The Great Lent: Takeaways from a Dirty Experiment
Tell me anyone just a year ago...
The promise of reduced glucose spikes — The unexpected crutch — Other inputs — Hypothesis confirmed — Straightening up — Discoveries
God works in mysterious ways, indeed. I guess I’ve always been somewhat interested in all matters lifestyle: diet, exercise, sleep, skincare, what have you — but the last year took me to a one hell of trajectory which recently passed a milestone that made people round their eyes at me and I don’t blame them. I tried the Orthodox Christian Great (pre-Easter) Lent.
It all started some time in February. I’ve been browsing in the local bookshop with decent offer of books in English and noticed it again, Glucose Revolution: The Life-changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar by Jessie Inchauspé. I’ve always been put off by its price, but this time I decided to at least flip through, took some photos of breakfast suggestions (I’ve always struggled with breakfasts), and went home. Where I found an e-version on VK (the only reason I still keep my account there). I’ve read it within a week and I liked it, for it made sense, given what I already knew on nutrition, so I decided to implement most of its 10 hacks.
The one hack I initially raised my eyebrow at was the one about drinking vinegar water (a spoon of apple cider vinegar diluted in a glass of water) before meals. That sounded like BS. But the anecdote it mentioned in support was about a woman from, I think, Near East who remembered her family members always having a jar of that on the table. And I’m into such traditional stuff lately (more on that further below). So I decided to google around and apparently reduction of blood sugar is the only medicinal effect vinegar water actually has (more are claimed). So to hell with it, thought I, might as well.
To summarize the hacks very quickly into a cohesive tip: don’t eat carbs on their own, especially fructose/sucrose. Always add some fats or proteins on top. Ideally, your snacks should be savoury, actually, as should the bulk of your breakfast. And your meals should look like this: a glass of vinegar water, a green starter, main dish where you attack veg, proteins and fats first, if possible, then you can have something sweet, if you wish (like, salad - main course - dessert is a scientifically backed order of food??!). Ideally, go for a ten minute walk afterwards.
Promises? Apart from the obvious, that is, (1) avoiding or managing diabetes and cardiovascular disease, plus extra weight, (2) you’d reduce inflammation in you body, which would help with your overall health, slow down aging, and, last but not least, (3) you’d clear up your brain fog and would not faint after a few hours without food.
As someone who struggles with (3), likes the idea of (2) and doesn’t mind (1), I thought those little changes are worth the effort. On week two or three I came across a video of a Russian podcast with a scientist that specializes in microbiome, which at the very least confirmed what I already knew: I/we should eat way more veg and way less sugar. But he also mentioned that in his view everyone should try the Orthodox Great Lent, sort of to restart your digestion.
It wasn’t the first time in recent months that I came across the Great Lent, and it being March I decided to look up the dates for this year.
The Lent was starting precisely in a week.
I took that as a sign.
Now, the irony of that did not escape me. I was christened as a kid, within the Orthodox Church, in the church that was still being built and came to become this:
But my family was never religious, I’ve never been to a service, and I just never liked the Orthodox Church. Too much gold and at the same time drab (ah, teenagers). During my uni studies I came to the conclusion that if I was to pick a Christian branch, it would be Protestant: stripped of all non-sense, face to face with God and Scripture (but not too Protestant, Calvinists sounded extremely off-putting, to say the least). Regardless of those musings, I picked LaVeyan Satanism as my “religion” of choice, led by my affiliation to Nietzsche and William James and his Pragmatism. (Don’t you worry, I’d still rather stick to all that, I just added to the multitude.)
Fast-forward a few years, and I was contemplating following the Orthodox Lent. And although that podcast was the last straw, overall I blame Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I’d read his Black Swan and Antifragile some years ago and I liked them and his vibes. I’ve discovered him on twitter, where he would occasionally post something on weight-lifting, or on gravel-biking but also on food, and he would mention Lent. And Orthodox Christianity. I was bemused by that initially, because he was the last guy I’d suspect of this (I clearly forgot Antifragile by that point, but such are the workings of my memory). But I was intrigued then and I was even more intrigued now because in my worldview Taleb carried some weight (hehe).
Plus, my senior colleague who holds yoga sessions for us at work, and who shared some connected knowledge and experiences, including dietary ones, also generally sticks to vegan diet (which is what Lent primarily is).
There I was, in a perfect storm of factors converging into one course of action.
When I started, I made one decision/concession: I may still add cream/milk to coffee, no replacements. Don’t ask me why, I just decided on that, thinking that I’m here for dietary reasons anyway and this one thing isn’t gonna matter much. Plus, it’s easier on my teeth that way, with milk reducing the acidity.
Now I believe this decision was the road to my downfall, but it also confirmed one hypothesis I formed to myself long ago:
Give your mind a finger, it’ll bite off the whole arm.
Our brains are naive and hence dangerous d*cks sometimes. Whatever we might think and say and prove about how cool and evolutionarily groundbreaking and incredibly capable our prefrontal cortex is, it is a double edged sword. For the simple reason, that it’s still weaker in comparison to the other two, older, layers of our brains. That’s what led to me “rationalizing” myself into first allowing milk in coffee; then having some baked goods that most certainly contained eggs and butter, but hey, as long as it’s not a cheesecake, amiright? Which brought me to the lowest point two weeks before the end: with my flat white I had a bloody ti-ra-mi-su.
That’s when it hit me that the struggle is real.
Now, the brain layers explanation above might be neat but some time ago I found one even neater. People in the days of yore, when they would say someone is possessed, did not necessarily mean it literally. It was just a nifty framework to work with. Think about it: God endowed you with a pure soul which the Devil wants to get for himself. He can’t do it directly, so what does he do? Sends a demon (or two) to you, to seduce you off the righteous path straight into his arms. So, the natural thing to do is to: a) protect yourself from such demons, b) exorcise them if they got their dirty hands on you anyway.
The point being that your vice isn’t you or an inherent part of you, but something foreign that you can get rid of.
In other words, when you succumb to temptation, you shouldn’t be kicking yourself for it, but a demon out of yourself.
I say, this framework is simply mentally more productive. Because now, when you see that cheesecake and you’re either trying to lose weight or are fasting, you can shush something beside you, like a nagging mosquito, and not berate yourself.
(An image that’s helping me a lot is from Guy Ritchie’s Revolver, in which Statham’s character undergoes a separation from his ego/demon and you can see that creature, with Statham’s face, being all sweaty and nervous and shouting, desperate at the prospect of losing. Pretending to be Statham or at the very least his friend, and failing. So satisfactory.)
That’s all speaking of how I came to believe that a lot of old timey frameworks, images and practices, from chakras to fasting, are actually laden with a lot of practicality, which our “rationality“ was very stupid to cut off. The sheer amount of times I’d say to myself “and here we threw the baby out with the bathwater“! Count all those times, and there’d be a babycide of biblical proportions.
Funnily enough, reading Taleb’s Skin in the Game and especially rereading Antifragile resonates with those conclusions so often that I’m not sure there’s anything for me to add to the discourse. But then I thought that at least I might help spread the word.
Regardless: for the last week and a half or two (depends on how you count me finishing off a bar of chocolate that had milk somewhere down the ingredients list) I was squeaky clean. Boy did it feel good.
Now that it’s been a week since Easter, let me list some takeaways. Obviously, not all of them are attributable to Lent: some are to Inchauspé, some to another similar book, but to me they’re all part of the same experience. In no particular order:
Meat is so dispensable. So is dairy, to a large extent. Black coffees are fine, after all, and even though I love cheese and quark and yoghurts, I can do without for quite a while rather comfortably. But what hit the spot for me, was fried eggs. No salt or pepper, no nothing else necessary, just gently stir fried eggs. It’s ridiculous how good they made me feel.
A side note on “replacements“ and “alternatives“: I say that’s a cheat. Especially for a lent. Because you aren’t here for “ethical“ purposes. You’re here to give up on something. And I say that very much includes textures. Although I did try soy yoghurt and it was indeed nice (oat milk flat white was an abomination, however). But you should be able to go without for a month and a half.
I always loved veggies, but now I doubled down on them, plus on lentils and, finally, chickpeas. I don’t know why I only just got to chickpeas, but now I have to make up for the time lost. So good.
I guess I’ll stick to the Orthodox fasting calendar for the rest of the year at least (for it’s not just the Great Lent). Although I might customize pre-Christmas time, because I live in a land-locked country, I don’t earn that much, I’m not that much into fish anyway, and I don’t want to go fully vegan for yet another month and a half. Anyway, here’s the calendar from Taleb’s twitter:
Again, not so much for religious purposes (for I think some dates — and principles — won’t coincide with the Russian/Ukrainian calendar), but for the added benefits. Without the calendar, I had considered trying giving up, say, sweets for a week on several occasions already, but that demon would always be like: “Great idea but why do it this coming week? Let’s do it some other time!“ And I’d be like: “Yeah, sure, I don’t really insist on it being this week, I guess…“ But a calendar like that serves as a wonderful external crutch. Plus, I bet there’s a lot of logic behind it, and it’s not just seasonal (although that too, and that’s great!). I mean, see, how it’s forcing you to abstain from animal products for at least two days a week most of the time? Isn’t it similar to the general advice from professionals now? (that no one follows but hey, there’s no nice framework around it, is there, to shut your inner demon with?)
Explaining myself was funny, and not in a good way. Obviously people got curious, and I wasn’t hiding it or anything, but there was so much background to cover, that I couldn’t be arsed. On top of that, it was even stupider in the beginning when I still put milk into coffee: now I had to go through the spiel of “well, I’m not doing it for religious reasons, so I’m having my own sort of lent“, which got too embarrassing but not quickly enough, for I still had that bloody tiramisu(!!1!).
I got to think a lot about what many would probably call plain discipline and willpower but to me it was more about old timey concepts of patience and temperance. And putting that skin in the game, hehe, of practicing what I preach: if I’m so adamant that the perpetual striving for comfort, mental and physical, 24/7/365 is what is gonna kill us eventually, then I should be getting rid of some. Food is a good place to start. I also started having lukewarm showers instead of hot ones, and changed routes to my offices in such a way, that I get to walk, which means it takes longer ergo I have to get up earlier, but I also use trams more than metro again, and that feels geeeed. Not to mention clocking in around 2K steps before 9:30.
Mental clarity and higher metabolic flexibility were indeed achieved. I had no idea it’d take so little time and so little effort. I’m not sleepy after lunch. I comfortably eat bigger portions and stay full for longer. Actually, I noticed how I’m not hungry in the mornings, so I’d sometimes skip breakfast entirely (just drink a cup of empty black tea), and survive commute and work beautifully, with a clear head. And sometimes I’d skip the afternoon snack, too, which usually was the nastiest food of the day nutrition-wise. Practically, I’ve introduced occasional intermittent fasting by listening to myself, and now I see the point of it, too. I just don’t move up the dinner, because it’s simply impossible timewise for me, but I found it so easy to ditch breakfast, it feels stupid good. Also, Taleb (yes, him again. He absolutely joined Nietzsche in my philosophical pantheon), and not just him, mentioned it somewhere that breakfast is a made-up meal. And I saw it somewhere else that snacking was practically artificially introduced in the 1990s. So, a lot to think about here, but even more to experiment with.
My boyfriend is the best. He came over to Prague twice during the Lent: at its start and at its finish, and volunteered to join out of solidarity, however many times I told him that he shouldn’t bother. I don’t deserve him. But he was desperate on the second visit, coffees with no milk and all for whole two days, saying that he wouldn’t be able to go through with it for over a month (not that I did). That’s when I felt proud for belonging to the Orthodox branch which turned out to be no wuss when compared to (my bf’s) Protestantism :D Although granted, my superficial research showed that both Catholics and Protestants can use the pre-Easter time to give up on something they enjoy (out of the same sympathy for Jesus wandering in the desert for 40 days and then up to the cross), and that’s good, but too vague and not as hardcore, hehe.
Now I can’t wait to finish Antifragile, so that I can draw up further plans for putting my skin in the game. Oof. I had no idea something like a Lent would be so invigorating. Fingers crosses, it would last.