Where this practice came from
Before It Was Metabolic
Health 7: The Window ยท Episode 1 · the first of eight stories
Almost every religious tradition of any age has a fast in it.
Ramadan, a month of daylight abstention from food and drink, observed by an enormous number of people every year. Lent. Yom Kippur. The fasting days of the Orthodox calendar, which are numerous. Monastic rules across Christianity and Buddhism that restrict when as much as what. Fasts before initiation, before divination, before mourning, before feasting.
The uniformity is the striking thing. These traditions arose in different places, at different times, out of different cosmologies, and a very large number of them independently arrived at the practice of deliberately not eating for a defined period.
And not one of them did it for metabolic reasons.
The stated purposes were things like discipline, purification, penitence, solidarity with the hungry, clearing the mind for prayer, marking a boundary in time. The body was involved, obviously. Hunger is a physical state and traditions knew perfectly well that it changes how you feel and think. But the goal was not weight, and it was not blood glucose, and it was not autophagy, because none of those concepts existed.
I start here for a reason that is going to matter by episode eight.
Fasting is an extremely old practice with an extremely long record of people finding it valuable, and that record was compiled entirely without any of the mechanisms currently used to justify it. For thousands of years people fasted, reported that it did something worthwhile, and organised their calendars around it, with a set of explanations we would now consider entirely wrong.
Which raises a question I find genuinely interesting rather than merely sceptical. If a practice has been valued for millennia under explanations that were wrong, and is now valued under explanations that may also turn out to be wrong, what is it that people keep noticing?
There is also a simpler observation buried in the religious record and I do not want to skip it. Almost all of these traditions fast communally and temporarily. A month, a day, a season, alongside other people, with a defined end and usually a meal at the end of it.
That is a very different thing from an individual practice, run permanently, alone, tracked on a phone.
Same physical act. Almost nothing else in common.
Next episode: what happens when a fast becomes a natural experiment.
Wren
The record says this much; the scenes between are imagined. The rest of the season, and the sourcing behind it, runs a few times a week at Wren. One page for the whole practice: /practice/.