(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of Faith and Reason, author and scholar Dr. Jay Richards joins Deacon Keith Fournier to discuss his book Eat, Fast, Feast: Heal Your Body While Feeding Your Soul – A Christian Guide to Fasting.
After briefly explaining why he wrote this book, Richards emphasized that Catholics have largely abandoned the strict fasting of the early Christians because it can be very difficult.
“Jesus [fasted] for 40 days in the desert before He started His earthly ministry. If you know anything about Church history, you know that fasting was just taken for granted,” he said. “Christians said, ‘Well, Jesus says … ‘When you fast,’ ‘when you pray,’ ‘when you give alms,’ so He didn’t command us to do it, He assumed that we would do it, and Christians did this as a natural part of their practice.”
“But over time, what I call sort of ‘death of a thousand dispensations,’ we now mostly just don’t fast,” he added. “Among Catholics, now we think we fast [because] we don’t eat for an hour before Mass, which means if you take a shower, that’s your fast.”
Richards highlighted how the early Christians had a calendar full of days for strict fasting and feasting, which is more penitential than simply abstaining from using social media.
“If you look at the historic practice, what you will discover is that the Christian calendar was punctuated by different sort of time scales in which there was eating and feasting and not eating at all sometimes,” he said. “So fasting just perennially meant not eating food. So you don’t fast from Facebook. You might abstain from it, but you fast from food.”
A bit later, Richards underscored that fasting has spiritual, physical, and psychological benefits. He recalled how, after being required to fast from all food for 36 hours, he felt stronger and had greater mental clarity.
This experience led him to research the physical and psychological benefits of fasting.
“I found out … there’s this thing called ketones, and if you go long enough without eating, your body uses up all of the stored glucose in your muscles and liver, It’s called glycogen,” he said. “So it doesn’t have any of that fuel to feed itself, and then your liver starts taking the fats from your body or your diet and converting them to ketones, which is another form of energy that your cells can use.”
“And it turns out almost everyone that does this records that they have this kind of mental clarity. And so this is the first hint I had that, ‘Gosh, there’s actually a physiological benefit to fasting,’” he added.
To hear more from Dr. Jay Richards on the importance and benefits of traditional Christian fasting, tune in to this episode of Faith and Reason.
To purchase Richards’ book, click here.
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