p-Lent-y - Fasting, Fast food, Fast diets.

In this 6 week period of Lent many faithful Christians commit to fasting or giving up certain types of luxuries as a form of penitence. I'm not a Christian, so I don't. I've just eaten 3 segments of a chocolate orange & 2 digestive biscuits with a mug of tea, yet I had a perfectly adequate lunch a couple of hours ago. That doesn't stop me pondering on the whole issue of plenty as related to food, or the issue of voluntary fasting in a world where so many have an inadequate diet or starve.

I find the the whole concept of half of the world voluntarily fasting or limiting their intake, while the other half struggles to get enough to eat, one of the great dichotomies of the modern world. Yet we seem to be oblivious to the irony.

Research now shows that a couple of days fasting actually does you a lot of good & can even prolong life. Fast diets on the other hand rarely work in the long term. Except for the people who devise & promote them, who make fortunes out of overweight & obese people trying to control what they put in their mouths. We in the developed world are willing to pay good money to conquer the fat and the flab, when all we really need to do is limit our intake of food & exercise more. Many people now are truly living unhealthy lifestyles. Perhaps we need to remember we were "hunter gatherers" or small mixed farmers originally. When we had to catch or produce our food we had to work hard & we really valued it. Now we can have it delivered to our door.

Fast food doesn't have to be junk food, but all too often it is. If you haven't prepared the food you put into your mouth you really have no control over, or idea of, what has gone into it. It isn't just the quality of the ingredients which is bound to be poor if the food is cheap. There are also all sorts of things to mask that very fact - flavour enhancers, bulking agents & preservatives for example.

I should lose some weight, ideally about a stone. I know exactly how to do it. However I live in a land of plenty & I enjoy my treats. I find it very hard to reduce my intake. Temptation lurks in the biscuit / cake tin & the bottle of white wine. I'm lucky & I know it. Perhaps we in the developed world need a regular "famine day" so we really experience what it is like to not have plenty to eat.