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📍 Week 39 | Day 270/365 | 95 Days Remaining
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National Day 🙏🏾 National Forgiveness Day
The phrase intermittent fasting has surged in popularity. Health bloggers tout the method, doctors prescribe windows, and wellness influencers wrap the practice in digital ribbons. Yet the term feels incomplete, even false. To label fasting “intermittent” misses the essence. Fasting doesn’t mark an occasional break in life’s rhythm—it composes the rhythm.
Why “Intermittent” Rings Hollow
Intermittent implies randomness and inconsistency, a revolving door you stroll through when convenient. The word suggests a toggle: switched on for a season, off the next; adopted for weight loss, dropped when pounds fall. In other words, the marketplace sells intermittent fasting as an event rather than a way of being.
Fasting never belonged to the event category. The practice inhabits the structure of life. We all fast, every single day. Sleep creates a nightly fast, and morning breaks it. Calling that universal cadence intermittent shrinks something elemental into a scheduling hack.
Fasting as a Natural Cycle
To understand fasting rightly, see it as cyclical. Nature turns by cycles: day yields to night, the moon waxes and wanes, tides rise and recede. Breath alternates—inhale, exhale. Work leans on rest. Speech yields to silence. Feasting meets its counterpart in fasting.
Fasting never ruptures life’s rhythm; it returns as a recurring note. Humanity learned this early and wove the pattern into religious observance, seasonal practice, and instinctive self-care. Every culture recognized the cycle—sacred fasts, agricultural lean seasons, healing pauses. The body recognizes the cycle as well, using food-free intervals to repair, restore, and renew.
The Error of the Label
Why does modern culture cling to “intermittent fasting”? Novelty sells. Rebrand an ancient practice, add graphs and timers, and a timeless discipline becomes a clickable program. Depth, however, often gets stripped away.
Intermittent frames fasting as unusual, even exotic—something reserved for special projects and quick fixes. Fasting requires no exotic frame. It belongs to everyone. To call it intermittent resembles renaming sunrise “intermittent light therapy.” The phrasing misses the point.
A Better Name: Cyclical Fasting
Language directs perception. Choose the right word and the mind sees more clearly. Choose poorly and the mind trips. Cyclical fasting restores dignity and accuracy. Cycles carry authority—seasons, tides, heartbeats, circadian clocks. Fasting joins that family.
Cyclical fasting affirms partnership: eating and abstaining belong together like inhaling and exhaling. One mode without the other distorts the melody; the pair completes the measure. The name also invites steadiness. Instead of a gimmick with on/off weeks, you cultivate a cadence you can live with for a lifetime.
Philosophy Meets Practice
Heraclitus observed, “The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.” Fasting embodies that hidden harmony. What looks like absence—the empty plate, the quiet kitchen, the pause between meals—reveals order beneath appetite. Rhythm shapes health; restraint grants meaning to abundance.
Speak of cyclical fasting and the mind shifts from manipulation to alignment. You no longer chase tricks. You rejoin the pattern the body and the seasons already keep.
Why the Words Matter
Some shrug at terminology. The practice matters, not the label, they say. But labels train habits. Call fasting intermittent and people treat the discipline like a stunt—occasional, optional, outside the grain of daily life. Call it cyclical and people recognize a built-in pattern—normal, humane, sustainable.
Language has reshaped other domains. Mindfulness reframed meditation for millions. Recycling reframed waste into stewardship. A precise name unlocks cultural adoption. Cyclical fasting can do that work for this practice—anchoring it in nature’s logic rather than in novelty’s glare.
The Spiritual Dimension
Faith traditions have long honored fasting as a returning discipline, not a sporadic spectacle. Ramadan circles back. Yom Kippur returns. Lent arrives each year. Ekadashi dots the lunar calendar. These cycles don’t interrupt life; they tune it—toward humility, gratitude, clarity, compassion. When you call fasting cyclical, you stand with a lineage that understood rhythm as teacher.
Science in Harmony
Modern research describes benefits with the language of rhythm: circadian alignment, hormonal cycling, cellular housekeeping through autophagy. These processes don’t flicker on as fads; they unfold as repeating patterns that recovery and renewal depend on. Biology hums, philosophy nods, tradition smiles—the chorus sings the same refrain: fasting belongs to cycles.
Toward a Truer Understanding
This essay doesn’t dismiss those who follow plans marketed as intermittent fasting. The practice still helps many people tremendously. The problem lives in the frame. A thin label flattens a rich discipline. Fasting doesn’t sit outside life; fasting undergirds life. Rename the practice with care and the body, the spirit, and the culture remember what the ancestors never forgot.
Choose the name that fits the truth. Choose cyclical fasting.
🏛️ Wisdom’s Lens
Heraclitus: “The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.”
🔎 The strength of fasting comes from alignment with enduring cycles, not from occasional interruption.
🌅 Closing Meditation
We never step outside fasting; we move within its current. The pause between meals, the surrender of sleep, the hush before dawn—each measures the music that carries us. Intermittence distracts; cycle conducts. Fasting sets the tempo for appetite, gratitude, and grace.
🔎 Name the practice as rhythm, and the body remembers how to heal.
🙏🏾 Affirmation
I live by fasting’s rhythm. Each pause restores, each return renews. I choose the cycle over the stunt, the harmony over the hype.
🪶 The Cycle of Silence
R.M. Sydnor
We do not break the rhythm—
we live within its breath.
Night folds us into fasting’s arms,
day lifts us back from death.
The table waits with quiet grace,
yet hunger teaches more:
that fullness means remembering
the emptiness before.
The tide withdraws, the tide returns,
as moonlight pulls the sea.
So fasting draws the soul to rest,
then frees it into glee.
Call not this gift “intermittent,”
as if it comes and goes.
It circles like the turning sun,
the ancient pattern knows.
Here silence sings, here bodies mend,
here wisdom takes her seat.
The cycle never pauses—
its harmony complete.
RMS INSIGHTS ✍🏾 