Quran 20:81 Eat of the good things We have provided for your sustenance, but commit no excess therein.

Fasting is good for you. Very good. Josh Mittledorf, in Cracking the aging code: The new science of growing old and what it means for staying young, 2016, estimates he’s added a decade, a good, healthy decade, to his life with his regime, which includes a weekly fast from 10pm Wednesday to 8 am Friday, when he only drinks water. He has figured out other ways to trick his mind into operating in its highest metabolic mode, but the main thing is the fast. Fasting has long been a spiritual exercise to quieten the body’s incessant desires for petty satisfactions, real world distractions.

It is of course the no-brainer way to lose weight, but the marvel, paradox, is that for all living creatures, reducing consumption to just above starvation guarantees better health and longer life.

Couch potatoes end up flabby, insulin-resistant, chronically sicker as they age, awaiting a pathetic last stage in life where death is arguably an improvement over pain and self-loathing. Which brings me to the other secret, paradox, of longevity. Exercise. And lots of it, every day making sure you’ve pushed yourself to the point of feeling your blood pumping. Forget about antioxidants. If you put your body engine into low gear, it can deal fine with them.

Exercise produces lots of antioxidants, but top athletes have longer, healthier lives by specialising in manufacturing them! You damage your muscles in hard exercise, but that’s good damage, damage that your body is honed to repair and does so eagerly when you give it the optimal conditions (hot, sweaty), growing back stronger, preparing for the next battle.

Indian sages do just fine with meditating, no exercise, but lots and lots of fasting. John Oakes, in The fast: the history, science, philosophy, and promise of doing without (2016), argues that fasting acts like a metaphor, withholding, sacrificing, to open you up to compassion, creation, ‘the real work’ or real purpose of our mind-body, allowing room for something else to happen besides the incessant preparing for and indulging in consumption. At his substack, Douglas Rushkoff ponders the sense of emptiness, nonbeing, even death, that fasting suggests. ‘You lose the sense of inside/ outside, of duality, replaced by an existential oneness.’

Oakes likes to have a partner, a shared community, for his week-long fasts. Which brings to mind the famous hunger strikes by such as Bobby Sands and his fellow IRA prisoners under the cruel hand of Thatcher. And which mostly fail to ‘move the mountain’, but inspire others in the common struggle, and as a bonus, extend your life (as long as you don’t starve to death).

Mittledorf, Oakes and Rushkoff are secular Jews, dabbling in Buddhism and yoga, and more or less dismiss religion in their fascination with Nature’s paradoxes. Buddhism is a belief based on nonattachment, ‘no preference’, in life, the way to get beyond the world of ‘I’ll eat or be eaten.’ By taking eating out of the equation, you can get beyond the dog-eat-dog mentality. You leave room for ‘food for thought.’

What’s with the paradoxes? Look at our cliches. Food for thought, no pain – no gain. They are true! Good pain. Bad pain. We are beings of qualia. Good-bad is built into our genes, into our universes. And what’s good for the goose is usually good for the gander. When it comes down to it, there is very little separating one individual from another, except his/her community, and the individuals there are also much the same. Our bodies........

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