>>1631945>You feel great. Your senses are heightened drastically. You'll be able to smell food miles away like a dog.maybe because you're, you know, hungry and should eat? what you describe is still new age lunacy, only less shallow and ostentatious but still lacking in any profound substrate
fasting is a core tenet in Christianity (and any major religion, really), it's the West has become so secularized that it feels the need to reinvent the wheel and provide some new justifications for it
there have always been periods of refraining from certain foods in the Christian custom (in Catholicism this tends to resemble a vegetarian diet, while Orthodox are more drastic and go vegan), dates also well accustomed to each nationality and country's specific particularities in terms of food availability and labor requirements, but black fasting (no food whatsoever) lasts no longer than a day and usually only once a year (because a man needs energy to work and be in his best form)
apart from the obvious physical benefits of fasting (cleansing your gut by simply alternating the type of foods you eat and eliminating unhealthy 'build-ups' of a certain kind) there is also the major element of harnessing your will power by controlling your urges and reigning over your senses
at the end of it you basically come out physically healthier and renewed, mentally stronger and more confident, no longer alone in the world because you belong to a group of people who have partaken in the same ritual as you, and, last but not least, one then goes to Church to confess and take communion, thus clearing his conscience and remembering God loves you and death isn't the end
i just can't overstate how much of a caricature fasting as not eating or adopting some bestseller 'love yourself more, you deserve the best' diet is, you're basically depriving yourself of an extremely complex and nutritious (spiritual) food to instead go eat some candy that's nicely marketed as healthy
