Is it possible to fast for 40 days and nights

Not everyone should fast for forty days and forty nights. Everyone should fast. No one who wants to grow in Christ should neglect the gift of going with less so you can seek God more. Not all fasting is the same. Moses did not eat or drink Deut. This is deadly unless God is miraculously sustaining you.

Jesus did not eat Matt. Daniel did not eat delicacies for a season. He gave up meat and wine for three weeks so that he could give himself to seeking the Lord Dan. Fasting can be for different durations and it can give up different things. Not all fasting is good. In Isaiah 58 the people of God were seeking God with fasting. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Fasting that is not accompanied by repentance and obedience is rejected by God. Not all fasting is good because food is very good. Nothing about fasting should be a rejection of the goodness of food. God created all food good Gen. Fasting that runs away from the good gift of food is really running away from God. Fasting is an intensifier. Fasting is a way of intensifying our ordinary pursuit of God.

In the words of John Piper, fasting says,. Fasting can intensify our seeking of God. He provoked his hunger by fasting and channeled that hunger towards God. He provoked his discomfort with sackcloth and directed that discomfort towards God.

Fasting helps us intensify our seeking of God by redirecting the energies and passions we normally fix on food to the Living God. Fasting can intensify our repentance. Fasting accompanies repentance. It belongs in the company of intense actions like weeping and mourning.

Fasting reminds us that repentance is nothing glib or light. If your soul needs the upheaval of repentance then fasting is a great intensifier. Fasting is a fitting response to an intense situation. Sometimes the situation we are in is already intense. In response to the intense threat of genocide they responded with intense prayer and fasting.

Fasting is often mightily used of God. When the leaders of the church at Antioch fasted the Holy Spirit spoke and sent out two of the most powerful apostolic missionaries the world has ever seen Acts Before God does a mighty work he often moves in His people to seek His face with prayer and fasting.

I needed to fast. I did not seem to be making progress in my walk with God and my victory over sin. I have felt my time for prayer crowded out. I have felt my conscience grow duller. I have felt my hunger for God grow faint. I was moved to fast for revival.

I believe wherever there are true Christians the Spirit of God is at work. Even when Christians are at their lowest—like when the Corinthians were visiting prostitutes—they are still the people of the Spirit 1 Cor. Having said that, how can we ever be satisfied with such a sad state of affairs. If you can be satisfied with such a sad state of affairs you are probably not a Christian. Christians were made to be filled with the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit and to repeatedly experience fresh baptisms of the empowering Holy Spirit of God Eph.

Christians were meant to drink of the living waters of the Lord Jesus Christ. I was moved to fast for repentance. My wife Christy and I have seen that there is too much anger in our home. Our home is not a raging volcano of rage. We have a lot of love for one another and our kids. But far too often it is a place of anger, irritability and frustration. Despite the plain teaching of the Bible, we seem to believe the lie that the anger of man can produce the righteousness of God James We felt compelled to deal with that more severely.

We long to commend the gospel to one another and to our children so we fasted, asking the Lord to forgive us and to change us. I was moved to fast for self-control. I like food. I like it a lot. I like ice cream. How do you properly fast? What does fasting mean to God? What to give up during a fast?

What are the rules for Lent? What is giving up for Lent? What time does lent end ? Are you supposed to give up something for Lent?

Is lent just a Catholic thing? What are three things we do during Lent? What are the 40 days of Lent ? What kind of meat is not allowed during Lent? Why is a fish not considered meat? What happens if a Catholic eat meat on Friday? What prayer do we not say during Lent? What word is never said during Lent? Does the Bible say no meat on Fridays?

Why do we not eat meat on Fridays during Lent? Can you eat meat on St Joseph Day? Why is fish not considered meat in the Catholic Church? Can you eat eggs on Ash Wednesday? What does the Bible say about Ash Wednesday? Previous Article How much money do in home daycare providers make? Next Article Can eating after fasting cause diarrhea? Back To Top. After all, some sects in those religious traditions used to fast at length, even for weeks at a time. Now, my research into fasting—including doing it myself 4 times in the past 2 years for 12 days, 9 days, and 7 days twice, and some shorter fasts in between —has less to do with spiritual fasting or purification and more to do with the health benefits.

I developed a modified fasting kit this year, as well as what could be described as a fasting-mimicking detox five years ago, which 13, people have now done.

I don't honestly believe that most people can or will go completely without food for a week or more, like I did. When water is readily available, it is hard for most people to abstain from it. I have very little self-discipline. Besides being raised Mormon, where we fasted Saturday night to Sunday night one Sunday every month from the age of 8, I have absolutely no reason why fasting for 40 days would be easy for me.

I might even last a whole day. But, the fridge would be right there steps away. My car would be in the garage. I live just 10 minutes away from food, really good food. My willpower is nothing when I get ferociously hungry. I suffered actual pain writing that. Rather than deal with all that temptation, I flew to a spiritual retreat in Texas run by Hindu monks and nuns to fast. Siddhayatan is in Nowhere, Texas. Truly, it is miles from anything, and you cannot use your Uber or Lyft app from there to sneak out and get food in a moment of weakness.

I take a sliver of soap and a towel. That's right, the Hindu ashram does not provide a towel or washcloths. You can Uber to the ashram, but not back to the airport. You can schedule them to pick you up tomorrow. You would have to be in a serious crisis to just drop in for lunch, though.

First of all, that would be embarrassing. The monks and nuns dressed all in white make a homemade vegetarian Hindu meal three meals a day, but they make just enough for the exact number of people they have there doing the yoga, meditation, silent, and spiritual retreats. So, besides being embarrassing to fail to ask well in advance if you can eat a meal with everybody else, you might actually be causing everyone they did plan for to not get enough to eat if you just crashed a meal.

So, my point is, your food cravings are not easily indulged at this place. I know a guy at home who recently fasted for 23 days. He went out to lunch and coffee with people the whole time and just abstained.

Do you know how much food they show, on most movies and TV shows? Water fasting can be dangerous under the wrong circumstances and should only be done under supervision.

One, there is no medical supervision here. No nurses or doctors. I mean, the odds of you dying from fasting are probably about as high as you dying from taking most over-the-counter medications or driving in a car. But, when I interviewed Valter Longo, Ph. This seems ridiculous, given that millions of people have fasted, whether accidentally due to lack of food or on purpose, for literal millennia.

Please do it under the supervision of a trusted functional medicine practitioner. For more information about supervised fasting, listen to my podcast interview with Dr. Alan Goldhamer of True North clinic. This blog post is about my experience, is not medical advice, and does not substitute for competent medical care. When fasting for long periods of time, it is normal to not have very much energy. Then, your body and mind settle in.

Some people describe having lots of energy. Generally, the longer you fast, the more your cravings for food subside, but so does your energy. If you can afford the time off from life, you can just lie in bed and take short walks now and then, but not do much of anything unless you feel like it. On about day 4, I start to have periods of not feeling hunger. But, I also, in each of my last 3 fasts, start to have lower back pain on day 4. Yeah, your muscle breaks down a little bit.

This may sound like a bad thing and of course, you should never ignore what pain may be telling you. Fasting is a great way to cleanse your body of all the harmful things that are introduced when eating everyday food. Well, two of them. This incredibly important process, called autophagy , is one of the most important reasons to fast, whether it is modified fasting, or water fasting.

When the body is in a fasting state rather than a fed state, the immune system hunts down mutated cells, and breaks them down. The white blood cells and killer T cells, for instance, are highly energized when you're deprived of food, and they become very active. This discovery is considered so important, that it won the Nobel Prize for researcher Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi in My friend Katie Wells, who has one of the most popular wellness blogs online, The Wellness Mama , recently water fasted for 2 weeks and found that after the first three days of weakness and hunger, she was insanely productive.

Total isolation and removal from food temptation, like I get at the Texas ashram, is very beneficial to me also a little lonely. You know how you need a coffee to wake you up? There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing if long term fasting is for you or not.

This becomes an interesting deep dive into your soul, where you learn how addicted to stimulation, in general, you are. What will you do with that knowledge? I think even the awareness is helpful towards managing addictions and moving through them to a healthier place.

I think that if you can soldier on and do your work and tend to your family, the time will pass more quickly than if you do what I do: sit around in bed, mostly, working on your laptop and watching movies. PS: try not to watch movies about food. When I was hitting a wall in my most recent 7-day fast, on day 3, the nuns told me about some of their other water fasters.

The longest? An older man fasted for 40 days without food. Pretty Biblical, right? They said he would pretty much lay in bed the whole time and was very, very weak. But, the woman who stayed in my room before me had come for a day fast, brought her dog, and planned to confront her emotional eating problem. Like I said, fasting is different for everyone. In fact, while each of my long fasts has had similarities, my process, struggles, and epiphanies are different each time, too.

There are a host of health benefits that result from giving your body and your digestive system a break. I was first handed a bibliography of books on fasting by Thomas Lodi, M. Some disagree. In fact, Valter Longo, Ph. But, Dr. Lodi maintains that the evidence shows it to be a powerful cancer preventative and treatment adjuvant. With quite a bit of cancer in my family, my primary reason to fast periodically is cancer prevention.