154: Superfasting for Spiritual Feasting
One of the benefits of longer fasting is sharpened mental clarity. This is because when you burn through glucose (sugar), your body starts burning fat and producing ketones. When your brain doesn’t have glucose to use as fuel, it uses these ketones from fatty acids, which is a much cleaner burning fuel. It’s like the fog lifts and your brain becomes more awake. Is it any surprise that God designed us with the means to clear our brains to hear Him better? Fasting enhances our spiritual experience. We are called to fast, and when we do, it puts us in the position of receiving His guidance more clearly.
“So we fasted and petitioned our God about this, and he answered our prayer.” Ezra 8:23
This week’s podcast is all about the way Super Fasting leads to Spiritual Feasting. Come listen to what this means for you in spirit, mind and body.
EPISODE 154: Superfasting for Spiritual Feasting
Show Notes
(0:00) Intro
Hello my friend welcome back to the club how are you today?
(2:14) Superfasting:
I came up with this term Superfast - which means fasting for longer than you normally do.
The purpose is to challenge yourself - to kind of break through what you thought was possible.
Fasting accelerates your body’s ability to burn fat, to ease digestive issues, to clear brain fog - they’re like this is awesome, why didn’t I do this sooner.
Our goal with intermittent fasting is to realign ourselves with the rhythm of feeding and fasting and restore metabolic flexibility - which is how God designed our bodies to work.
Our ancestors ate regular meals that aligned with the daily circadian rhythm.
And that is our baseline. It’s not new modern diet phenomena, this is just like old school basics we need to get back to.
(5:44) The Superfast takes it deeper.
Super Fasting finds that beautiful place where physical FASTING meets spiritual FEASTING.
We invite God into our Superfast and we feast on His presence, we rely on His strength to get us through that longer time without eating.
Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalm 34:8
We taste all the goodness of God during our superfast:
I encourage my Feast 2 Fasters to amplify this time to make it a more holy experience by adding in activities like prayer, reading your Bible, meditating on His word, journaling your thoughts, writing Him a letter, letting Him write a letter to you - what do you feel Him saying to you, what would He want to say to you - write that down, it’s a beautiful exercise - go on a nature walk - instead of listening to a podcast or talking on the phone just BE in His creation and notice the birds chirping, the sun shining, the crisp or the warm air on your skin, get your bare feet on the ground - do some grounding and enjoy the gift of Nature - get out your Frankincense essential oil and use that during your Superfast, blast some worship music while you’re working around the house - there are so many ways to amp up your Superfast and immerse yourself and surround yourself with more of Him.
I also encourage people to take an issue that’s on your heart - a worry, a concern, a person, a situation and put that forth to God during the Superfast. As we’re clearing space in our bellies and in our hearts, we’re clearing space in our mind to hear Him - to be open to receiving His guidance.
Ezra 8:23 So we fasted and petitioned our God about this, and he answered our prayer.
(9:29) Fasting & Mental Clarity:
One of the well-known benefits of longer fasting is sharpened mental clarity.
This is because as you burn through glucose - the sugar in your body - your body starts burning fat and producing ketones.
When your brain doesn’t have glucose to use as fuel, it uses these ketones from fatty acids, which is a much cleaner burning fuel.
It’s like the fog lifts and your brain becomes more awake and so I believe this is another purposeful, by design way that God made our bodies.
(10:56) Lent:
John 3:30 - He must increase, I must decrease.
Lent honors the time that Jesus was fasting in the desert and being tempted by Satan before he went on to be crucified and resurrected.
Lent is often the only time Christians think about or consider fasting but we’re doing it year round in Feast 2 Fast with our baseline of intermittent fasting and our Superfasts.
Now for Lent - we kind of step things up. Every year I run a special round of F2F for Lent which is longer than the normal 4 week program - we go the whole 6 weeks of Lent - from Ash Wednesday to Easter- we do our intermittent fasting, we do weekly Superfasting instead of just one Superfast AND we do more sugar detoxing.
While I’m cleaning up my food and cleaning up my brain, it’s also the time of year I like to clean up my clutter. It’s kind of that whole spring cleaning thing.
(13:58) Superfasting from Social Media:
One thing I will be doing this year that I’m really looking forward to is Superfasting from social media.
I will be going off of Facebook and Instagram during Lent.
I remember one year I gave up my favorite coconut milk coffee creamer and just drank my coffee black - blech. But every morning when I poured that cup of coffee and didn’t add my coconut milk, it triggered me to think about why I was doing that which led me to think about God. The absence of my coconut milk, triggered more presence of God in my day.
(16:51) The Social Dilemma:
The description of the film says:
The documentary examines how social media's design nurtures an addiction, manipulates people's views, emotions, and behavior, and spreads conspiracy theories and disinformation, to maximize profit.
It reminds me of how food manufacturers do the same thing.They make us addicted to their product.
The food manufacturers use chemicals to flavor their food in a way that overstimulates our taste and dopamine receptors so that we crave more.
And it’s the same with social media. We’re stimulated by the notifications and likes and drama and stories and the fake perfect lives of people on FB and IG.
We get dopamine hits when we eat super flavored food and consume super flavored social activity.
(19:00) Dopamine:
Dopamine is a pleasure chemical produced by our brains that influences our motivation.
When I say we get a dopamine hit, I mean we get a release of this pleasure chemical and it feels good to us.
Our dopamine function has been hijacked. It’s just gross overstimulation. And sometimes we need a come to Jesus reset on that.
(21:45) Closing thoughts:
If you’re feeling that stir to decrease your junk and increase His presence, come do it with us in F2F. We’ll be sugar detoxing, intermittent fasting, superfasting, focusing on scripture throughout.
Come join us! You can sign up here.
(25:02) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!