The practice of fasting has entered popular culture in recent years as a way to lose extra pounds. Featured in the bestselling book “The Fast Diet,” it advocates eating normally on select days of the week while drastically reducing calories on the remaining days. Fasting has been shown to improve metabolism, prevent or slow disease and possibly increase life span. But the practice is far from new. Around the world the pious have been fasting for millennia. As a scholar of religion, I argue that there is much to be learned from religious fasting, an embodied practice, meaning that it connects the body and soul.
Fasting may have become a health fad, but religious communities have been doing it for millennia
Fasting may have become a health fad, but religious communities have been doing it for millennia
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