besieged by the “barbarians at the gate.”

The Rule of St. Benedict

St, Benedict of Nursia, heralded as the founder of Western monasticism, instituted the Order of St. Benedict to preserve the faith and care for the sick. Drawing inspiration from earlier cenobitic monasteries, his vision was to create a unified monastic community governed by a consistent rule. This was encapsulated in the Rule for Monasteries, written between 534 and 542, during a time marked by social upheaval and uncertainty.

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If you’re not ready to commit to the full 40 days, you can sign up for the test cohort and get an abridged PDF at no cost. I am hosting brief, weekly calls, including one tonight at 5pm PT, to check in and prepare for the week ahead, when we shift from a 12-hour eating window to a 10-hour eating window.

Today’s installment looks at the development of the One Meal as the basic template for fasting. As always, the content from my books is free for paid subscribers.

Jesus’ initial act following His baptism in the Jordan River is a testament to the significance of fasting within the Christian tradition. Led by the Spirit, He retreats into the desert to fast for forty days. There, among the wild beasts and with angels ministering to Him, he encounters Satan’s temptations.

These temptations, aimed at undermining His divine sonship through offers of worldly power and sustenance, are decisively rebuffed by Jesus. When presented with the lure of turning stones into bread, Jesus responds, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

This act of fasting and resistance not only marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry but also serves as a pivotal moment of redemption. It echoes the failures of Adam in the Garden of Eden and Israel in the wilderness, positioning Jesus as the new Adam who embodies perfect obedience to God’s will. His forty-day fast in the wilderness is not merely a personal trial but a symbolic act that foreshadows His ultimate victory over sin and death in the Passion. The Church, in commemorating Jesus’ desert experience through the forty days of Lent, unites itself with this mystery.

This number of 40 days carries deep biblical significance.

Moses fasted for forty days—not once, not twice, but three times—atop Mount Sinai, where he received the law written by God’s finger.

The Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert, sustained by manna, before entering the Promised Land—a land “flowing with milk and honey.”

Similarly, the Prophet Elijah, in a moment of despair and threat, embarked on a forty-day journey to Mount Horeb, where he encountered God. The people of Nineveh, responding to Jonah’s warning, fasted for 40 days to avert God’s wrath.

By the time of Christ’s fasting in the wilderness, the symbolic significance of the number 40 was well-established, representing a period of repentance, preparation, and anticipation that precedes a revelation or divine blessing.

From the very beginning, the practice of fasting—or the failure to adhere to it—has been central to humanity’s redemptive arc. The command given to Adam and Eve, to abstain from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, was essentially a fast. Their disobedience, followed by an act of gluttony, brought sin into the world.

As a result, we continue to fight the battle between flesh and spirit described in Scripture. This struggle most often manifests in the realms of eating and sexuality—the two areas in which our base instincts or animal urges rear their head and tempt us into excess.

Fasting as a Core Spiritual Discipline

Theologians and saints throughout the ages have grappled with the perennial questions of how to tame our base instincts and appetites. In this quest for spiritual discipline and mastery over the flesh, fasting emerges as a pivotal practice.

St. Augustine, in an early sermon, preached that “Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, kindles the true light of chastity.”

St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, presents fasting as serving a threefold purpose in Question 147 of the Summa Theologiae. By disciplining bodily desires, he says, we bridle the lusts of the flesh. By detaching from earthly nourishment, the mind ascends more freely to heavenly contemplation (as evidenced by the revelations granted to the prophet Daniel after his three-week fast). And by embracing voluntary hardship, we offer atonement for sins—both our own and those of others.

However, while the theme of atonement frequently surfaces in these theological analyses, the Biblical narrative of fasting presents it less as an exercise in penance or legalistic obligation and more as an expression of dependence and preparation for an encounter with God.

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Over the past several seasons of Lent, I have revisited and refined a 40-day guide to aid the development of a sustainable fasting habit. This program is based on the ancient monastic fasting tradition of eating just one meal a day – a core plank of the moderate yet disciplined rule established by St. Benedict for aspiring “Cenobites” in the 6th century AD. The rule was written as a kind of litmus test for one’s readiness to renounce the world and live for Christ within the confines of a monastic community. In honor of the founder of Western monasticism, I have named my guide The Benedict Challenge.

Originally presented as a video course in 2021, I updated the material into a series of weekly Substack posts last Lent. This year, after extensive improvements, I have finally arranged the ideas into a compact book that combines important background on fasting—its history, traditions, and modern science—with a suggested Lenten discipline. I’ve also added a 100+ page daily journal to provide additional structure for the 40-day journey of spiritual and physical transformation.

Over the course of the 7 weeks, the fasting protocol transitions participants from the customary three meals (no snacking!) spread over 12 hours to eating just one meal a day by the end of Lent. Woven throughout is a system for identifying and overcoming our destructive habits (read: demons) through the discipline acquired from rigorous prayer and fasting. Lastly, the journal takes a page out of my friend David Clayton’s book The Vision for You, and provides a template for daily and weekly reflections about your vocation.

Are you moving in the right direction? If not, why bother moving forward at all?

I’ll be the first to admit that fasting and Lent do not initially scream “Fun!” I enjoy my breakfast of hamburger and eggs, washed down with coffee or tea containing liberal portions of cream and honey.

However, there is something energetic and vital about fasting that has been lost over time—something that the early saints knew well. The Catholic Church’s fasting discipline began to decline centuries ago, and this decline has accelerated in the past 100 years. Today, there are only two days each year when fasting is required: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Even on these days, the One Meal requirement has been watered down with the allowance of two “collations” or smaller meals leading up to dinner.

I document the reasons behind this decline at the beginning of the book, although my concern is less with the reasons for the death of Catholic fasting and more focused on practical ways we can reinvent fasting as a living tradition. There are many trendy guides to “intermittent fasting” for weight loss, life extension, and the like. However, few connect these physical benefits to the deeper spiritual riches available through fasting. When coupled with prayer and sincere repentance (metanoia), I have found fasting to be a vital aid in my spiritual life. My aim is to contribute to a revival of this lost tradition – making it accessible for modern Catholics seeking a clear rule rooted in the wisdom of the saints.

Join the Test Cohort

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. While the paperback is still pending publication (hurry up Amazon review staff!), I have prepared a temporary abridged PDF version with the basic roadmap and first two weeks of the journal, which I will share with those interested in a preview.

I invite you to join a test group for the program and provide feedback. If you join, you'll receive:

• Advance access to the fasting roadmap

• First two weeks of the daily journal + the first four book chapters.

• A link to a private group where I’ll be hosting weekly informal video calls for support and accountability

• Opportunity to shape future iterations of the program

There is no cost except a commitment to attempt the first week and share any feedback. For those who wish to continue, you will be able to purchase the full paperback journal starting later this week for $14.95. Lastly, you do not need to be Catholic or even Christian to participate, although I wrote the book to appeal to Catholic men.

What Are You Getting Yourself Into?

You’ll have to read the abridged guide to find out exactly what the program entails, but the key emphasis is on establishing a sustainable rhythm of fasting, avoiding the extremes of austerity practiced by certain monastic orders during the later Middle Ages. Such stringency often proved impossible to maintain long-term and is part of the reason for the decline.

Join the test cohort

The essence of the Benedict Challenge, following its namesake’s original rule, is a return to the original monastic fasting tradition of One Meal a Day. It’s become popular to give up certain things for Lent. This protocol provides flexibility for additional abstinences from indulgences like sweets or alcohol (should you decide you need to eliminate them). However, these sacrifices should not obstruct fidelity to the central pillar of the One Meal a Day fast.

If you’re feeling lukewarm about your current direction and are open to a deeper encounter with the living God, I hope you’ll join me for the next 40 days.

As we turn the page into Ash Wednesday, I leave you with the words of St. Benedict from his Rule as final motivation to begin this challenge with boldness:

“[W]e must prepare our hearts and our bodies to do battle under the holy obedience of His commands. If we want … to attain everlasting life, while there is still time, while we are still in the body, and are able to fulfill all these things by the light of this life, we must hasten to do now what will profit us to eternity.”

This post is a draft of the first chapter of my forthcoming book, The Benedict Challenge, set to be released on February 7 – one week before the start of Lent on February 14.

In the Gospel of Mark, there is a critical dialogue between Jesus and his disciples that often gets overlooked. Confounded by their inability to drive out a demon from a man, they turn to Him for answers. His response is succinct:

"This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting" (Mark 9:29).

This statement, echoed in Matthew's account, stands with little elaboration.

Regarding prayer, Christ provided his disciples with a template – the Lord’s prayer. But for fasting, they were given no explicit manual. He cautioned against fasting for mere show, as exemplified by the Pharisees.

Beyond this, Jesus simply indicated that a time for His disciples to fast would come when He was no longer with them:

"When the bridegroom is taken away from them, then till fast in those days" (Luke 5:35).

The lack of a detailed formula suggests that the concept of fasting was a given – something woven into the fabric of the disciples' spiritual lives. It was a legacy inherited from an ancient tradition of fasting that had been tainted by hypocrisy, but was not in need a complete overhaul.

In an age where the Church grapples with the shadows of despair, division, and doubt, this line from scripture resounds with new urgency. The disciples couldn't cast out a demon; we, too, face our own demons – within and without – that we can’t cast out. Jesus offered a simple two-fold solution: prayer and fasting. Fasting is not an archaic ritual; it's a vital, underused weapon. So why are we so afraid to use it?

The Modern Comeback of Intermittent Fasting and One Meal a Day (OMAD)

Not all are reluctant to fast. In fact, the ancient practice has made a comeback in diverse forms, from fad diets like juice cleanses to the basic discipline of time-restricted eating, or intermittent fasting (IF). Eating just one meal a day, or “OMAD,” is the pinnacle of IF, in which one’s eating window is limited to just one hour or less.

Other popular variations include:

• 16:8 - where you eat for 8 hours and fast for 16.

• “Fast Five” - a tighter window, just 5 hours of eating.

• 5:2 - where you cut back on calories for two days a week, but eat normally the rest.

  Subscribe and stay tuned for the 40-day Lenten fasting challenge starting February 15.

The increased attention to fasting has been part of broader trends in health and “biohacking.” What distinguishes fasting from traditional dieting is that it restricts when you eat as opposed to what or how much. While the studies on restrictive diets show little to no long-term results, the results for fasting are more promising.

General Stanley McChrystal has been eating OMAD for more than 30 years. Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey also went on the record as an adherent, causing The Atlantic to fret about “the Dangers of Silicon Valley’s Fasting Diets.” The pearl-clutching tone of the article may be the surest sign that Dorsey and his fellow biohacking tech CEOs are onto something, if not the fullness of truth around fasting. Their testimonials speak to a certain type of person who is drawn to fasting not just for health reasons but because it aligns with their regimented lifestyles and ambitions.

More than a mere diet, fasting has emerged as a tool for enhancing productivity, mental clarity and discipline. It's a method to exercise your “willpower muscles” and boost your efficiency. Some who initially adopt fasting for its practical benefits often later discover a spiritual dimension. They begin to appreciate the practice's ancient roots across various world religions and start pondering its deeper implications.

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Yet many innocent onlookers have been perplexed by the term ‘Good Friday,’ asking, “What’s so good about it?” After all, the fast commemorates the day when Jesus was brutally tortured and put to death on a Cross after being betrayed and denied by his closest friends.

For many, this is a scandal. But for Christians, it is a challenge to see beyond the very worst that humanity is capable of, to the infinite mercy and eternal life that God bestows on those who trust Him amid life’s hardships. For God, death is no obstacle, and the Cross becomes an opportunity to reveal His full power over the forces of sin and destruction.

As we close out our 40-day challenge and prepare to break our Lenten observance with one last day of fasting, many of us are looking ahead to Easter Sunday with anticipation.

The Resurrection is a historical event that has already occurred, yet we still eagerly await the Risen Christ as a lived experience. While we wait, the Resurrection is brought to life each year with the arrival of Spring and the 50-day Easter season leading up to Pentecost.

One of my favorite theologians, James Alison, says that we can awake this Sunday and see the world with “Easter eyes.” This means we can experience the reality of the resurrection more thoroughly having gone through the trials and afflictions of Good Friday and the penitential period of Lent. Food will taste richer, flowers and blue skies will look brighter, and it will feel natural to loosen our grip on old resentments. A season of fasting mirrors the transformation we aim for in our souls. It's a transformation of our desires and identity away from death-based patterns towards a new life in Christ, who is light and in whom there is no darkness. We see the same pattern in the changing of the seasons, as Winter gives way to Spring and the world comes back to life after a period of dormancy.

Autophagy for the Soul

Much of the modern health craze is still rooted in a fear of death and decay. While we can and should attempt to increase our ‘aliveness’ through practices like prayer and fasting, we should never do these out of fear of dying. Instead, we should be motivated by a desire to live a more robust life of faith—what James Alison calls a "faith beyond resentment.”

If you’re struggling with hunger or feelings of weakness in the final days or hours of your fast, I encourage you to let God speak peace into your heart, as you descend into the minor abyss of your own fears and resentments. Try writing out those negative thoughts, and perhaps sharing them with a trusted friend or confessor. You’ll never know how much they might be weighing you down until you put them in this concrete form. You can think of this as a kind of “autophagy for the soul”—recycling the old junk that’s accumulated into raw material for spiritual transformation.

I recently learned from my Orthodox brother in Christ, Jacob, that they have a practice in the Eastern Church of forgiving each other in a reconciliation service at the beginning of Lent.

Christ calls his followers to repentance (metanoia), which means undergoing a 180° change of direction, turning away from the ways of death and embracing the ways of life. There is something special about the period around a fast that enables a supercharged, even supernatural kind of spiritual growth. I mean real conversion, beyond mere habit change and life hacks.

A full theology of the power of resurrected love is beyond the scope of this series, and since I don’t have a license to practice theology I’ll content myself to give some unsolicited advice on the best way to break an extended fast.

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Breaking the Fast

When our bodies are in a fasted state, they slow down the production of digestive enzymes. This reduces the body's workload, allowing it to channel that energy into other processes. However, it takes some time to ramp up enzyme production again. Therefore, it may not be wise to eat a large meal right after fasting, or certain foods that are harder to digest.

If you’ve been abstaining from dairy and meat for all of Lent, you might be excused for joining your community in the Paschal feast that traditionally follows the Easter Vigil.

However, be aware that people often struggle with consuming raw cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, dairy products, eggs, and alcohol. It is also recommended to avoid processed carbohydrates, which can cause a sudden and significant insulin spike.

Dr. Jason Fung, who helps obese and diabetic patients to cure their metabolic syndrome with long-term fasts, recommends including some cooked non-starchy vegetables with poultry or fish for your first meal.

To prepare your stomach for a meal, there are a few things you can do. First, add a tablespoon of psyllium husk (Metamucil) to a cup of water and let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes before drinking it. Second, drink some lemon water before eating to help trigger natural digestive enzymes. You can also order a digestive enzyme supplement to take before meals, whether you’ve been fasting or not.

Also, eating a small meal about 6 hours before your larger meal can also help prepare your stomach. To start, consider having a cucumber salad with parsley and a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. When it comes to meat, aim for a portion that is approximately the size and thickness of the palm of your hand. Fill the rest of your plate with non-starchy vegetables cooked in natural fat such as butter, ghee, coconut oil, or avocado oil. If you're still feeling hungry, finish off with a whole avocado.

Finally, if you’ve been fasting for more than three days, it would be wise to consult with an expert to make sure that you’re not at risk for “refeeding syndrome” – a rare phenomenon, but something to be aware of nonetheless.

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What Comes After Easter?

Developing a fasting discipline can help you reach new heights of freedom that you may have never thought possible. Whether or not you have been following along with this challenge, I encourage you to find a comfortable rhythm of fasting. This could be as simple as a 12-hour daily eating window, or a weekly or twice-weekly OMAD fast.

I have found that twice-weekly OMAD fasting, with flexibility on the other days, suits me well.

Some of you may want to explore long-term fasting as a means of promoting healing and vitality. I’ve become partial to the idea of a seasonal, multi-day fast, and will be providing more content on this topic shortly, so please stay tuned.

My parting message is to emphasize that fasting is truly a joy once you become adapted to it. We can "love fasting" as much, if not more, than the feast itself, as St. Benedict challenges us to do.

Lastly, my prayer this Easter is that some of you will be able to see any difficulties you are going through with eyes opened wide by the resurrection. I hope you will see that whatever darkness you are facing, there is a spark of new life hidden within it.

I leave you with an extended quote from St. Symeon the New Theologian, who writes the following:

Let each one of us keep in mind the benefit of fasting… For this healer of our souls is effective, in the case of one to quieten the fevers and impulses of the flesh, in another to assuage bad temper, in yet another to drive away sleep, in another to stir up zeal, and in yet another to restore purity of mind and to set him free from evil thoughts. In one it will control his unbridled tongue and, as it were by a bit, restrain it by the fear of God and prevent it from uttering idle and corrupt words. In another it will invisibly guard his eyes and fix them on high instead of allowing them to roam hither and thither, and thus cause him to look on himself and teach him to be mindful of his own faults and shortcomings.

Fasting gradually disperses and drives away spiritual darkness and the veil of sin that lies on the soul, just as the sun dispels the mist. Fasting enables us spiritually to see that spiritual air in which Christ, the Sun who knows no setting, does not rise, but shines without ceasing. Fasting, aided by vigil, penetrates and softens hardness of heart. where once were the vapors of drunkenness it causes fountains of compunction to spring forth.

I beseech you, brethren, let each of us strive that this may happen in us! Once this happens we shall readily, with God’s help, cleave through the whole sea of passions and pass through the waves of the temptations inflicted by the cruel tyrant, and so come to anchor in the port of impassibility.

My brethren, it is not possible for these things to come about in one day or one week! They will take much time, labor, and pain, in accordance with each man’s attitude and willingness, according to the measure of faith and one’s contempt for the objects of sight and thought. In addition, it is also in accordance with the fervor of his ceaseless penitence and its constant working in the secret chamber of his heart that this is accomplished more quickly or more slowly by the gift and grace of God. But without fasting no one was ever able to achieve any of these virtues or any others, for fasting is the beginning and foundation of every spiritual activity.

Symeon the New Theologian: The Discourses, pub. Paulist Press. pp. 168-169

Stay the course, and have a blessed Easter.

Having increased our fasting window each week, we now arrive at the final challenge: One Meal a Day, following the Lenten rule of St. Benedict. If you are having difficulty, you can continue the previous week’s discipline, or take a few small collations prior to the one meal. As in previous weeks, strive to be more strict on Wednesday and Friday. “Black Friday” in particular, is a mandatory fasting day in the Catholic Church, and our brothers in the Orthodox Church typically extend this fast from Thursday evening all the way to Sunday morning’s Pascha Liturgy.

Once you can comfortably fast for a whole day, the next 24 hours are much easier. Time-restricted eating, such as One Meal a Day Fasting, adapts the body to switch over to the longer-term adaptation of relying solely on one’s own internal sources for nutrition and energy.

What happens inside the body during “deep fasting” of more than 24 hours was a mystery until recent breakthroughs confirmed in scientifical terms what spiritual teachers have always reported about its cleansing effects on mind, body, and spirit. This cleansing, in turn, is a preparation for an encounter with the Divine, or a God-given mission that can only be received with the unparalleled clarity that comes from long-term fasting.

If you choose to partake in a longer fast this week, the usual warnings about consulting your physician apply. There is a second caveat, however, regarding the dangers of attempting to fast deeply without also going deeper into the spiritual essence of Lent. We shouldn’t rely on our own fickle willpower, but rather on the sustaining effects of supernatural grace. We must recall that man does not live off bread alone, “but from every word that proceeds from the mouth of the living God.”

Fasting without prayer can easily turn to pride, and we must guard against this by paying special attention to the substitutes for food that we turn to. Are we white-knuckling, and binging on black coffee or social media? Or are we using our enhanced focus and clarity wisely, setting a tone for what comes after Lent with rigorous ‘Ora et Labora’—honest labor and dedicated prayer?

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Autophagy as Non-Violent Detachment

Once two brothers went to visit an old man. It was not the old man’s habit, however, to eat every day. When he saw the brothers, he welcomed them with joy, and said: “Fasting has its own reward, but if you eat for the sake of love, you satisfy two commandments, for you give up your own will and also fulfill the commandment to refresh others.” – the Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The Desert Fathers were noted both for their fasting disciplines and their long lives. The connection is unlikely a coincidence. Fasting not only cleanses your soul but also purifies and strengthens the body through a process known as autophagy, which literally means self-eating or self-digesting.

Autophagy was discovered in the 1960s by a Japanese researcher who won the Nobel Prize for his findings in 2016. In this discovery, science has finally caught up with what the Great Religions have said all along. When fasting, our cells proliferate small vesicles within themselves called Autophagosomes. These vesicles search for specific proteins and organelles marked for degradation because they are dead or no longer fulfill their purpose. They break down the oldest, most degraded proteins first and recycle them into immediately usable energy within a cell. Autophagosomes are like the Marie Kondos of the body—experts in The Art of Tidying Up.

Adalbert de Vogüé notes that this process represents a transition to a state of non-violence with respect to the outside world:

“Fasting is not only the mastery of desire on a key point, commanding the whole complex of human appetites. It is also the repose of the digestive functions, the cessation of the violence done to living things destroyed by these functions, the recollection of man within himself in a sort of detachment and self-sufficiency. From these spring pacification and spiritual refinement obtained, both when the fasting period is finished, and in the whole way of life in which fasting recurs at regular intervals.” – To Love Fasting

Accompanying autophagy is the switchover by the brain to running on ketones, produced from body fat in the liver, rather than glucose from outside sources. This likely explains the feelings of lightness and clarity De Vogüé experienced from fasting.

But the rewards don’t stop there.

Following an infection, autophagy can also eliminate intracellular bacteria and viruses. This explains why we tend to be less hungry when we get sick—the lack of appetite is the body’s wisdom telling you to give it a rest so it can focus on repairing itself.

We can speculate about why we evolved this counter-intuitive repair mechanism. During periods of extreme scarcity, humans would have needed to kick into high gear in order to acquire the resources necessary for survival. Fasting is thus a vital adaptation to a food environment where the next meal is not always readily available. We wouldn’t have lasted long as a species if we became sluggish and dysfunctional after skipping a meal or two.

All life evolves within a forcefield of stressors – from the harsh elements to other conditions of deprivation and scarcity. Most of these stressors are cyclical, or acute. We labor under the hot sun but then rest in the shade of night. We feast on the bounty of the hunt or harvest and then fast in preparation for the next.

Paradoxically, when you eliminate these cyclical stressors, the body ceases to function optimally, and in the extreme case, disease results. The body atrophies and allows the proliferation of all kinds of unbenign growth that would normally have been trimmed away during the hardship period in the stress cycle. Without some amount of stress, the body never has to “dig deep” and instead accumulates this intracellular junk, which accelerates the aging process.

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Peak Autophagy

We can still activate some level of autophagy in a fed state, but only at a low level. Without longer-term fasting, you are limiting the therapeutic benefits of autophagy.

It takes time to ramp up to “peak autophagy.” Dr. Jason Fung estimates that if you're eating a standard carb-heavy American diet, it will take two to three days to deplete glycogen supplies and finally enter into a truly fasted state. Once there, the rate of autophagy increases by up to five times the normal level.

From a low-carb baseline, the transition might take just 24 hours. Those on ketogenic diets can enter a fasted state in just 14 to 16 hours because of the low stores of glycogen, meaning you will trigger some amount of autophagy just through daily intermittent fasting.

Nonetheless, the occasional long-term “deep fast” will typically achieve a greater degree of autophagy than a series of shorter fasts, or even a daily routine of One Meal a Day. Again, this is because of the lopsided nature of our biology. Stress adaptations are not linear. A 36-hour fast might give you more than 3x the benefits of autophagy than an overnight fast, and a 3-day fast might be more than twice as effective at clearing out the old hunk than a 36-hour fast.

Most people can safely fast for four days or more before the body gets anywhere near the dreaded “starvation mode,” where it begins to break down vital tissue to feed itself. In the meantime, it will be burning up excess body fat, up-regulating autophagy, and generally enhancing your cellular health. Through autophagy, old defunct mitochondria are recycled into new ones, which burn energy within the cell more efficiently.

During longer fasts, the body produces an enzyme called AMPK which works as an energy sensor to detect low energy levels during fasting. AMPK stimulates the liver to burn fat and produce ketones, which helps restore the overall energy balance in cells—against the tide of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome that is leading a majority of American adults into chronic illness.

The Science of a Miraculous Healing

The same cascade of hormone-regulated changes that has the potential to reverse obesity and diabetes also creates an environment in which it’s very hard for cancer cells to form.

Several years ago, a middle-aged woman in my parish shared a story of miraculous healing with the congregation. A few months before sharing her story, she had been diagnosed with a benign but sizable tumor that had to be removed through invasive surgery. She prayed and fasted in the days leading up to the procedure. After the surgery, the doctor reported with surprise that he had only removed a small growth compared to what had originally been detected with imaging equipment. The cancer had shrunk from the size of a fist to just a pebble.

Was this a miraculous healing or simply "autophagy"—the body's inherent ability to selectively consume the most degraded, useless, and even harmful tissues?

We don't have to choose one narrative over the other. We can give all glory to God while acknowledging that he sometimes works through biological mechanisms, aided by our faith—in this case, the willingness to try fasting. As embodied creatures, our spiritual life includes care of the body and the soul. By replacing obstacles to God's healing—such as constant worrying, or eating—with prayer and fasting, we can create the conditions for seeming miracles.

There have been many studies however that confirm this from a scientific perspective. A 2016 JAMA Oncology study on women with breast cancer found that those who fasted for more than 13 hours a day had lower rates of cancer recurrence. It’s unclear whether this comes from autophagy or lowering blood glucose levels since cancer cells use glucose as their main energy supply. Other explanations for the cancer-fighting effects of fasting center around the benefits to mitochondrial function.

Regardless of the exact mechanisms, we see life-extension and cancer-preventing benefits in all organisms, from worms to flies, suggesting that all life—not just humans—have a built-in mechanism to become more resilient and robust under semi-starvation conditions.

Autophagy from fasting is also protective against neurological diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other forms of dementia, and helps maintain the quality of our stem cells – the “backup cells” that help renew all our tissues, from our muscles to our bones. Stem cells are held in abundant reserve when we were young, but get depleted as we age. Most of us want to live a long life but along with that, we want to age gracefully. No one wants to get older if that means forgetting where you are, being unable to move around, and being in constant pain. Thus, we are wise to take fasting seriously – including the occasional deep fast.

But, How?

In one sense, nothing could be easier than long-term fasting. Just stop eating. You don’t need an instruction manual, and the simpler you keep it, the better. You’ll find plenty of supplements and ‘life hacks’ like juice fasting to make it easier, but there is a strong argument to be made for keeping your fast to the austere version of water only, or perhaps water and black coffee or tea.

I am agnostic on whether minerals like salt and other electrolytes will help or hinder a long-term fast. They may be necessary for those doing intense exercise while fasting.

Bone broth can make the first couple of days of fasting easier when you find your energy flagging, but even the small amount of protein in it can interrupt the “deepness” of a deep fast and put autophagy on pause.

Likewise, Dave Asprey swears by Bulletproof Coffee for daily intermittent fasting, but recommends against it during longer, spiritual fasts.

I recently listened to a podcast, where my friend Case Bradford interviewed Rob Hanna about long-term fasting. The more I listen to people like Rob, the more I’m convinced that a long-term fast should aim at the highest possible degree of detachment from outside nourishment. To paraphrase Hanna, do you think Jesus, Moses, and Elijah were taking supplements with them on their 40-day wilderness retreats?

It is by periodically going without that we come to realize our true, creaturely dependence on our creator. It’s also how we realize our own greatest power as creatures—activating what Case calls the “Superstate” unlocked by long-term fasting.

So, how are we to discover that this promise is real, and not just snake oil? Once again, I return to the words of Adalbert de Vogüé, on whose intercession I’m depending to sustain me for the final week of the challenge:

To love fasting one must experience it, but to experience it, one must love it. The way to get out of this circle is easy: trust in the word of God, in the example of the saints, in the great voice of tradition, and trusting in this witness, try it.

This final week’s worksheet increases the daily fasting window to 22 hours, allowing 2 hours for renourishing with a hearty meal. A black fast, with no food or collations, is recommended on Black Friday.

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As we extend our daily fast to 19 hours this week, we have to nourish ourselves intentionally within a five-hour eating window. Eating fewer meals, it’s natural to consume less than you would have, but can’t operate in a permanent caloric deficit.

Paraphrasing Shaw, I would say that how you break your fast will determine whether you experience fasting as a joy long term.

Fundamentals of “Re-Alimentation”

I once heard a story about a pair of Buddhist monks who sat down at a restaurant, ordered their food, and then began to eat. The person who told me the story relayed the way that, after each bite, the monks would slowly lower their hands with perfect poise—from their chest down towards their stomachs—as if to consciously aid the digestive process. Was this for pacing? A mindfulness technique to slow down and appreciate each bite? We are indeed wise to slow down and savor each bite as a gift from God. Breaking a fast by scarfing down a large plate of food can put a sudden strain on the intestines.

The traditional Benedictine formula for eating One Meal a Day called for two cooked dishes and one uncooked dish. That way, if a monk was unable to eat one dish due to allergy or any other reason, they could eat the other. The one meal was also taken at dinnertime (6 pm), giving time to digest overnight, and granting the benefit of alertness during the work day.

I have tried to make dinnertime a ritual – not a rushed affair. Like the monks in the restaurant, I like to think of it as an exercise in eating meditation and gratitude. Fasting has helped me to both appreciate the food more and slow down because I know that I will be hungry later if I fill up too quickly. Paradoxically, the faster I make myself full, the sooner I feel hungry gain. It helps to start with a small plate to start rather than a heaping pile of food.

When I remember, I try to break longer fasts with a glass of water with lemon juice 20 minutes before the meal. The lemon triggers hormones like ghrelin to prepare your stomach and intestines for the uptake of nutrients. You can also sip a beverage between bites – even a glass of wine if you aren’t giving up alcohol for Lent.

Although we are gradually working out way towards One Meal a Day as the Gold Standard of ancient fasting, some people might find that they still struggle to eat enough within a 1-2 hour window. This week is a good time to experiment with an extended eating window of between two and five hours. This allows for two smaller, distinct meals. Burt Herring’s “fast five” protocol recommends starting with a smaller, followed by a larger meal later in the day. Eating smaller meals is also recommended if you have already developed insulin resistance, and want to limit the sharp insulin spike that can accompany a large meal.

What kind of food to eat

Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” – Acts 10:13

My original version of the Benedict Challenge prescribed rules and formulas for macronutrients, limiting carbs, and getting enough protein and fat. I’ve since come to see the foolishness of this approach. Everyone has different needs and tastes—not to mention abstinences that might make additional requirements burdensome (good luck going keto without meat, dairy, or oils).

Scripture tells us that it’s not what goes into the body that defiles us, but what comes out. Therefore, I won’t tell you what to eat or what not to eat during your eating window. One of the beauties of fasting is that it largely frees us from the neurosis of obsessively tracking calories and grams of fat, carbs, and protein.

However, there is one caveat. Foods high in transfats and other highly processed ingredients have a perverse effect on the quality of our fast. Namely, they crowd out more nourishing foods, and simultaneously fuel our cravings for more junk food. This is not the right venue to expound on the danger of excessive polyunsaturated fats and seed oils, but these should also be avoided (see Cate Shanahan’s excellent book The Hateful Eight for the long version). There is a certain combination of tastes and textures in processed foods—the salty/sweet/fatty/crunchy combination—that is engineered to hook consumers into the vicious cycle of snacking and eating for pleasure.

Your core meal on OMAD should be palatable and rewarding, but not addictive or hyper-pleasurable. When it comes to fat vs. carbs, and getting enough protein, just be aware that the combination of fat and carbs together can promote weight gain and insulin resistance. Carbs spike insulin, and fat amplifies the effects of that spike since it is more calorie dense, meaning there is more energy in the bloodstream to shuttle into the cells.

I often eat higher-carb meals when eating One Meal a Day—especially during Lent, when things like bread and lentil soup are served. With these meals, I am conscious not to add cheese, oil, or sour cream—both for penitential reasons and to attenuate the effect of the insulin spike.

However, I tend to default to a lower-carb way of eating since I find fats and protein to be more satiating. The general recommendation for daily protein is about .5 - .75 grams per pound of body weight. So a 150-pound person might strive to get between 75 and 125 grams of protein per day. This is a lot for one meal. There are roughly 120 grams of protein in a pound of meat. I tend to eat less protein when eating one meal, and more on days when I eat two meals or more. There are two ideas that seem contradictory that you must hold in your head:

1. Protein is essential to rebuilding bodily tissues and remaining well-nourished.

2. You can still spare your muscle tissues while foregoing protein, and we will take up the benefits of “autophagy” in the next post.

Transfats aside, dietary fat in general has been wrongly demonized. Thankfully the tide is beginning to turn, and people are recognizing that fat is an essential nutrient and building block for our cells, and an important reserve in times of scarcity. It also enhances the flavor and satiation factor of other foods on your plate (i.e., roasting vegetables in butter or coconut oil, and adding liberal amounts of olive oil to a salad).

I also enjoy fat in the form of cultured full-fat dairy—often as sauces made of sour cream. I try to eat something fermented or cultured at each meal like sauerkraut, Kimchi, yogurt, or apple cider vinegar. These all contain enzymes that will help with digestion – breaking down food into usable energy and building blocks that nourish you following a fast.

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Collations Revisited

Adalbert de Vógüe writes about collations as a kind of concession, watering down of the original Benedictine standard of One Meal a Day. From the 5th to the 8th century, monks and faithful did not eat until evening during Lent.

Today, the church allows two small collations on fasting days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, as long as these “snacks” add up to less than the one meal eaten.

In my experience, eating just a little bit is actually more difficult than fasting completely due to “Pringles hunger,” and the effects of spiking insulin. This is especially true of sugary snacks—less so for fat and protein.

When I’m struggling on fasting days, my default collations are “bulletproof coffee”—i.e., coffee with butter or coconut oil blended in—and salted bone broth. Since neither of these contains many carbs or calories, they keep insulin signaling low and allow the body to remain in ketosis.

As I’ve grown more accustomed to eating One Meal a Day, these collations have begun to feel superfluous. They are meant to be used as crutches to ease the transition. Once you no longer need them, you should cast them aside and experience the freedom of walking on your own two feet, with God’s grace as your only support.

There is another category that doesn’t quite count as a collation in my book. These are zero or near-zero-calorie supplements like water with apple cider vinegar, or sugar-free electrolyte powders. I drink a glass of water with a splash of apple cider vinegar in my water each morning and drink electrolytes when exercising while fasting.

If you belong to a denomination like the Orthodox that abstains from certain foods, be sure to consult your spiritual mentor to make sure that you are not violating the spirit of the fast.

In the end, there is always a tension between making fasting easier through these “life hacks.” However, in easing the transition, I am of the mind that we can use all the help we can get.

Entering Week Five

As we enter the second to last week of Lent, I hope you are finding newfound joy and freedom, as the benefits of fasting begin to speak for themselves. This week, we make a leap to fasting for 19 hours, eating for just five. You can modify this if need be, or remain in the 16:8 mode for an extra week, but make sure you are following a rule, and checking in with yourself daily. It’s okay if you slip one day, but slipping two days in a row might mean you have attempted to take on too much too fast, or that you need to adjust your systems to make it through. No white-knuckling!

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St. Benedict’s motto was “Ora et Labora”—prayer and work—but this phrase is somewhat redundant in that the way monks prayed back then was considered a kind of work. The Work of God was the highest form of labor, and while the prayer schedule observed in monasteries was meant to be an occasion for joy, the daily rigors of the Divine Office were indeed a labor of love.

Two years ago during Lent, I interviewed my friend David Clayton, author of The Vision for You: How to Discover the Life You were Made For, and the curator of the Way of Beauty, about the traditional monastic pattern of prayer and how people living outside of the monasteries can adapt it to our present circumstances. Just as a rule and structure is essential to our success when it comes to fasting, a regular pattern of prayer turns out to be a powerful aid to a vibrant prayer life. What follows is a condensed transcript.

The power of a regular prayer practice

Charlie Deist: Today we're talking about the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the Divine Office. Are those terms interchangeable?

David Clayton: Pretty much.

Charlie Deist: How old is this practice?

David Clayton: The earliest Christians continued the Jewish practice of praying at certain times of the day. Acts 3:1 mentions that Peter and John went to the temple at the third hour to pray the Psalms, as was the Jewish custom. The essence of our Christian monastic tradition is praying the Book of Psalms and marking the hours of the day for prayer.

Charlie Deist: So it's actually an ancient Jewish practice.

David Clayton: Yes. I once heard the Mass described as a jewel in the crown of the Church. The mass is the jewel in its setting, and the setting is the Liturgy of the Hours. It follows the pattern of the day and the seasons, reflecting the cosmos. The Liturgy of the Hours is similar in structure to Jewish prayer, though not identical. It was ready to receive us, shaped to sanctify time in some form.

So the mass has the highest importance. That is a weekly Easter, in a sense, the Passover, but also the celebration of the resurrection. St. Paul referred to all creation eagerly awaiting its destiny, the cosmos moaning and groaning (Romans 8:22), while we were really waiting for the mass to come, which is what it all points to. The Mass is the ultimate expression. The liturgy of the hours becomes a way to carry the graces received at Sunday Mass through the week and into each day. Thus, it allows us to cooperate continually with grace. There is a call to "pray without ceasing"—to pray constantly.

Charlie Deist: We know that fasting and prayer together are more powerful than fasting alone. Though the secular world sees fasting as a life hack or weight loss method, we aim to go deeper. We want to develop a habit of spiritual fasting, focusing on spiritual things and using prayer to resist temptations like snacking. I've been trying to pray more throughout the day with varying success. Mostly, I stick to morning and evening prayer, seeing anything else as a bonus. How has praying the Liturgy of the Hours benefited you?

David Clayton: One of the most important points in my life was my meeting David Birtwhistle, who showed me the power of a regular prayer practice. Through him, I discovered a simple morning and evening prayer, as well as praying throughout the day in times of anxiety, annoyance with others, or other struggles. Rather than following the Liturgy of the Hours, this was a more personal way to connect with God. These key moments and practices have shaped who I've become.

Charlie Deist: Don’t ever get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired (HALT, as the expression goes).

David Clayton: Hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. Right.

Then, a few years later, my spiritual director suggested I start praying the Psalms and following the daily prayer schedule. It's hard to point to a direct cause and effect, but as soon as I started, I never doubted that it was right for me. I felt the benefits—somehow, my days go better and life's challenges seem easier to handle when I stick to this routine.

The Monastic Observance of the Liturgy of the Hours

Charlie Deist: I want to discuss the Benedictines, the first monastic order. Though most Benedictine communities no longer follow their strict fasting rule, they likely still observe the Liturgy of the Hours.

David Clayton: The monastic tradition actually began with monks in the Egyptian desert before the Benedictines, who were one of the first Western orders. The Benedictines continued the practices of the early church, including praying the Psalms seven times a day—at midnight, dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and evening—as the psalmist wrote, “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws.” The monastic pattern that developed was seven hours of prayer each day, followed by an evening prayer. The Benedictines brought these practices from the Middle East across to Christians in Europe.

Benedict quotes in his rule that the traditional pattern of monks is to pray the office, or daily prayers, at set times. The prayers follow a cycle: certain prayers are said daily at particular times, while the 150 Psalms are recited sequentially over the course of a week. Now, monastic prayer often combines these elements. Some prayers are said daily, while others are spread across the seven daily prayer hours and the nighttime prayer. (By "hours," we refer to the times of prayer, not their fixed durations.) The Rule establishes this pattern as the standard for monks. Originally, monks would pray the office together in cathedrals. But over time, the prayers have evolved into a combination of daily prayers and Psalms recited over the course of the week.

Remember, there were no clocks then. So you're talking about when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Typically, between daylight hours, they would divide the day into 12 parts. So there was morning, then the first hour, the third hour, the sixth hour (around noon), the ninth hour, and then Vespers at the 12th hour (beginning of darkness).

Matins is prayed in the early morning, often around 2 AM. Lauds follow around dawn. Prime is the first prayer of the day, around 6 AM. Terce, Sext, and None are prayed at roughly 9 AM, noon, and 3 PM. Vespers are evening prayer, and Compline is a night prayer before bed.

The pattern, then, was the addition of certain canticles, like the Magnificat (every day) and Benedictus (every day). Hymns for feast days were also added. Gradually, more and more complex additions came in. Then, periodically, these additions would be stripped out, keeping only what was necessary: mainly the Psalms and some canticles said weekly or monthly. The specifics depended on the context.

Charlie Deist: So I have some thick, leather-bound Liturgy of the Hours books at home with tassels that mark different parts of the book. These books seem daunting to me because they appear to follow a strict formula. It’s not as simple as just reading from the Book of Psalms and noting where I left off. What else, besides the Psalms, is in these thick books? Do the books even contain hymns or just references to them?

David Clayton: Yes, the Psalms are included along with other content. The Psalms are at the core of it, but it's easy to lose track of that. Because for the feast of a saint, there'll be a hymn to the saint. When you're in the season, it's easy to forget that the Psalms are central. That's because there are so many additional things, like petitions, "Lord, have mercy. Please give us peace in the world".

Some of those also vary daily or by season. In Lent, there'll be certain prayers and hymns just for Lent. There'll be Christmas hymns too. So it depends on the season and feast day. You'll get many different hymns and meditations inserted. The simplest thing, I think, is to focus on the Psalms. Just observe that.

David recommends using the SingtheOffice website, which makes it easier to sing traditional Anglican Daily Offices by combining all the necessary resources in one place, creating an order of service that can simply be followed from top to bottom.

Self-Discipline and Habits: Start Small and Grow

Charlie Deist: I like this model because it aligns with the concept of gradualism. I know that if I were to try praying with that large book, like seasoned monks do, I'd probably set myself up for failure. Yeah, that would be too much too fast. Whereas something simple, like this little book of hours abbreviated for personal use, says this would be a great way for me to get started.

It also mirrors my recommendation for fasting, which is to start off basically doing what you're used to doing, just without snacking. So start with three meals a day, if you usually eat three meals a day, but just define your first eating window and last eating window. Then from there, you can move on to other fasts like 16-8 or 16 hours of fasting.

But this makes a lot of sense for me and will hopefully be a way for me to actually adopt something that gives me time to pause throughout the day.

David Clayton: Yes, what worked for me was starting with aiming to pray two times per day, maybe in the morning when you wake up and at night when you go to bed. Then the key is to make praying at certain times a habit. Even if it's just something simple like an Our Father or Hail Mary. What happens is you get into a pattern of prayer, work, prayer, work. Gradually, you can expand some of those prayer times. What I found is that now, about 25 years after I started, I've ordered my life around prayer times. So I make decisions that allow me to pray the Divine Office, and I look for ways to organize my day so I know I'll be available for prayer.

The benefit of this, I think, is what you described - by starting a habit, even in a small way, it develops discipline. Then that discipline can be applied more easily to other areas you struggle with. And that has been the pattern in my life, gradually increasing self-discipline.

Charlie Deist: I suggest that rituals shape our identity in two ways. First, the rituals we perform reflect and strengthen our identity. Second, regularly engaging in rituals helps form our identity over time.

Prayer illustrates this well, even for nonbelievers. When we pray, we are acting as if we have a certain identity. If prayer is combined with other disciplines, like gratitude, we tell ourselves a story about who we are. That story becomes self-fulfilling; we will feel more abundant and blessed.

Not only is there a supernatural element to prayer for some, but there is also a psychological component. The identities we form through our habits and rituals profoundly impact us.

We take on the identity of a disciple in relationship to christ. We fast because the bridegroom is gone, and feast when he is here, or when he returns. The season of lent is about changing our identity and drawing us deeper into that reality - that relationship. This is more than just St. Paul’s idea of disciplining our bodies to gain mastery over them. It prepares us for the encounter with the risen Christ.

David Clayton: I think that's correct. There are two things happening here. I heard a psychologist from Stanford discuss this. She said she knew how to help people stop smoking and lose weight, which is what everyone wants to do, lose weight, but just couldn't. She said the way to do this is to introduce a habit, do something you can do to reduce that discipline, and then deny yourself something you like but can do without, without directly attacking the problems themselves. She said, in time, you'll find that that'll just happen, because deep down you want to change.

Now, this utilizes those psychological principles as well. But I also think, as you say, that if what we say is true, and underneath this, this is praying to God and God exists, we're, we're changing as a result. We become better able to do God's will; there's a supernatural impact of this, which goes above the natural psychological impact that's there too.

Charlie Deist: Right, that's a good place to stop for today. For those interested in learning more, you have many great resources on your website, The Way of Beauty. That's thewayofbeauty.org.

I'd also add that if you're accustomed to taking breaks from work for meals and snacks, adopting an "ora et labora" (prayer and work) rhythm can be a great alternative pattern. So I hope people will try this. I'm certainly going to try it myself. Focus on the Psalms—that's the idea.

Sing the Office

“And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry (prospeinos)." (Matt. 4:2)

The wording of this verse in the Gospel of Matthew is informative. It implies that prior to the 40th night, Jesus wasn’t hungry—or at least not starving.

Paradoxically, hunger seems to go down, not up, the longer one fasts—at least up until a point. Once the body shifts to using fat for fuel, we discover we have far more accessible energy in reserve than we realized when relying on three meals a day, plus snacking.

Hunger is a complex phenomenon. We say “I’m starving” when a few hours have past since our last meal. In fact, most of us are weeks away from true starvation given the adipose tissue we carry in reserve. This is not to diminish feelings of hunger which can cut short our fasting efforts if we don’t understand what’s happening both physically and mentally.

As we continue to lengthen our fasting window from 14 hours to 16 hours this week, I want to talk about different kinds of hunger and the underlying mechanisms that drive them so that we can distinguish between “prospeinos”—true hunger, bordering on starvation—from other kinds of hunger that we are better off ignoring.

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The Minnesota Starvation Experiment – How to Starve Yourself While Constantly Eating

In the 1940s, Ancel Keyes [1] conducted a study known as The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which provides a perfect example of how not to fast.

Subjects in the year-long study—men ages 20-33—were put on a diet that mimicked the post-WWII conditions in Europe. For six months, they were given a semi-starvation diet of ~1,500 calories per day of “rations” consisting only of foods that were available in countries that had been devastated by the war: potatoes, bread, jam, sugar, cabbage salad, jello, oatmeal, macaroni and the like.

The frequent but undersized and nutrient-void meals kept the body from ever making the transition into ketosis. Instead of efficient fat burning, the men remained stuck in the less efficient intermediate process of gluconeogenesis. Combine this with a caloric deficit, and their bodies would have no choice but to a) shut down or b) cannibalize their own protein stores to meet their energy needs.

The results of this semi-starvation were predictable. Participants were always hungry. They couldn’t control their body temperature and lost coordination. Their appearance suffered, as did sex drive and energy levels. When they were finally allowed to eat again, many of the men binged on 10,000 calories or more per day. This study was recently replicated with similar results.

This vicious cycle plays out as millions of Americans attempt weight loss through short-term “yo-yo” dieting that changes portion sizes but never underlying habits.

Understanding the appestat & different kinds of hunger

The failure of most diets, in the long run, stems from the body's unwillingness to starve itself. Appetite is an ancient survival mechanism without which we would not be motivated to seek out food when it’s needed. For thousands of years, obesity was nonexistent in humans, suggesting this mechanism was finely tuned for survival.

Drugs like Ozempic™ work by overriding our natural appetite signals, but the drug’s long list of side effects suggests this comes at the expense of malnutrition. As Keyes’s study showed, we suffer without proper nutrition. The dreaded “starvation mode” people talk about is just a long-term response to a caloric deficit, where your body's hormones start to signal the need to conserve energy. This can lead to feelings of being constantly cold, having low energy and, of course, being hungry.

However, we must distinguish true biological hunger—or starvation in extreme cases—from fleeting hunger sensations that trick the brain into thinking we need to eat when our energy needs can easily be met with existing fuel stores. Hunger is not starvation. Our appetite, or momentary hunger, is conditioned by a different set of hormones than do-or-die starvation mode.

In his book The Power of Appetite Correction, Burt Herring compares the body's hormonal hunger signals to a thermostat regulating a house's temperature. The “appestat” controls how much fuel we burn to maintain adequate fat stores in emergencies. In Herring's analogy, body fat percentage represents temperature, hovering within a small range around a “set point” largely beyond our control. Whereas true hunger comes from the body, appestat-driven eating emerges from within the brain core. It overrides conscious preferences. It's instinctive.

If your appestat gets out of balance—even by 20 calories a day—it will lead to an annual surplus of about 7,000 calories, or two pounds of body fat. If people could solve their weight gain by eating 20 calories fewer per day, it suggests that there’s more to the problem than a lack of willpower. When the appestat is broken, the advice to “exercise more, eat less” is useless. Rather than setting unrealistic goals, we must refocus on the underlying systems that drive outcomes. We must address this hormonal imbalance.

The Appetite Gremlins

In the last post, we looked at the role of insulin in promoting a vicious cycle of cravings. Insulin spikes from frequent snacking or carb-rich meals set us up for a blood sugar crash, which makes us reach for another snack. It helps to have at least a cursory understanding of hormones like insulin, but we don’t need to identify all of the precise factors in our modern environment that are conspiring to make us fat, sick, and lazy. Herring refers to the complex forces disrupting our appestat control as “appetite gremlins.”

“Gremlins,” Herring writes, “Have been blamed for things going wrong in all sorts of vehicles since the 1940s, especially things that had no clear explanation.”

The blessings of technology sometimes backfire, and we are left to sort through a mess of complicated possible reasons for the sudden rise in obesity – none of which have to do with an inherent weakness of humanity or genetic flaw.

Here are a few examples:

• Cultivation of sugar-rich foods: sweeteners like honey used to be extremely scarce. The only place you could find sugar was naturally, in fruit. But today, even the fruit has been genetically modified to be bigger and juicier. The same goes for starches like potatoes, not to mention the abundant availability of bread and staple grains—subsidized by Uncle Sam.

• Processed foods: We can buy bags of shelled, roasted nuts without having to pick them, crack the shells and then prepare them in a way that makes them edible. Convenience stores entice us with hyper-palatable candy bars, engineered with the perfect ratios of sugar, fat, salt, and additives to be maximally addictive (and minimally satiating).

• Blue light late at night: We are surrounded by artificial blue light from our screens and televisions at all hours of the day, disrupting our natural circadian rhythm and causing all kinds of mayhem at the level of our hormones.

• Social occasions: From potlucks to children’s birthdays, we are always coming up with reasons to “celebrate” with sweet desserts at times when we would never think to indulge by ourselves.

The overarching problem is the profound mismatch between our natural physiology and the modern environment. It is truly a crisis of abundance.

Herring chooses the gremlins metaphor, but since this is the Benedict Challenge, let’s go ahead and acknowledge that the modern world is full of demonic forces. We don’t need to know all of the demons or gremlins by name to engage in effective spiritual warfare. Instead of trying to isolate a single root cause of our maladies, we must find a fix that disempowers them all simultaneously.

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Looking Under the Hood: Hunger Types

Warning: This section gets somewhat technical and is only for those who are interested in what’s going on underneath the hood.

Obesity researchers have discovered a “gastric-brain communication,” meaning the part of your unconscious brain located in your stomach. These hormones connect your body's signals to your brain about how much you should eat. In a healthy person, hormonal signals are carefully calibrated to balance your energy needs and storage, delivering energy where it’s most needed.

Diets fail long-term because they limit how much we can eat when our body thinks it’s starving. However, in the short run, we can use our limited willpower to limit when we eat rather than how much. By delaying meals, we can resensitize the hormones responsible for inappropriate feelings of hunger and expel the appetite gremlins permanently.

The Tl;dr version (Too Long; Didn’t Read) is that the appetite gremlins do most of their mischief by dysregulating three hormones: insulin, ghrelin, and leptin.

For most of us, 40 days of fasting would bring us close to starving, but the shorter fasts we’re talking about during Lent won’t get us anywhere near starvation from fasting, unless we attempted an extended fast with a low initial body fat level.

Limbic hunger refers to the drive to keep eating until you feel full. I call this ‘Pringles hunger,” i.e., “Once you pop, you can't stop.” This is why limiting snacking is wise and why One Meal a Day is a proven method of controlling appetite—once you adapt.

There’s also somatic hunger – stomach rumbling – that we feel physically. Clock hunger, based on routine, is a type of somatic hunger. When you wake up, if you're accustomed to eating breakfast, you’ll feel hungry. This is primarily driven by ghrelin, the “hunger hormone” produced in the gut. Ghrelin is essential for regulating balanced energy levels. It adjusts how much energy goes toward making ATP (for immediate use) versus storing fat, glycogen, or releasing heat. Ghrelin levels rise sharply after waking, acting like an alarm clock. Your body prepares to eat, and the ghrelin spike boosts your motivation to find food. Ghrelin falls after meals, but also falls naturally if you can ride out the wave of initial morning hunger.

Ghrelin closely relates to leptin, the “master regulator of body fat.” Leptin communicates your body’s levels of fat stores to your hypothalamus in the brain, which regulates hunger and satiety. When fat stores are low, ghrelin rises and leptin falls, increasing appetite and food intake. When fat stores are high, leptin increases and ghrelin decreases, reducing appetite and eating. Again, this feedback loop helps maintain stable body weight and fat over the long term.

In healthy people with sufficient stored body fat, leptin signaling should be strong enough to turn off the alarm clock and tell you to eat less. It should function as a built-in automatic stabilizer for body weight. For example, if you eat ice cream and birthday cake one day, you'll burn more energy the next day. Your appestat will dial up activity in response to the presence of more energy.

However, chronically high leptin levels desensitize the brain to the signal, so that it takes more food just to feel full. This is called leptin resistance—the evil twin sister of insulin resistance. The brain becomes unresponsive and thinks that there's too little leptin, when in fact, there's plenty of fat stored on your body. Intermittent fasting helps to resensitize, or “reset” leptin.

Into Week 5—16:8

To summarize, resetting hormonal functioning is the key to mastering your hunger and appetite. The causes of hormonal dysfunction are legion, and we don’t need to understand exactly where the problem lies in order to fix it.

Resensitizing your hormones is a process that can take months if you only change your diet (for example, eating more nutritious fats and fewer empty carbs and unhealthy fats). However, fasting accelerates this process. Think of it like turning the computer on and then off again.

Unlike a diet, which obsessively tracks calories, we focus on fixing the underlying system where appetite gremlins are wreaking their havoc. If your appestat control is working, you shouldn't have to constantly track calories to stay at a healthy weight. Furthermore, by resensitizing hormones like leptin and ghrelin, you also regain the ability to enjoy food and feel full.

This week, we move one step closer to OMAD with so-called 16:8 fasting – 16-hour fasts followed by an 8-hour eating window. When you encounter hunger this week, just remember that it is fleeting.

Download the week 4 fasting worksheet

[1] Keyes is best known for his later work, promoting low-fat, high-carb diets that informed the USDA’s woefully misguided food pyramid. Ironically, the diet he ended up advocating was not so far off the diet of the men in the semi-starvation study. We are still suffering from his legacy of cherry-picking and confirmation bias when it comes to the conventional wisdom about carbs and fat.

“Let us therefore now at length rise up as the Scripture incites us when it says: “Now is the hour for us to arise from sleep… [W]e must hasten to do such things only as may profit us for eternity, now, while there is time for this and we are in this body and there is time to fulfil all these precepts by means of this light.”

– Introduction to the Rule of St. Benedict

When Adalbert de Vogue, OSB, set out to recover the lost Benedictine tradition of fasting, he took his time. For two years, he gradually reduced his breakfast until it was nothing, and then did the same for lunch.

In our dopamine-addicted modern world, it’s tempting to rush into “goals” that provide us with a fleeting sense of satisfaction. It’s prudent to take the time upfront to design intelligent systems for achieving reach a state of lasting satisfaction. We are developing a keepable habit of fasting, not following a fad diet.

With that said, there is an urgency to recover vital spiritual and bodily disciplines as the hour grows ever later, as the opening of St. Benedict’s rule suggests. The Benedict Challenge aims to quicken and ease the transition to habitual, joyful fasting. Two years, I think, is too long. If we play our cards right and seek out supernatural graces during Lent, we can experience the joy of fasting in under 50 days.

Last week I introduced a system of gradually intensifying fasts during Lent, in which the eating window gets shorter until it reaches just “One Meal a Day” in the final week leading up to Easter. While last week’s rule called for 13-hour fasts, this week we increase that to 14 hours. We will also continue the more rigorous fasts on Wednesday and Friday, when we go “Full Benedict” – eating just one meatless meal at dinner.

Print your rule

Before advancing to 14-hour fasts, take a minute to review how closely you followed the previous week’s rule. If you are experiencing this as a ‘challenge’ so far, you’re not alone. If you’re just starting, you can download the weekly worksheets here.

I’ve found it harder to not snack between meals on non-fasting days, than to simply not eat on fasting days. This speaks to a problem I call the Pringles Effect—once you pop, you can’t stop.

Pringles are the perfect Frankenfood—lab-engineered to be maximally addictive, and with no nutrients. They make you think you’re still hungry even after you’ve eaten.

But even “healthy” snacks like protein bars, smoothies, and trail mixes, have warped our relationship with food over the past 40 years.

In this post, I’ll describe what happens in the body when we snack and suggest a better way to overcome hunger, which will ease the transition to One Meal a Day fasting.

Snack Attack! The Anatomy of Insulin Resistance

Snacking, like breakfast, is a relatively recent phenomenon—part of the broader trend towards pursuing instant gratification, which leads to the cycle that James Clear warns us about in Atomic Habits:

There is a cue—say a catchy Pringles ad—which prompts a craving. The response—eating a snack—leads to a reward. Each repetition reinforces the habit:

While constant grazing works for cows, in humans it is a recipe for both physical and spiritual illness. When we’re healthy, the body’s endocrine system (i.e., hormones) naturally balances energy expenditure with calories consumed. Insulin, ghrelin, and leptin are all signaling chemicals that are produced to tell various organs when to eat, and when to burn energy versus store it, based on the amounts of energy that are already stored in places like the bloodstream, the liver, muscles, and fat.

Snacking is one of the modern bad habits that dumbs down our body’s natural intelligence when it comes to regulating how much we eat. First, the dopamine reward of an enticing snack hooks us, to the point that we override the “I’m full!” signal and keep eating past the point when we’d normally feel full.

Once a snacking addiction habit is acquired, the vicious cycle of insulin resistance begins. Insulin’s main job is to signal when energy is available, and shuttle nutrients into the cells—either to be burned or for storage. When cells are already full of energy, the body must secrete more insulin, demanding that cells “open up!” to absorb excess glucose out of the bloodstream. Cells eventually become resistant to the signal from the insulin, and in the extreme case of diabetes, you need external injections of insulin just to keep blood sugar from reaching toxic levels.

Half of adult Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic, as measured by unhealthy fasting glucose levels. We prescribe drugs to manage blood sugar, and for many years, diabetics were encouraged to eat 2-3 snacks between meals. However, most kinds of snacks make the problem worse. Just a teaspoon of sugar will spike insulin, and with each spike comes a crash, and a new craving for another snack.

Why am I spending so much time on the anatomy of diabetes? Given that pretty much all of us are on the road to diabetes or prediabetes if we continue on our current trajectory, the discipline of fasting between meals takes on new particular urgency.

Making the Switch & Breaking the Chain

We used to think that there was no cure for Type II diabetes—only management of symptoms. However, a growing number of patients are reversing the root cause of diabetes—insulin resistance—most commonly through the powerful combination of intermittent fasting plus very low-carb ketogenic diets.

The same cascading chain reaction that leads to insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity can also work in reverse. It starts by putting the body into a fasted state for long enough that our fat cells begin to release energy stores to be burned.

Our bodies use a different metabolic pathway to burn our own fat stores than the one it uses when in grazing mode.

de Vogue summarizes the physiological phenomena with reference to the spiritual transformation that takes place alongside it:

“About ten hours after a meal, the [digestive] contractions stop and the feeling of hunger disappears; five or six hours later the glucose stops coming directly from the intestines and begins to produce itself from the reserve of glycogen contained in the liver. From then on, the body works on itself in a closed circuit, becoming itself the source of the energy it uses. Instead of destroying and appropriating to himself nourishment taken from outside, man enters a state of nonviolence and detachment relative to the outside world.

…

Fasting, when thus perceived as an expansive and liberating practice, has nothing in common with the severe penance it seems to be for some of my brothers.”

Instead of a pointless penance, fasting is a true bodily repentance – in the original Greek sense of a metanoia: a 180-degree turn away from old ways as a result of spiritual conversion.

The trouble is that not everyone immediately experiences this reversal as a state of nonviolence. To a body accustomed to the ‘state of violence,’ self-digestion can feel uncomfortable.

de Vogue continues:

“Several times people have confided to me that an attempt at fasting (whatever was meant by that) was paid for by nightmares. These violent dreams suggest that the experiment was badly carried out: the unconscious resented it as a violence. Instead of being an aggression, fasting should be felt as the suppression of useless and burdensome excess. If a person experiences its benefits, as I have, the psyche is not disturbed but strengthened and pacified.”

Perhaps this discrepancy and the variety of fasting experiences stems from the transitional period that must be crossed over in faith before the lightness of fasting is felt. I liken the transition to the Jordan River. It’s chilly and wide, but we all have a home on the other side if we’re willing to cross it.

The reason why fasting (and not snacking) is such a hard habit to break has to do with how the body supplies its energy needs when glucose is easily available, versus when it’s not. NOTE: If you’re bored by the technical details, skip ahead to the next header.

When you first run out of the most accessible stores of glucose and glycogen, you begin to pass through a stage known as gluconeogenesis (new glucose creation). This process is not as energy efficient as the usual process of making glucose from outside carbohydrates. Gluconeogenesis also consumes more water, making it more physically taxing. However, if you stick it out for long enough to get through this transient phase, you are rewarded by another, more efficient pathway called ketogenesis. Ketones bodies – produced from fat in the liver – are supplied as fuel in lieu of diminished glucose supplies. Unlike gluconeogenesis, ketosis spares protein and is less physically taxing. The brain operating in a state of ketosis does a better job balancing the neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate, which may also contribute to the feeling of strength, lightness, and peace de Vogue reports while fasting.

Ketosis was likely an evolutionary adaptation that enabled humans to survive on their own supply of body fat. A human being has anywhere from 20,000 to 90,000 calories of fat stored on their body. You can imagine food might not have been available for several days, or even weeks at a time, during long expeditions by nomadic hunter gatherers. Our fat stores literally helped us we took over the world, as we walked across the planet.

The average person can survive weeks burning nothing but their own body fat; for an obese individual, it might be months.

There are reports of morbidly obese patients who fast nonstop for over a year – taking only supplemental minerals – reversing their metabolic syndrome in the process. Going into week 3, that should put the 14-hour fast and 3-5 hours of no snacking between meals into perspective.

Of course, we still experience discomfort initially as we are making this physiological switchover. It’s not enough to simply say we want to stop snacking, we need to have a clear intention for how we are going to deal with cravings when they arise.

Introducing the Fat Brunch

Most people feel hungry upon waking up because they're used to having breakfast at that time. This is usually right after the body has stopped digesting your last meal, and is finally beginning to break down body fat for energy rather than the food in your belly. From a fat-burning perspective, eating a sugary breakfast (think juice, toast, cereal, and pastries) or snack is the worst thing you can do first thing in the morning.

The intermittent fasting community has discovered that ketogenic diets can ease the transition, by allowing you to satiate your hunger without relapsing into sugar-burning mode. Eating plenty of healthy fats with minimal carbohydrates has a similar effect as fasting on the metabolism, and it tends to make us feel full. This is because we are not spiking blood sugar, and thus insulin levels remain low. When insulin remains low, the “hunger hormone” ghrelin also remains low.

Thus, the best weapon in our arsenal against snacking is to eat a filling, high-fat/moderate protein meal for breakfast and lunch.

To put this in terms of the Atomic Habits framework, we have an initial cue – waking up – which paves the way for a craving: we are hungry.

Our response to that craving might be to eat a sugary breakfast, which gives us the reward of sweet deliciousness, and a temporary feeling of being full. However, the sudden spike and subsequent dip in insulin sets us up to be hungry again soon after – ready for a “healthy” snack like a protein bar that is mostly sugar.

I recommend instead responding to that craving by drinking a cup of unsweetened tea or coffee with several tablespoons of heavy cream. This doesn’t have to count as breaking the fast, since the cream is low enough in sugar and protein to keep your body in a fasted state, but it still provides a substitute reward that doesn’t feed the vicious snacking cycle.

A 10-hour fasting window allows for a late breakfast, say 9:30 or 10 am. Bacon and eggs, or eggs fried in a generous amount of butter, should be enough to stave off true biological hunger until lunchtime. This won’t break you free from the violent state of digestion altogether, but it will break the vicious cycle of snacking that makes longer fasting impossible.

Print your rule!

“Whoever is faithful in small matters will be faithful in large ones.” – Luke 16:10

The popularity of self-help books suggests two things about modern people:

1. We need help.

2. No one is coming to help us.

Therefore, we have to help ourselves. Or so we’re told.

It’s true, we are largely free of people telling us what to do. But without discipline, we run the risk of drowning in cheap amusement and distractions. In the extreme, we may even lose or diminish our capacity for joy.

In my last post, I talked about how ancient fasting traditions are making a comeback under new names like “I.F.” (intermittent fasting) and “OMAD” (one meal a day). Similarly, the self-help genre has generated a boom of programs to help us govern our behavior with rules, replacing the religious frameworks that governed the majority of people’s lives up until relatively recently.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is a quasi-religious text wrapped in the language of secular psychology. James Clear’s Atomic Habits is another example of a best-selling self-help book that has reached millions with wisdom that the ancients have known all along: rules matter.

Clear’s book takes up the age-old question of why we do what we know is bad for us, and how to do a little bit better with a rules-based approach. We are promised remarkable results from tiny changes. The subtitle boasts that the Atomic Habits method provides “An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.”

Likewise, St. Benedict opens his little rule book with assurances that his suggested disciplines of prayer, fasting, and obedience are easy—the bare minimum, really. Modern psychologists like Roy Baumeister have studied willpower to understand why rules make it easier to abstain from particular activities. More choice, it seems, is taxing. An external authority, such as the Abbot of a monastery, helps to make expectations clear. Enforcement takes away the chore of choosing.

One metaphor for a rule is a box that constricts our freedom. The late Benedictine monk Adalbert de Vogüé, however, selects a different visual:

“Does not every Christian and every religious have a permanent need of a rule that arouses, directs, and supports their efforts as a stake directs and upholds the plant?”

Today, however, there is no stake. No one from the Church is monitoring our behavior or enforcing the rules—especially when it comes to the old fasting rules. Thus we are left to stitch together the tattered remnants of tradition. We can combine this with whatever insights we might gain from the latest psychology to make for ourselves a keepable rule of fasting—in short, a habit.

Towards a Keepable Rule of Fasting

Clear’s core insight is that habits are simply patterns of behavior reinforced by rewards. In his own words, “satisfying consequences tend to be repeated until they become automatic.” Creating good habits first requires clarity about the nature of our bad habits, and an explicit intention to rewire our desires. He says we should start by writing down our current bad habits on a scorecard. Then, we create an easy rule for ourselves to help us habituate a new and improved behavior.

For example: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”

We start with the smallest possible incremental changes in behavior. These tiny changes snowball, as you deepen the groove of the new habit through repetition. The key to ensuring repetition is that the new behavior provides some kind of reward.

Here’s where we hit a seeming paradox: fasting is inherently about denying oneself a short-term reward. Long term, we get self-mastery, but it’s uncomfortable to not eat when we’re accustomed to three meals, plus snacks in between.

de Vogüé, in his book To Love Fasting, confronts this paradox head-on:

“The benefits of the fast speak for themselves. It is enough to experience them. But how to obtain this experience? A person does not impose such an effort on himself without being moved by an attraction that is already a kind of love. Thus a vicious circle is established. To love fasting one must experience it, but to experience it, one must love it. The way to get out of this circle is easy: trust in the word of God, in the example of the saints, in the great voice of tradition, and trusting in this witness, try it.”

Self-help books like Atomic Habits confirm what St. Benedict already knew: if we are to fast, we must love it. Like most good habits, fasting eventually becomes its own reward. But if we are to love it, it’s not enough to simply dive in off the deep end and start eating One Meal a Day (OMAD). Most of us can do this for a day or two, such as the prescribed fasting days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but it would be foolish to attempt the transition to Full-on OMAD Monk overnight.

I know, because I’ve tried.

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When I first started dabbling in intermittent fasting around 10 years ago, I would wake up each day and attempt to white-knuckle through the hunger. I could make it to dinner time, but only by consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee throughout the day. At dinnertime, the floodgates would open and I would begin to binge from around 6 pm until midnight, and then start the same cycle again the next day. This wasn’t intermitten fasting—it was intermittent gluttony.

In hindsight, it’s obvious what I was missing: 1) a clear rule that imposes a regulated eating window and 2) an incremental approach. Much like late Medieval Trappist monks who set out to eat nothing but rotten food for the 40 days of Lent, I set my discipline too strict and quickly burnt out. Thankfully, I didn’t end up in the infirmary. I did, however, stretch my adrenal glands to the point that I gave up fasting altogether for several years.

In contrast to my all-or-nothing approach, de Vogüé shares his seamless transition to One Meal a Day, which he achieved by gradually postponing his first meal over a long period:

“Gradually, month by month, the first meal of the day became more and more insignificant. One day at the end of two years I suppressed the little that remained and found myself in good shape. With this first liberation attained, I set myself to work on supper in the same way. Progressively, and in about the same length of time, I reduced it to the point where I could do without it. It was not without suspense that you make the final experiment of trying to skip a meal for the first time. One day I did without supper, and saw that all went well. Henceforth I knew that eating only once a day was possible for a modern man like me.”

de Vogüé is the poster child for the Atomic Habits approach of incremental gains. You start with something so small or easy that it’s hard not to succeed, like reducing the size of your breakfast. In wracking up these little wins, we get a taste of the reward that will cement the habit as we attempt increasingly more difficult forms.

In working towards harder habits—such as a longer intermittent fast—you must find the sweet spot between too little progress, which will lead you to stall, and too much, which will lead you to burn out. de Vogüé took two years to make the transition. Many may find that they can adjust more quickly to eating One Meal a Day.

Clear finds evidence that it takes at least 21 days to form a new habit, but the average is closer to 66 days and the range extends all the way up to 200+ days.

40 days falls squarely within that range, making it an appropriate length of time to jumpstart a fasting habit and experience its rewards. However, we should always remember that it is a discipline to be practiced over a lifetime—not a fad diet to be kept for a time, before falling back into the constant snacking and grazing pattern of the modern world.

Without rules or a strong set of principles to conform to, a single slip-up can set us up to give in to a whole chain of temptations. With a rule, we might find that we slip one day, but we can get back on the proverbial horse. Gradual improvement combined with consistency creates the compounding effect that Albert Einstein called the 8th wonder of the world. As Clear writes, never slip two days in a row.

Designing a Rule for Modern Times

We can recover the ancient fasting tradition by taking baby steps, as both de Vogüé and Clear suggest. The Rule of St. Benedict presents the simplest and best fasting rule: One Meal a Day and limited Lenten abstinence. We should hold this up as the Gold Standard, and lay out weekly stepping stones that will allow us to progress closer to this ideal by the end of the 6-week season of Lent.

Instead of shrinking the size of our breakfast, as de Vogüé did, we will postpone our breakfast and shorten our eating window by a little bit each week. We will also use the traditional fasting days of Wednesdays and Fridays to test our discipline—asking for additional graces on these days to fast for longer than usual—and write out a simple rule to keep ourselves accountable.

Last week, I proposed following the “One Meal a Day” rule on the two traditional fasting days—Wednesday and Friday—to the best of one’s ability, and otherwise simply attempting to fast overnight (12 hours) and abstain from snacking between meals.

No one is going to force you to fast, but if you wish to progress incrementally toward St. Benedict’s original Lenten fasting discipline, here is what I propose for this week’s rule:

• Week 2 (March 6 - 12) — 13-hour fast, 11-hour eating window.

  • Three meals; no snacking.

  • Wednesdays & Fridays: One Meal (with collations as necessary)

On fasting days, for example, I might consume one cup of bone broth as a “collation,” along with black coffee and tea—but being mindful not to overdo the caffeine, or allow the eating window to continue too late into the evening.

You can download and print the updated template here.

Get the template

In the following installments, we will examine our hunger and cravings to understand how we can rewire our desires to find fulfillment through alternative rewards instead of constant snacking—until fasting becomes habitual. We will review our current eating patterns and aim to replace unhealthy habits with better, more nourishing ones. Each week, if we consistently follow our rule, we can lengthen the fast until we find that eating one meal a day isn’t just easy, but brings us joy as well.

Each week, I’ll provide more context and resources to help you stick with your chosen fasting rule. Please email me any feedback on the templates or content.

Intermittent fasting is making a comeback. One variation, “OMAD,” is particularly popular among busy professionals since it involves eating just One Meal a Day (hence the acronym).

Some have labeled it a dangerous fad – or even a starvation diet – but even a brief examination of the topic reveals that restricting when you eat rather than how much is one of the safest, most effective forms of dietary discipline. The health benefits go far beyond simply losing weight, to promoting a more efficient metabolism and clearing out the junk proteins that normally accumulate in our cells.

You wouldn’t know it from reading the secular literature, but the practice of eating only one meal is an ancient discipline – dating back to early Christianity and Judaism before that. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.

In the early Christian Church, Wednesday and Friday were considered fasting days – meaning that disciples would not eat from dinner the night before until at least 3 pm on the fasting day. This tradition was updated from the even older Jewish practice of twice-a-week fasting on Mondays and Thursdays, in addition to certain Holy Days.

Some Catholics still abstain from meat on Fridays year-round, and the Eastern Orthodox Church is known for the numerous strict abstinences that are recommended during fasting seasons such as Lent and Advent. The idea of a spiritual rule of fasting, however, has fallen out of favor – especially in the West.

In today’s Catholic Church, there are only two mandatory fasting days: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. These days are the bookends for the 40-day penitential period of Lent, which culminates in a feast on Easter Sunday. On these fasting days, Canon law prescribes just a single meal, but makes allowance for two “collations” or small meals that do not add up to a full-sized meal.

As the fasting requirements have lessened, so too have the physiological benefits. Secular people are rediscovering the benefits of fasting with urgency, in light of the obesity and diabetes epidemics.

Catholics in particular, however, should be asking what they can gain both spiritually and physically from recovering their own ancient tradition of One Meal a Day fasting.

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St. Benedict and the One Meal

“The principle of just one meal… is the essence of the fast.” – Adalbert de Vogue, OSB, To Love Fasting

As I mentioned in the previous post, Saint Benedict of Nursia is considered the founder of Western monasticism. The Order of St. Benedict was instituted as a way of preserving the faith at a time when Roman civilization was being sieged by the “barbarians at the gate.” St. Benedict believed that monastic communities had to be governed by a uniform rule to ensure that monks wouldn’t simply free-ride off of the communal living arrangement. In addition to rigorous prayer and self-denial, he institutionalized a fasting requirement as part of his broader Rule for Monasteries as a way of establishing order during such chaotic and perilous times.

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The fasting rule was simple. The monks were to eat just one meal a day for 200+ days out of the year – from the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, in September, until Easter in April. During the summer months, a second meal was added to support a longer work day.

The rule of St. Benedict also barred the eating of four-legged animals (i.e., beef, pork, lamb, etc.) year-round. During Lent, monks abstained from other kinds of meat (except fish), and sometimes added additional penances at the discretion of the Abbot. Beyond this, Benedict simply urged the monks to “love fasting”  (Jejunium amare).

The full line from Chapter 4 of the rule states:

“Renounce yourself in order to follow Christ; discipline your body, do not pamper yourself, but love fasting.”

While most of us find this command at odds with our natural appetites, it was embraced by the devout early Christians and Desert Fathers and Mothers who discovered that fasting allowed them a closer union with Christ.

Paradoxically, it is by not eating that these holy men and women learned to satisfy their deeper hunger with the “supersubstantial bread” that Christ offers in abundance to those who ask through the Lord’s Prayer:

"Give us this day our daily (epiouision) bread."

For centuries, this spiritual understanding accompanied the practice of eating one meal on fasting days. The tradition continued through the Benedictine monasteries into Europe during the middle ages. The practice of rigorous fasting during Lent eventually spread to all Medieval Europeans who belonged to the faith – not just the monks. By the 700s AD—some 200 years after the founding of the Benedictines—the standard Lenten discipline in Roman Catholic Europe was even more strict than the original Rule of St. Benedict. It included:

• No animal meats or fats

• No eggs or dairy

• No sexual intercourse between spouses

• And no Sundays off.

Fish was permitted, as were wine and beer, but only within the confines of the One Meal a Day tradition inherited from St. Benedict and his predecessors.

Excessive Abstinence & the Decline of OMAD

At some point in the middle ages, the spiritual essence of fasting was lost, along with the principle of the one meal with it.

Taylor Marshall marks the beginning of the decline around the year 800 AD, when the monasteries moved the mid-afternoon nones service to 12 pm, so they could break their fast three hours earlier. Soon after, German bishops began to allow the consumption of dairy or “lacticinia” during Lent in exchange for payment or good deeds. When coffee and tea became widely available, consumption was allowed prior to nones.

The final nail in the coffin came in 1966, when Pope Paul VI limited mandatory fasting to just two days of the year – Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – during which one meal and two collations were also permitted.

Clearly, fasting requirements didn’t erode overnight, so it’s hard to pinpoint what caused this gradual degradation.

Adalbert de Vogüé was a French Benedictine monk born in 1924 who lived to be 87 years old, passing away in 2011. de Vogüé was Puzzled by his own order’s failure to follow the rule laid out by its founder – the Master – St. Benedict himself. In his book To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience, de Vogüé examines several explanations for the erosion of the fasting tradition.

Ultimately, he concludes that “Christian fasting has disappeared because pastors and faithful have not reinvented it together in each generation.”

In other words, the original spirit of fasting has been lost. Fasting came to be viewed as purely a penalty, for which other sacrifices could be substituted. In his historical survey of fasting in the church, de Vogüé finds again and again that monks were happy to trade an earlier breakfast for stricter abstinences and lower quality food. One French Trappist community, for example, took the logic of substitutable sacrifice to the extreme by attempting the most severe imaginable abstinences during Lent. The monks were allowed to eat breakfast and lunch, but all of the meals consisted of blackened bread and moldy cabbage. The majority of monks became too ill to complete the 40-day period and had to loosen their discipline just to make it out of the infirmary alive.

In this anecdote, we can hear the echoes of the same “diet culture” that pervades the modern world. People would rather restrict what they eat to a few unappetizing foods than limit when they eat through disciplined fasting, followed by sufficient nourishment in a single, evening meal.

Once the transformation from vital discipline to penal sacrifice had been made, it was only a matter of time before fasting would disappear along with all of the other excessive medieval penances: self-flagellation, chastity belts, and the like. Many of today’s religious leaders still operate on the misguided association of fasting with punishment, and therefore hesitate to make demands on their flock out of fear that they will make God out to be a tyrant.

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Recovering the Joy of Daily Fasting

In reviving the Master’s dictum to “love fasting,” de Vogüé attempted to recover the joyful component of the traditional fasting discipline, as he experienced it in the second half of his own life. To love fasting is to flip the whole idea of repentance on its head. It’s not about proud flagellation or a triumph of the will in exceeding our limits. Instead, fasting repentance is about turning away from self-will. It requires a humble surrender to the light yoke of Christ, while discovering what we can do through grace.

Alexander Schmemann, the influential Eastern Orthodox priest, writes that fasting requires “a total effort of our being.” He continues:

“The Orthodox idea of fasting is first of all that of an ascetical effort. It is the effort to subdue the physical, the fleshly man to the spiritual one, the ‘natural’ to the ‘supernatural.’”

In other words, the fasting discipline gives us mastery over ourselves and restores the whole person to what they are meant to be. In fact, the Church Fathers believed that the soul was disordered – not the body – and that asceticism could re-orient the heart’s desires and renew the soul. We must periodically forego even good things, that our bodies need, in order that we may delight in them all the more.

de Vogüé settled on a daily routine of OMAD (long before it was trendy) because he ultimately found it more pleasurable and rewarding than breaking his fast too early in the day, and becoming sluggish. Carving out the freedom to skip breakfast and lunch turned out to be quite difficult for him. Following the modern trend, his superiors actively discouraged fasting in the name of preserving community meals. Eventually, however, de Vogüé was allowed to live as a hermit, and eat only one evening meal each day – in solitude – following the community prayer of Vespers.

After a short adjustment period, de Vogüé found that St. Benedict’s fasting rule was a light burden.

“My mind is at its most lucid, my body vigorous and well-disposed, my heart light and full of joy,” he reports feeling at the end of his daily fast.

Those of us who have dabbled in intermittent fasting can attest to its benefits: mental clarity, surprising new vigor, and even inexplicable joy. We know that neurotransmitters like epinephrine and norepinephrine are activated during fasting, but we should be wary of trying to reduce the fundamentally spiritual nature of fasting to mere physical and chemical reactions in the brain and body.

The Biblical View of Fasting

While it’s true that scripture occasionally refers to fasting as a penitential practice, it is more often framed as a preparation for an encounter with God. To be in the right mindset for this encounter, one must undergo a period of spiritual and physical affliction.

In his book Fasting: The Ancient Practices, Scott McKnight looks at the full Biblical sweep of fasting, and finds that “every dramatic circumstance calls for supplication reinforced by fasting.”

In Lent, Christian disciples fast for 40 days to prepare for Easter. Moses fasted for 40 days and 40 nights when he went up the mountain to meet God in the Burning Bush. He fasts again before receiving the 10 Commandments. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, subsisting only on Manna, in preparation for their arrival in the land of Milk and Honey.

In the Book of Kings, Elijah fasts for 40 days and nights in order to be able to hear God’s still small voice on Mount Horeb.

And finally, in the New Testament, Jesus fasts for 40 days in the desert in preparation for his public ministry. There, Satan tempts him with an all-you-can-eat buffet of bread, to which he responds, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

Hearing the word of God, in turn, requires attention. Fasting hones our attentive faculties and temporarily halts the usual bombardment of our senses for long enough to hear what we otherwise might ignore or miss altogether.

If you view fasting as pure penance, you likely will not experience the same degree of preparation. Nor will you be as likely to keep the practice when it becomes difficult. If instead, you view it as a discipline that will help you discern your highest calling, even the periods of difficulty will come with a certain sweetness.

“The regular fast is always possible to one who wants it,” writes de Vogüé, “and is impossible to the one who does not want it.”

The experience of the middle ages should teach us not to stack up too many complicated abstinences, or deprive ourselves too suddenly, when we are seeking to build a keepable habit of fasting. Attempting to exceed our limitations is a kind of perverse pride. However, the resurgence of intermittent fasting, and joyful testimonials of spiritual men like Adalbert de Vogüé, show us that we are still capable of the ancient discipline of eating one meal a day. If we approach this challenge gradually, and with trusting humility, we will discover that it is possible to not just endure fasting, but to love it.

Starting this Sunday, I invite you to set your own keepable fasting rule using my template, or writing down a clear intention on a blank piece of paper:

Create Your Own Rule

Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast recently featured a debate on whether the medication will solve obesity in America.

The Free Press

Will Ozempic Solve Obesity in America? A Debate

Listen now (78 min) | Ozempic, the brand name drug for a medication called semaglutide, is one of the most popular drugs on the market right now. Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, the injectable drug has recently boomed in popularity for its off-label use to help people lose weight... fast. Celebrities and public figures have admitted they're taking it. Instagra…

Listen now

3 years ago · 21 likes · 33 comments · Bari Weiss

You should listen and draw your own conclusions, but after hearing both sides of the debate, I’m skeptical.

It’s not that I don’t believe in miracles. Rather, we’ve been promised so many quick fixes and miracle drugs that it seems unlikely we’ve suddenly found the Holy Grail. More importantly, a drug represents a medical solution to a deeper spiritual problem in the West. “Diet culture,” and the bevy of drugs and fads to fight our appetites, is paradoxically a result of a wealthy society that remains trapped in a scarcity mentality.

The spiritual response, in my view, is a return to the ancient discipline of fasting – but not as it has been presented in the popular media, as a “life hack” to lose weight. Instead, fasting must be renewed as an effort of the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. Although a regenerated metabolism is one effect of fasting, its true power extends far beyond any physiological mechanism.

Before signing up to pay what may be a lifetime annuity to the makers of Ozempic, we might examine its claims more closely and compare them to the alternative approach that has been around for millennia.

Better Living Through Chemistry? How Ozempic Works

Ozempic was originally developed to regulate insulin in type 2 diabetics, but is now racking up celebrity fans and testimonials on TikTok for its off-label weight loss potential. It mimics a naturally-occurring hormone, GLP-1, which is produced in the gut to signal that we are full. Taking the drug makes that fullness effect last longer, and reduces thoughts of food between meals. It’s basically a chemical version of the stomach-shrinking gastrointestinal bypass surgery, but because it doesn’t require an invasive procedure, people are signing up in droves.

People criticize Ozempic for promising results without demanding the hard work and discipline of lifestyle change, but spokespeople for the drug argue that obesity is a brain disease, inherited through genes. If being overweight is genetic, then we are absolved of taking responsibility for our health.

However, the sharp rise in obesity over the past 30 years suggests factors other than genetics are at play. 40% of American adults are now morbidly obese. To this, the “brain disease theory” answers that genes load the gun, but our environment pulls the trigger. When we look at our environment, there are many possible culprits – from processed foods and unnatural light to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

The classic doctor’s advice to “eat less and exercise more” tends to ignore the environmental factors that stack the deck against weight loss. Thinking purely in terms of “calories-in-calories-out” transfers blame to the patient for his gluttony, laziness, or both. This explanation fails because it ignores the powerful hormonal signals that tell the brain how much to eat in order to maintain a certain “set point” of body fat. You can white knuckle your way through a restrictive diet for a time, but willpower is no match for these bodily cues long term. The virtue of Ozempic’s hormone-modification strategy is that it overrides the need for willpower by hacking our body’s reward system.

The complexity of the debate, coupled with the difficulty of losing weight once gained, is enough to frustrate anyone. Rather than futilely attempting yet another lifestyle change, it's tempting to say, "Just give me the drug already!”

But the stakes are too high to accept the drugmaker’s narrative uncritically.

Cracks in the Narrative

TikTok is full of dramatic testimonials, both positive and negative, from people who have taken Ozempic.

Some show off their impressive bikini-bod transformations or track progress by putting on their loose-fitting old clothing.

Others warn that they gained back double the weight after going off the drug (patients who take Ozempic for type 2 diabetes typically remain on the medication long-term since discontinuing can cause gastrointestinal issues).

The drug has now been approved for children as young as 12. That means that if Ozempic becomes the default treatment for obesity in this country, then one in three children are on a trajectory to be prescribed an irreversible course of a drug that extracts a high cost – paid directly to Big Pharma.

That’s not the only downside. The Ozempic website reports:

“The most common side effects of Ozempic® may include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach (abdominal) pain, and constipation.”

Finally, anecdotal reports suggest that altering the receptors in our gut can lead to more rapid aging, severe depression, and even suicidal thoughts.

These last side effects remind me of G. K. Chesterton’s wise observation that true despair stems not from being weary of suffering but from being weary of joy. Suppressing hunger may fix a symptom, but our body’s desires serve important purposes – not least of which is the joy of eating. Chesterton’s aphorism rings especially true in today's dopamine-overload era, where the constant availability of cheap food and entertainment makes us take them for granted. The more we indulge our famished cravings, the more starved we become, and the more we need external regulation to rein in our excessive desires.

Thus, diet culture is a direct result of our physical and spiritual malnourishment.

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Thriving in an Age of Barbarism

The obesity epidemic is only symptomatic of a broader cultural crisis, through which the entire West has lost its moorings. A society that lets kids become overweight and then medicates them en masse to stop them from eating so much cannot be called civilized in any sense of the word. The crisis we are facing—of which obesity is merely one manifestation—afflicts not just the body, but also the mind and spirit.

But while a wonder drug seems implausible, I haven’t given up on a miracle.

Much of the “good news” in the Gospels consists of verified, eye-witness reports of miraculous healings – not only those performed by Jesus, but also by his disciples under the power of the Holy Spirit.

Where did the disciples get this power to cast out demons and perform healing miracles?

We get a clue from the word disciple, which implies discipline. The answer is stated plainly in the Gospel of Matthew:

Fasting has been touted as a health cure, as well as a productivity and weight loss “hack,” but this framing falls short of its greatest power. Fasting is a regenerative discipline that partially restores what was lost in the fall. It is a core plank of a broader return to the simple asceticism that allowed the early church, and later the monasteries, to flourish.

In his book After Virtue, Alistair MacIntyre compares the present day to the period of the collapse of the Roman Empire, when Benedictine monasteries preserved the light of Christ’s teachings amid the chaos and violence of that period. They accomplished this through intense discipline and asceticism—through prayer and fasting. Long before it was a trendy protocol for “intermittent fasting,” eating one meal a day was the essence of St. Benedict’s fasting rule for monasteries. They practiced this during Lent, and on more than half the days of the year. Many attribute their lively, prayerful, and productive existence to the practice of rigorous fasting.

But today this practice has been largely abandoned—even in the monasteries.

After Virtue doesn’t mention fasting, but MacIntyre concludes his book with an exhortation to form small communities in which the moral life can flourish, and notes that the special challenge today lies in recognizing that “the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”

Indeed, they are in the lobbies of your elected representatives’ office, pushing pharmaceutical cures for spiritual illness.

Introducing the Benedict Challenge

Over the next six weeks, I will be providing weekly templates and resources to help set your own rule and progress gradually toward the goal of the Gold Standard Benedictine formula of One Meal a Day (during Lent). This challenge is meant to regenerate mind, body, and spirit, and break free from the scarcity mindset that is so prevalent in our crisis of abundance.

I do not suggest fasting as a panacea to cure obesity. Not everyone can fast, for various health reasons. My intention in relaunching a 40-day fasting challenge is twofold:

First, it is to help myself and others incrementally recapture the discipline that will enable us to fast with the same rigor as the ancient Church. As we will see, St. Benedict set a high bar, but not impossibly high. Scripture speaks ill of “the flesh” (sarx), which can be easy to mistake for a rejection of bodily health. While we must war against our natural appetites and inordinate desires to satisfy the flesh, I like to think of this task in terms of self-mastery—not self-negation. The incarnation teaches us that God took on the weakness of human flesh in order to show us how our bodies might be renewed and restored to new life, through Him. Fasting helps us to discipline the body, but more than that it teaches us the skill of fasting of the heart and makes us more like Christ. It makes us more sensitive and attuned to the world around us, to the suffering of others, and to the powers that have belonged to us all along.

Second, it is to embolden us to reclaim our anointing as Christ's torchbearers, who have given all authority through him under heaven and earth to bring the Gospel to the far corners of the earth. This authority enables us to heal sickness and free captives from their own spiritual enslavement. The Gospel has now spread around the world, but it is more important than ever to evangelize with passion in the post-Christian era. Outside of a handful of Pentecostals and professional exorcists, few Christians even attempt to perform miraculous healings. We fail to exercise this authority because we are embarrassed that we will be found powerless. We fail to fast because we are afraid to fail. And in truth, we are largely powerless. Our willpower alone is insufficient to maintain the rigorous fasting practiced by the ancients.

I am creating this challenge because I need it to stay accountable in the upcoming season of Lent. I must confess that a part of me recoils at the thought of fasting for the next 40 days. The spirit is willing but this flesh is weak!

Thankfully, there is a great treasure to be found in the deposit of ancient wisdom that gives us fasting as a vital tradition—whether that's Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Judaism, or Buddhism. However, my focus in this series will be on the Catholic tradition—as this is my own, and the one I believe possesses the fullness of truth. Unfortunately, much of the deposit of faith—while available and accessible to all who seek it out—is covered in centuries worth of dust. It must be brought out and made new, as well as explored in light of the emerging science of our hormones and physiology.

Over time, I hope that this project will inspire some version of the small communities that MacIntyre envisioned as the new monasteries for the encroaching dark ages.

God bless you on this journey. I’ll see you on the road.