Time to take a digital fast?Time to take a digital fast?

How do we cope in a world full of constant reminders to eat more junk food, drink more alcohol, have more friends, read more, post more, text more, and tweet more?

One emerging way of managing hyper-consumption is the “modern” fast.

Fasts have a long history in many societies and religions – Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur to name a few. They can relate to food, to alcohol, or to control of one’s emotions, actions and speech. They are associated variously with repentance, self-denial, penance, or giving to others.

These fasts varied enormously in duration, intensity, selectivity and severity from the daily overnight fast, to much longer food fasts and perennial abstinence of various activities.

But in Buddha’s day you didn’t need to have a rest from junk food, alcopops, or Facebook, Twitter or your email. Now there is the technology to overload us in ways we have never seen before. And this is where the modern fasts, or variations on past themes help us cope with life’s changing patterns.

Alcohol was the first with month-long fasts also doubling as fundraisers – FebFast, Dry July, Ocsober and more recently the three-month fast from alcohol promoted by Hello Sunday Morning.

These fasts also work by allowing the participants to signal to their friends and family that they are “having a break”. As Jill Stark pointed out in her book High Sobriety, if you refuse a friend’s offer of a drink it can be seen as breaking the social contract. By saying “‘I’m FebFasting” it signals that you’ve got an endorsed and socially acceptable way of saying no thanks, I need to have a rest, while also reassuring your friends that taking a month off isn’t an attack on their behaviour.

There is the 5:2 Fast, which has been rapidly and enthusiastically embraced by the MAMIL (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) and MAWIL (Middle Aged Women in Lycra) set. It is an intermittent fast on two days a week of eating minimally (600 calories for men, 500 for women), while being able to eat without restriction on the other five days.

Similarly, saying “I’m on a two day” means you can explain why you are having just lettuce and black coffee for lunch. The 5:2 Fast also works well for the chronic grazer – like me – in ensuring you have only two big decisions a week, on the fasting days, rather than trying to make hundreds of little decisions to eat a bit less all week. It has worked for me, with 6kg lost over 10 months. It is the intermittent nature that makes it do-able and stick-at-able for me.

Over the past couple of years FebFast has expanded from alcohol-only fasts to include sugar, junk food and smoking. And intriguingly they have introduced the digital fasts – taking a month off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Tinder, Grinder, Tumbler or Snapchat.

Again, this allows participants to have an endorsed or sanctioned time off without being seen to be a recluse. It is a month where you don’t have to either suffer everyone else’s perfect Facebook lives or try to show you have a perfect one yourself. And of course you can reclaim an hour or two back every day that went into social media surfing (SMS).

Despite the known and accepted positives of social media – one being the capacity to encourage mass participation in events like FebFast – it can become counterproductive and unhealthy. So if you, or particularly your teenage children, are feeling the need to spend more of the day on social media, are planning constantly to use it, are feeling restless, anxious, or moody if you don’t get to use it, or are ignoring other aspects of your life in favour of using new media, maybe it is time for a break, or a digital fast.

For me fasting is a great way to cope. I’ve had practice over many years of doing 10-day silent retreats – fasting from talking for 10 days (surprisingly easy), fasting from food from midday to breakfast (again pretty easy), fasting from caffeine (more difficult) and over the past few years taking a 10-day break from email and social media. This is the most difficult, as it turns out. What happens if someone wants me, or if I’ve missed an important world event or if I’ve been maligned by a nasty journalist again?

Do these month-long fasts work? Well, they certainly raise money (FebFast has raised $7 million over the past seven years for young people with addiction problems) and VicHealth’s evaluation of FebFast has shown that nine out of 10 participants benefited from one or more positive outcomes, with the top three being saving money, sleeping better, and losing weight. You get a clearer head and tend to cope better as well.

Rob Moodie is Professor of Public Health at the Melbourne School of Population Health is a patron of FebFast.

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/manage-hyperconsumption-with-the-modern-fast-20150124-12whju.html