Going without
I make a point of giving something up for Lent every year. I'm not Catholic, but I respect the practice of voluntarily doing without something that I enjoy. I don't assign any spiritual value to my fast instead considering it an exercise of character: recognizing that I can do without whatever I'm giving up, acknowledging that it's something that I enjoy but don't need, and realizing that for forty days there is nothing keeping me from having what I gave up except my own power of will. In years past I've given up (not all at the same time) carbonated beverages, alcohol, meat, carbs, and caffeine (the latter was by far the hardest; I had a screaming headache for the first week).
In February of this year I saw a documentary about a monastery in Greece with very rigid (bordering on draconian) restrictions for the monks that call it home. In addition to only getting a few hours of sleep each night, attending prayers several times a day, and working continuously in the gardens and buildings the monks eat only sparingly. Their daily diet consists of about seven hundred calories per day. Amazingly the average life-expectancy of the monks is in the nineties (without advanced medicine), and there's a waiting list of monks trying to join the monastery.
I decided to give it a try. The diet, that is. I enjoy eating, and I frequently eat until I feel full rather than just until I'm no longer hungry. If I feel at all hungry I eat. I decided that I could probably handle 800 calories a day. At my age and activity level it's recommended that I eat nearly three times that amount, but for only forty days I figured I should be able to survive the discomfort of being nearly continuously hungry.
For some reason Lent always feels like it lasts longer than it really does.
My wife and friends had concerns about my health, so I agreed to some basic rules:
- If at any time my health took a turn for the worse the experiment would end immediately.
- On Saturdays I would not count calories and just eat whatever I wanted just to make sure I didn't go into deep malnutrition. Sweets and refined sugars were still off the menu though.
- I always add a "special occasions" clause to my Lenten fast. I never want to distract from someone else's celebration by making demands about the food, so if there's a special event I join in and eat and drink with everyone else. St. Patrick's day always comes in the middle of Lent after all, and I never want to miss out on that. I try not to go overboard, however.
- I would continue exercising as per my routine to make sure my body didn't try to rob protein from my muscles.
- Calories don't exist on vacation. (This is important because we took a vacation to Mexico during Lent).
Tomorrow is Easter, the official end of Lent. As could be expected I've lost weight, but not as much as I thought I would. I won't disclose numbers however since this experiment wasn't about weight loss.
Limiting my diet so severely really wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Except for one occasion on which I was moving sand and digging holes in my yard I never really "ran out" of energy. I wound up in ketosis a couple of times unintentionally, but I made a point of eating carbs to avoid that afterward. I was hungry any time I wasn't eating. It wasn't overwhelming though, and I never experienced a hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) crash.
Intriguingly, what I learned most from this experiment was about my own socioeconomic privilege. I know that I'm privileged. I know that I've benefitted from my privilege even though I've never sought to use it to my advantage. I'm a (relatively) healthy, straight, white male in the USA, employed in a recession-proof industry drawing a wage that puts me at the very top end of "middle class". As limen pointed out to me once however being privileged blinds one to the meaning of that privilege.
A more complete understanding of the advantages I have and just what it means struck me one day as I was walking past a snack vending machine at work and suddenly had a craving for potato chips. I had the money, so I began calculating how many calories I had left for the day to see whether or not I could afford to snack. That's when my brain made the leap from calories to money, and it occurred to me that there were some people who would have to calculate whether they had enough money to purchase a bag of chips regardless of the calories. From there I realized that there were some people who couldn't even afford chips at all and could only look longingly into the machine, and suddenly it meant something to me that there were places in this world where there aren't even vending machines into which a person could look longingly.
Snack chips. Snack sized portions of chips. As complex as the greater issue of hunger is that simple realization brought the reality of hunger and how others might perceive me into clear focus: I live in a country in which food is plentiful enough that we've taken a dietary staple (potatoes) and reduced it to an oily, salty, crispy snack that's more a treat than a nutritional supplement conveniently packaged in a non-biodegradable, air-tight bag small enough that a single person can consume the contents in one sitting so as to save him or her from the problem of stale chips later. The very concept of "snack sized" would be ludacris to someone who has to risk his or her life to obtain food, or worse someone with no idea where even to look to find something edible let alone sufficient to meet his or her nutritional needs or the needs of a family.
I know that the issue of world hunger is far broader in scope than this. I know that there are political, social, ethical, logistical, religious, material, and geographic obstacles to getting food to every person who needs it. I don't mean to trivialize the problem with my analogy using chips, merely to explain my epiphany. It's nothing more than an anecdote, but it helped me momentarily to grasp what others might experience; for just a second to step outside my privilege and see the world with another's eyes.
More along the lines of my usual trivial observations: The dates of Lent are one of the weirdest holidays on the calendar (rivaled only by Carnival). Lent is the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Easter changes every year, therefore the date of Ash Wednesday also changes. Easter occurs the Sunday after Passover (according to the Bible Jesus was in Jerusalem celebrating Passover when he was captured and put to death). Passover is celebrated the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox (the date in the spring on which day and night are equal in duration). That makes Easter the first Sunday after the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, and that of course makes Ash Wednesday the Wednesday forty days preceeding the first Sunday after the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. From there you can figure out how complex the schedule of Lent is.
The Carnival season on the other hand ends on Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) which is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. It begins on Twelveth Night (twelve days after Christmas celebrating the arrival of the Wise Men at the side of the newborn Jesus). Carnival therefore extends from the twelveth day after Christmas (a fixed date) until the Wednesday forty days preceeding the first Sunday following the week containing the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.
In February of this year I saw a documentary about a monastery in Greece with very rigid (bordering on draconian) restrictions for the monks that call it home. In addition to only getting a few hours of sleep each night, attending prayers several times a day, and working continuously in the gardens and buildings the monks eat only sparingly. Their daily diet consists of about seven hundred calories per day. Amazingly the average life-expectancy of the monks is in the nineties (without advanced medicine), and there's a waiting list of monks trying to join the monastery.
I decided to give it a try. The diet, that is. I enjoy eating, and I frequently eat until I feel full rather than just until I'm no longer hungry. If I feel at all hungry I eat. I decided that I could probably handle 800 calories a day. At my age and activity level it's recommended that I eat nearly three times that amount, but for only forty days I figured I should be able to survive the discomfort of being nearly continuously hungry.
For some reason Lent always feels like it lasts longer than it really does.
My wife and friends had concerns about my health, so I agreed to some basic rules:
- If at any time my health took a turn for the worse the experiment would end immediately.
- On Saturdays I would not count calories and just eat whatever I wanted just to make sure I didn't go into deep malnutrition. Sweets and refined sugars were still off the menu though.
- I always add a "special occasions" clause to my Lenten fast. I never want to distract from someone else's celebration by making demands about the food, so if there's a special event I join in and eat and drink with everyone else. St. Patrick's day always comes in the middle of Lent after all, and I never want to miss out on that. I try not to go overboard, however.
- I would continue exercising as per my routine to make sure my body didn't try to rob protein from my muscles.
- Calories don't exist on vacation. (This is important because we took a vacation to Mexico during Lent).
Tomorrow is Easter, the official end of Lent. As could be expected I've lost weight, but not as much as I thought I would. I won't disclose numbers however since this experiment wasn't about weight loss.
Limiting my diet so severely really wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Except for one occasion on which I was moving sand and digging holes in my yard I never really "ran out" of energy. I wound up in ketosis a couple of times unintentionally, but I made a point of eating carbs to avoid that afterward. I was hungry any time I wasn't eating. It wasn't overwhelming though, and I never experienced a hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) crash.
Intriguingly, what I learned most from this experiment was about my own socioeconomic privilege. I know that I'm privileged. I know that I've benefitted from my privilege even though I've never sought to use it to my advantage. I'm a (relatively) healthy, straight, white male in the USA, employed in a recession-proof industry drawing a wage that puts me at the very top end of "middle class". As limen pointed out to me once however being privileged blinds one to the meaning of that privilege.
A more complete understanding of the advantages I have and just what it means struck me one day as I was walking past a snack vending machine at work and suddenly had a craving for potato chips. I had the money, so I began calculating how many calories I had left for the day to see whether or not I could afford to snack. That's when my brain made the leap from calories to money, and it occurred to me that there were some people who would have to calculate whether they had enough money to purchase a bag of chips regardless of the calories. From there I realized that there were some people who couldn't even afford chips at all and could only look longingly into the machine, and suddenly it meant something to me that there were places in this world where there aren't even vending machines into which a person could look longingly.
Snack chips. Snack sized portions of chips. As complex as the greater issue of hunger is that simple realization brought the reality of hunger and how others might perceive me into clear focus: I live in a country in which food is plentiful enough that we've taken a dietary staple (potatoes) and reduced it to an oily, salty, crispy snack that's more a treat than a nutritional supplement conveniently packaged in a non-biodegradable, air-tight bag small enough that a single person can consume the contents in one sitting so as to save him or her from the problem of stale chips later. The very concept of "snack sized" would be ludacris to someone who has to risk his or her life to obtain food, or worse someone with no idea where even to look to find something edible let alone sufficient to meet his or her nutritional needs or the needs of a family.
I know that the issue of world hunger is far broader in scope than this. I know that there are political, social, ethical, logistical, religious, material, and geographic obstacles to getting food to every person who needs it. I don't mean to trivialize the problem with my analogy using chips, merely to explain my epiphany. It's nothing more than an anecdote, but it helped me momentarily to grasp what others might experience; for just a second to step outside my privilege and see the world with another's eyes.
More along the lines of my usual trivial observations: The dates of Lent are one of the weirdest holidays on the calendar (rivaled only by Carnival). Lent is the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Easter changes every year, therefore the date of Ash Wednesday also changes. Easter occurs the Sunday after Passover (according to the Bible Jesus was in Jerusalem celebrating Passover when he was captured and put to death). Passover is celebrated the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox (the date in the spring on which day and night are equal in duration). That makes Easter the first Sunday after the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, and that of course makes Ash Wednesday the Wednesday forty days preceeding the first Sunday after the week containing the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. From there you can figure out how complex the schedule of Lent is.
The Carnival season on the other hand ends on Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) which is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. It begins on Twelveth Night (twelve days after Christmas celebrating the arrival of the Wise Men at the side of the newborn Jesus). Carnival therefore extends from the twelveth day after Christmas (a fixed date) until the Wednesday forty days preceeding the first Sunday following the week containing the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.