Breakfast is BS
Yesterday I had one of the most memorable meals in my life. A perfectly prepared medium/rare entrecote steak and a glass of water. There’s a Swedish saying that “hunger is the best seasoning”, and few truer words have ever been spoken. My spice of choice was a 26-hour gut-rest fast with only H2O to hydrate and nothing else. I don’t think I have ever been without food for so long before, and that made my meal a religious experience. The fasting put a whole new perspective on eating, and I was not aware that a piece of meat could ever taste that good. It opened up a whole new dimension.
It was so tasty that I got goosebumps. I have had some pretty damn proper world-class steaks before, Wagyu and the like. But I have probably never been that hungry before, and that changed everything. Yesterday around lunch-time, I got so strong cravings for meat that I drove to the store to pick up an entrecote and put it in the frying pan immediately. I have heard some stories about how pregnant women can get similar cravings for various things. Now I fully know the feeling.
The reason for my fast was that my gut had a complete meltdown starting this Friday and it just got worse over the weekend. Anything I tried to eat went straight through. On Sunday evening after spending pretty much the whole weekend in the bathroom, I decided that enough is enough and to go for a strict period of gut rest fasting i.e., no food of any kind is allowed except water. That should give the system some well-needed time to recalibrate and heal. It worked perfectly.
I am very suspicious of western diet. We are prone to diseases that I think to some degree are caused by our food. It is not rocket science to conclude that we become what we eat. For starters, I cannot understand why we should eat as much and often as we do. It must be very different to our evolutionary background. I do not believe that hunter gatherers would have a big breakfast every day, for example. I have tried 12 and 16 hour fasts before and it was no problem at all to skip breakfast. If you go to the gym, you won’t exercise the same muscle over and over again. You will let the muscles get some well-deserved rest every now and then. Why wouldn’t our guts behave in the same way? Give the system some rest and let it recover, and on paper it looks like this is a very solid idea to me. Constant eating with no gut rest, makes no sense.
Common wisdom, however, says for example that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” We have breakfast, lunch, dinner and perhaps supper and in-between some snacks or small things. In the latter case, there is no gut rest. Combine this over time with stress, bad sleep and perhaps alcohol, and you should have a bulletproof method of “how not to do it”. It is probably no coincidence that breakfasts often consists of sweet food, like jams and sweetened cereal. Sweet things are extremely addictive, perhaps more so than heroin. And that equals more money for Big food, that I believe have some leverage in the food recommendations that have been presented to us. Compared to our evolutionary background and eating habits, this does not harmonize.
The fasting exercise was amazing in hindsight. I will absolutely do it again, not just for the health benefit but also for the magical experience of a simple meal seasoned with real hunger. It’s also very easy. It only takes 24 hours apparently to learn the value of restraint. Other potentially unhealthy habits in our lives might take a lot longer to realize their effect. Speaking of which, I haven’t had a coffee for several days now. That is also now in uncharted territory. I might just keep it up for a week or whatever and see what happens. I heard about some guy who made a coffee celibacy of about six months and described what a fresh brewed cup felt like after he had got it 100% out of his system. The guy sounded euphoric, and it is probably true. We indulge ourselves in so many things and there is a serious lack of restraint. The inevitable consequence is that without restraint, we can forget how blessed we are. Which my entrecote steak proved.