The human body has many functions and duties that have to be taken care of. Our eating habits are definitely not the best help for them to do so. We obviously inherited our habits from generations to generations far back behind us in time. Eating 3 times a day, having a 10 o’clock and afternoon snack, those are all what we first did by habit then our body got used to those exact hours and starts asking us even though if an hour earlier we had a stomach full of food.

The society we live in has its own philosophy about food, nutrition, and many other related facts. This philosophy is only based on the taste in our mouth, and everyone’s little knowledge of about food, just to appear intelligent. No one actually knows much or even anything if I may say, about the human body and even most of the doctors are not really knowledgeable about the real physiological functioning of our system. Of course they know more than the average people but they mainly think in the direction of waiting for the problem to occur and then trying to find which organ is involved or out of order and they will first prescribe some medications to mask the pain like painkillers or anti-inflammatory drugs to calm down the inflammation, but in no case they will look for the real cause of the problem which is only our eating habits.

Many reasons for which we just eat are, as I said, part of our habits, and some of them are just a byproduct of our fully consumptive world. We got to a point in life where everyone is taking advantage of our wrong habits. The advertisements about food are so efficient that we never thought we could ever do against it. They mostly use the fear that you have of not having enough to eat in order to push you to do the wrong over and over.

Our world and society, with all their mental pressure, cause lots of damages and losses to our system that food cannot replace (and it even does more damages and losses). Most people replace their anxiety about their lives and their future outcome with food.  They are in a lack of being sure if they can cope with all their commitments, work, relationships, children, and etc that they put themselves into. More than 90 % of people work pay check to pay check and most of them are a kind of reassured by having lot’s of food around a kind. They get reassured about the economic future of their own life, as ridiculous as what I say here might sound and look like. This way they think they have enough to eat because the lack of food was always the first sign of poverty.

Food became an anti-depression remedy or a painkiller for most of the people who cannot cope with this world and its demands whereas the real remedy lies somewhere else. They eat to feel a kind of superficial happiness and also to feel that there is still something that they can be free of doing and no one can stop them from it. I will explain more about food and our relationship with it, in the next chapter.  

On the other hand and looking at it from the typical “health” and physical point of view, in this story, no one ever tried to even think: “so what if I miss one meal, or if I don’t eat the whole day?” The fear of maybe collapsing because of lack of nutrition in your body is so big that you might never want to take the chance and besides why putting a little more pressure into your life by not eating while you already have enough by your lifestyle? Wanting to change your habit is surely an extra pressure at the beginning anyway.

      Maybe this challenge will give you enough strength to cope with life and its difficulties. At first when I started to eat once a day it was in order to see how far my mental determination could go. Believe it or not, fasting was for me at first a mental game of how long I can last and etc. I suggest to all those who are depressed to use fasting as a remedy to their depression as most of the time the depression comes from lack of so-called success in what we wanted to achieve in life but we somehow did not. They might first think the opposite and think that food is their only pleasure left and take that as a remedy but that is only a painkiller. Once they can challenge that they will see that they are able to fight something that they did not know they had the strength for and that lack of challenging power might have been the main reason of their failure in life anyway.

     They will then realize that any challenge is good for them and their only problem is simply being week mentally and not having been prepared to confront today’s society. So through the food challenge, they will very easily gain more and more will power.

Dr. Fabio Eden

MD, PhD

MD : Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

PhD : Space Medicine, Longevity Medicine, Physiology,

Sport physiology and Anatomy

7th Dan Black Belt Tae Kwon Do Master