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Beyond Ramadan: the Practice of Fasting Across Religions

April 19, 2022
Jain nuns gather beneath the monolithic statue of Gommateshvara in Shravanabelagola, India. Photo Credit | Mario Tama/Getty Images

For centuries, people have practised abstinence from the comforts and pleasures of everyday life as a way to regain a spiritual focus and connectedness. Fasting has been a widespread practice across religions and cultures that entails refraining from eating completely, or almost completely, for a specific amount of time. Recently, the practice of fasting has been mainstreamed in popular culture as a way to lose weight, improve metabolism, prevent or slow disease and possibly increase life span. Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, has studied the benefits of calorie restriction. She believes that “having a fasting period every day could reap some of these benefits […] it gets into the idea that fasting puts the body in a different state, where it’s more ready to repair and surveil for damage. Far from new, the practice of fasting has been embodied in religious doctrine and embraced by the pious for millennia. However, there are varying differences in the practice of fasting across cultures. In Greek Orthodox Christianity, people fast for a total of 180 – 200 days each year, and their…


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