From soup to nuts, with nothing in between.
Anyway, my personal theory is that anything that sounds like a cheat code to the human body is probably bullshit, but not eating for five days is enough of a pain in the ass that it doesn't count as a "cheat".
People don't like to fast.
On the veldt, people who ate less than 200 calories a day didn't get the hott sexy time.
If fasting for five days can stop weight loss in people getting chemo, then that would explain why dieting really doesn't work.
People don't like to fast because fasting suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks, voluntary or otherwise.
It takes very few missed meals before food becomes all one can think about or, in some cases, start muttering new lyrics to Johnny Cash songs about.
I usually do a 24 hour fast from after lunch on Wednesday to lunch on Thursday. It isn't very hard for me. I do eat a crazy amount on Thursday lunch though.
Try picturing everything you are about to eat being fucked by all of Oxford.
To those of us observing the 24hr fast on Yom Kippur, this Tuesday night and Wednesday, the unpleasantness is the point, recognized, even emphasized in the liturgy.
But that's total, even water, not a severe caloric restriction, which is what the OP regime is and would have to be, given its duration.
I didn't realize there was no drinking. That's a long time to not drink anything.
...the unpleasantness is the point, recognized, even emphasized in the liturgy.
You're supposed to be scared, Charlie! That's how you know God loves you!
So, Wednesday on my way home, I should be extra careful about being run over.
If you do get hit, just remember that you're contributing to next year's atonement.
I'm pretty sure that I don't have to confess to increasing somebody's atonement.
Are you supposed to fast longer if you have more to atone for? So that if I see somebody who complains about being thirsty on Thursday, I know they are a huge asshole, but self-aware?
It takes very few missed meals before food becomes all one can think about or, in some cases, start muttering new lyrics to Johnny Cash songs about.
"You eat six wontons and what do you get?
A half a pound fatter and deeper in debt..."
I guess he did cover that at one point, but I don't really think of that as a Johnny Cash song.
That's a long time to not drink anything.
If you're Muslim you can't drink anything from dawn to dusk for the whole of Ramadan. Which seriously sucks in high summer at high latitudes.
18: There was a Muslim guy at my HS who wouldn't even swallow his own spit during daylight hours of Ramadan. Even the Muslims thought he was a nut.
I hadn't realized that the fast starts well before dawn (for all Muslims? For just whatever sect/level of observance Sally's good friend is?) Sally stayed over at a friend's house during Ramadan this summer -- I had assumed there was going to be a 5:00 am (or whatever, to just beat the dawn) breakfast, but no. They woke up at 3 or so for the last allowable meal.
A Muslim can't be president because they're really thirsty for like 1/12th of the time.
20
Many Muslims do have a morning feast. You only have to start fasting at the call to dawn prayers, which is up to an hour before dawn.
20 It is technically dawn and well before daybreak, with dawn being defined as what roughly corresponds to astronomical twilight, (the time you can't distinguish between a white thread and a black thread held at arm's length is the way the hadith has it).
We had Ramadan working hours here which was great, work started 1 hour later and ended 2 hours early.
Oh, actually, it seems that the call to dawn prayer can be substantially before actual dawn.
Things get pretty weird at high latitudes and I'm told they often get special dispensations when Ramadan is in summer there.
Crossposted with 23. I remember the call to dawn prayer being before sunrise because damn are they loud in some places, but I didn't know it was that much.
For instance, Stockholm had no astronomical twilight during Ramadan this year.
It's at around 4 am now with sunrise being close to an hour and a half later.
27 IIRC higher latitudes with no astronomical twilight follow the time of nearest Muslim country or Mecca time.
damn are they loud in some places
I remember thinking that you must be very sure of your place in the world to get on a loudspeaker that early in the morning.
26,31 it can be a factor when flat hunting here. I know some who've had regrets.
I once stayed a week in this small fishing village in Turkey on the Bodrum peninsula and stayed in this small hotel right next to the local mosque which had a busted PA system, or maybe he had a tube screamer hooked up to it, which is what it sounded like. I usually find the call to prayer beautiful and especially in Turkey where it has this haunting, lilting quality to it but that was the worst I've ever heard anywhere.
One of the loudest/worst places was on a tiny island in Indonesia. Crappy PA and just ludicrously loud.
I found the ones in big Arabian cities to be cool because a) high quality and b) dueling muezzins.
If you're Muslim you can't drink anything from dawn to dusk for the whole of Ramadan. Which seriously sucks in high summer at high latitudes.
And the lack of food also has a definite effect on driving habits - drivers get cranky and make more mistakes. Especially when dashing home for iftar -
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/fasting-and-furious-the-psychology-of-reckless-ramadan-driving
I remember thinking that you must be very sure of your place in the world to get on a loudspeaker that early in the morning.
So there was this mosque in Brunei where the muezzin didn't actually get out of bed - he just had a taped azan on a timer to go off for the dawn call to prayer. And then one night some oil workers broke in and swapped the tape of the azan for a tape of the Clash singing "Rock the Casbah" and then left the country very very quickly before anyone realised it was them.
I think Ramadan can be pretty sucky in Scotland, in summer. I don't know quite how they measure it, because there are certainly urban parts of Scotland where there is no astronomical twilight, in mid-summer, although there's still civil and nautical twilight.
I hope they fired the muezzin. He only has to work five times a day.
35 is a real problem, especially in cities such as Sheffield where taxi drivers are probably majority Muslim.
The people next door were eating at 10:00 pm and 2:00 am this year. They were perfectly clear that this was not fun. As it happens, although one of them is a taxi driver, he gets a dispensation for diabetes, so he probably isn't as scary as some of his colleagues.
37: according to this site
http://www.ramadan.co.uk/kirkcaldy-ramadan-timetable-2015/
("sourced from the St Mary's Mosque" which betrays either a commendably ecumenical outlook or a slight degree of theological confusion)
you're looking at a fast from 2.35 am to 10.03 pm which sounds pretty punishing.
The same site includes the Barking Ramadan Timetable and the Tooting Ramadan Timetable, both of which sound perfectly normal to Londoners but might seem odd to foreign types.
Long story short: some plumbers duct taped a guy to a chair so I had to do a webinar.
That could do with being a _little_ less short, Moby.
Tooting Ramadan Timetable
If the mosque is closer to Balham than Colliers Wood, then it'll give the Tooting Bec end call to prayer.
It was the most awful webinar I ever took, except for the fact that it was 5 minutes long. None of the links worked and it took me two tries to get it recorded that I finished.
35 Having seen the way people drive in these parts my response to that article is how could they tell the difference?
In Morocco the worst problem was always young guys going through nicotine withdrawal. I've seen fights break out which were always quickly stopped by more level headed people in the vicinity.
47.1: indeed. A friend of mine currently working as a Mentat on Giedi Prime regularly posts photos of local car crashes, generally remarkable for the expensiveness of the car and the incomprehensibility of the crash ("I didn't think it would be possible to get a Porsche to land upside down on top of another Porsche", sort of thing).
What about the plumbers and the duct tape?
36: for a tape of the Clash singing "Rock the Casbah"
A tape that started midway through "I Got You Babe" would be a stupid and acontextual joke, but one that would please me nonetheless.
If they're taking requests, James Brown "Get On Up" would be both rousing and thematically appropriate.
50: I don't know how or why they did it. Also, I guess the guy who got taped up was a plumber but they don't say the occupation of the guys who did it. Anyway, they fired two people (from government jobs) and disciplined five more.
A friend of mine stayed in a Norman village where something very similar happened: the mayor would signal the opening of the weekly market at about 0500 or so by playing Abba songs over the village-wide PA system. "Waterloo", normally, which you wouldn't have thought the French would take to.
53: ah, I see. So either
a) the guy who was taped to the chair was supposed to be giving the webinar, but couldn't because he was taped to a chair, and you stepped in
b) the plumbers were supposed to be giving it, but couldn't because they were being fired, and you stepped in
c) management decided that an appropriate response to the incident would be a compulsory webinar for all staff on why you shouldn't tape people to chairs, and you're the in-house subject matter expert.
It's mostly 55c, except that I had to take the webinar, not make it. And the webinar was about bullying in general and never once mentioned any kind of physical assault.
Oh hey, here's the main web page of the people studying the fasting-tumor stuff. Don't know why I didn't turn this up in my earlier hunts.