Excerpt
How to Fast
1Body, Soul, and SpiritI hate fasting. And hate is a strong word. Over the years, my hatred for this transformative practice has ebbed and flowed in proportion to my love for food.
Now, I am six foot one, have a somewhat athletic build, and weigh a little more than two hundred pounds. I am not overweight by any means, and that is simply because I love food, not eating. And there is a difference.
Some people love to eat, and the “what” is secondary. The very act of eating is what they enjoy. A friend told me about a Japanese concept called Kuchisabishii (pronounced koo-chee-sa-bee-shee), which describes a condition where we eat not out of hunger but rather because our mouths are lonely. If I had to describe my 2020 pandemic experience, it would be that one word, Kuchisabishii. And I’m pretty sure the masses are with me on this. The word speaks of periods where the eating is mindless. We fall in love with the act of eating.
But I’ve learned to love the art of eating.
A great example of this is in the animated film Ratatouille when Ego, a food critic, is questioned by the character Linguini on why he is so thin for somebody who loves food, to which he responds, “I don’t like food—I love it! If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.” That’s me. I love the art of eating. The act is merely a means to that joyful end. We all know the elation of biting into a chicken wing that has the right amount of crunchiness, or the swirl of umami flavor when we slurp a sweet and savory soup. In my book, ice cream should be an extra-creamy, decadent treat. So, if a food lacks any or all the above, is it really worth eating?
What I enjoy more than what I eat is whom I eat with. Now, that is where fasting literally punches me in the gut.
I am originally from Ko Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. I hail from the Ndebele tribe, a rebellious offshoot of the renowned Zulu nation in South Africa. Ndebele are a naturally gregarious and hospitable people, so growing up with an appreciation for good food and great company was literally baked into me. I have carried this formative value into every aspect of my career. A joke I am rather notorious for constantly cracking is that a meeting without food is simply an email!
The woman I married is the exact same way to the tenth power. We met, fell in love, and have prioritized our friendships based on whom we enjoy eating with and hanging out with. That (along with the discomfort of it all) is one of the main reasons why I dislike fasting, and were it not for its life-changing benefits, I would have long abandoned it.
But oh, the benefits. It is truly the most transformational discipline you could ever engage in, and any nation, tribe, or civilization that has embraced it fully has kept it central to their life cadence. Africans have been fasting for millennia. Asians, Middle Easterners, and many others have embraced it for its radical transformation of the entire human being: spirit, soul, and body. Fasting works, which is the reason it has become such an irreplaceable part of my holistic health. Spiritually, physically, and psychologically, the discipline works.
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In summer 2019, I felt the Lord inviting me into an extended fast. I had done extended fasts before, and I would humbly consider most people in my family line veterans. My mother is from the Lemba tribe, an Afro-Semitic group from Zimbabwe and some parts of South Africa that has a fascinating history and legacy. The tribe members claimed through oral history to be direct descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel and generated much skepticism and scrutiny until multiple DNA tests proved the irrefutable presence of the Cohen modal haplotype (CMH) in their genetics, directly tying them to the Jewish priestly lineage. That sparked fascinating debates, and many books and scholastic journals have been written about the tribe.
Beyond the genetics, the real area of interest within academic communities remains how specific practices and traditions can last thousands of years through generations. The Lemba traditionally observe most of the Jewish customs we read about in the Bible, such as circumcision, adherence to dietary laws, and ceremonial animal slaughter. I bring this up to say that because my mother was raised in the Lemba tradition, a life of fasting was hardwired in her culturally as something done communally and diligently, not as the divine practice we know and have approached it as in this text. Fasting was intended to maintain connection to the spirit realm and keep an optimized physiology.
She then instilled this fasting discipline in her children primarily as a cultural value, before her conversion to the faith, which came much later. So I grew up fasting—not as a unique or even remotely beneficial practice, but because it’s simply what we did. It was a chore, and I hated it because my young mind didn’t fully grasp the spiritual implications and saw only a systematic starving of my siblings and me. My upbringing was not one of questions and understanding but one of blind obedience and duty, as is typical of most Bantu tribes. So, until I gained what I, on my personal journey, deem my mental emancipation, I used to loathe the dutiful prayer, fasting, and Scripture memorization because we were routinely and daily forced into it.
In hindsight, I now realize what a gift those experiences were. When I gained understanding and took personal responsibility for my Christian walk, I found my foundation so solid that the disciplines that take people years to develop in their discipleship to Jesus were already so deeply ingrained in my rule and rhythm of life that it gave me a wonderful advantage. Of all the gold and silver my parents could have left me as an inheritance, my foundation was by far more valuable.
When the Lord called me to a twenty-one-day extended water fast in 2019, it was an automatic, muscle-memory-induced “yes” even though I struggled with the inconvenience of it. I was speaking, preaching, teaching, and going places, and visiting greenrooms fully stocked with goodies was a challenge. But I said yes because I had done it before and knew I could do it. In all candor, there was also an element of guilt, and I felt beholden to the Lord because my only culturally conditioned revelation of fasting was that it was a preparatory practice of sanctification before embarking on divine purpose. I assumed the Lord was wanting to knight me into my itinerant speaking ministry, and I agreed. But I remember feeling a gentle rebuke and redirection from His Spirit, as He brought up James 4:3, which speaks to how people can pray “amiss” (with the wrong motivation). Because I knew (culturally) that prayer and fasting work most potently in tandem, I was prompted to ask, Can people also fast amiss?
And that is where the insight that inspired this book was born. The Lord drew me with curiosity to begin what became a devoted, borderline obsessed six-month journey of studying the art of fasting. I studied books and articles, listened to lectures and podcasts, and even borrowed wisdom and praxis from other cultures and their views on fasting. I immediately ran into a couple of challenges: The Christian resources on the art of fasting are truly slim pickings, and the emphasis on most of those resources was usually one of only two things.
The first focus was on the mysticism of fasting, where, like Steve Jobs’s initial introduction of the iCloud, “it just works.” Don’t worry about how—just do it and it works. And as I’m sure you can surmise, the results for those who just shoot for the stars from a cannon of goodwill have always been arbitrary. In most of those cases, fasting is perceived as the humbling mechanism, or the lever that we pull when we want to tug at the heartstrings of God so that He, as a good Father, would somehow be pressured to placate us with whatever we desire, much like a new parent giving in to a toddler’s meltdown. The general understanding is, “If fasting moves God, then just do it.”
I also found that most of those resources consisted of stories of how different people had fasted and how God had moved on their behalf. Don’t get me wrong: I love those stories. God used them in my life and journey, and they are, to this day, treasured testaments to the goodness of God, and monuments to the benefits of fasting. But what I was looking for was a one-stop resource to explain not just the philosophy behind fasting but something to make a scriptural, culturally coherent, and historically grounded case for how fasting works and how not to do it amiss.
The second focus I found in most fasting resources was on the health and dietary benefits of fasting. That fascinated me! I had no idea how profound the physiological and health benefits of fasting were. I nerded out on the bodily processes that fasting produces, and I remember thinking multiple times, Lord, You’re a genius! We have some amazing Christian resources on healthy fasting from some truly brilliant Christian authors (some quoted in this book). But I noticed that the best resources on the topic were outside the fold, so I had to go straight to the science to find the depth and clarity of explanation I was looking for.
