Eating for stillness

You cannot still a mind you keep stirring. What you eat, and when, and how often, sets the weather of your attention for the rest of the day, and most of us eat in a way that guarantees storms.

A breakfast of sugar and refined flour sends blood sugar up and then down by mid-morning, and the crash feels like anxiety. Constant grazing means the body is never done digesting and the mind is never quite clear. A large late supper means you wake heavy and thick-headed, and the best hour of the day is lost to sleep or fog. None of this is a moral failing. It is a set of conditions under which stillness is very hard.

This is not a diet. There is nothing here about weight, and nothing here you must never eat. It is a way of eating whose only purpose is to make the three practices possible: to make the daily fast easy, to make prayer clear, and to make sitting still feel like rest rather than effort.

Three principles

Eat earlier

Finish supper early, by six or seven if you can, and eat nothing after it. This single change does more than any other. It means the daily fast happens mostly in your sleep. It means you wake light. It means the early morning, when Jesus went out to the deserted place, is available to you with a quiet body instead of a digesting one.

If your life makes an early supper impossible, make it small. The rule is: the last thing you eat should be the lightest thing you eat.

Eat simply

The table of Galilee was bread, olive oil, fish, lentils and beans, greens, figs, dates, grapes, a little wine, and on feast days a lamb. It is still one of the best tables in the world. Eat food that is recognizably food: something someone grew or caught, with one ingredient or a few. The more a thing has been processed, the more it will pull at your attention afterward.

Simplicity also means fewer decisions. A person who eats roughly the same good things most days is not thinking about food, and not thinking about food is most of the battle.

Eat less often

Two or three meals with nothing between them. No snacks. The body was not built for a constant trickle of food, and the mind that is always half-thinking about the next thing to eat is not available for anything else. Hunger between meals is the daily fast doing its quiet work. It passes.

What to reduce

Reduce these rather than forbid them. Each makes stillness harder in a specific way.

• Sugar and refined flour. The spike-and-crash is the enemy of a steady mind. Bread is fine; the sweeter and whiter a thing is, the more it costs you an hour later.
• Caffeine after noon. Coffee in the morning is a gift and does not break a fast. Coffee in the afternoon steals from the night, and a bad night steals from the dawn.
• Alcohol. A glass of wine with supper is in the gospels. More than that clouds the following morning, and the following morning is what we are protecting. During the forty days, many people set it down entirely and find they do not miss it.
• Eating while doing something else. Screens, reading, driving. The divided eye lets in no light. One meal a day eaten with full attention will teach you more about the eye that is single than any book.
• Ultra-processed anything. If it comes in a bag with a list of ingredients you cannot picture, it will pull at you afterward. That is a cost, not a sin.

A day that works

Here is what a fasting-friendly day looks like. Adjust to your life; keep the shape.

Before dawn. Wake. Water. No food, no screen. Sit in silence for ten to twenty minutes; then read a paragraph of the gospels, slowly. This is the first-fruits of the day.

Morning. Black coffee or tea if you like it. Work. Notice the mid-morning hunger when it comes; let it pass. This is the daily fast, and you are already doing it.

Midday (first meal). Break the fast gently and well: eggs or fish or lentils, greens, olive oil, good bread, fruit. Eat it sitting down, with nothing else going on. Give it fifteen minutes.

Afternoon. Water. If you must eat, a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit, but see if you can wait. Most people find the afternoon slump disappears within a week of dropping sugar and snacks.

Early evening (supper). The main meal, and the last one. Simple, whole, shared if possible. Finish early. Then nothing.

Night. No screens in the last hour, a brief examen (see the prayer chapter), sleep. The fast has already begun.

The fortnight before a real fast

If you are planning your first day-long fast, or your first three days, spend the two weeks before it eating from this chapter and nothing else: no sugar, no refined flour, nothing from a packet. The headache, the fatigue and the short temper that people blame on fasting are mostly the body coming off sugar, and they peak in the first week and fade by the second. It is far better to go through that while still eating three meals than on the first day without food. By the time the fast begins the body already knows how to reach its stores, ketones come sooner, and the hunger is quieter. Every experienced faster has found this out; you may as well find it out the easy way.

The Daniel table

For the Daniel fast, and as a good baseline for the forty days, eat from this table and nothing else: vegetables of every kind, fruit, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, olive oil, herbs and spices, water. Nothing refined, nothing sweetened, no meat, no dairy, no wine, no caffeine if you can bear it. It is a fast from richness rather than from food, and it is remarkable how quickly the palate resets. After ten days a fig tastes like a feast.

Feast days

A way of life built only on restriction is not the way of Jesus, who was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard and who turned water into a great deal of wine. Fasting means nothing without feasting. Keep Sunday as a feast: eat what you love, with people you love, without counting. Fasting and feasting in alternation is what makes both of them holy. A life that is all feast is numb. A life that is all fast is proud. The rhythm is the practice.