From prophets to tech moguls, why skipping lunch may be history’s ultimate power move.
In our hectic world, burdened with turmoil, distortion, and push notifications, the most iconic thinkers, visionaries, and spiritual firebrands have consistently reached for an ancient and surprising tool: fasting. It wasn’t just about skipping breakfast. It was about tuning in, centering oneself, and, occasionally, rewriting the laws of biology. From Hindu sages to Greek philosophers, Jewish prophets to Silicon Valley masterminds, fasting has been used for clarity, rebellion, self-mastery, purification, and occasionally, to freak out one’s dinner guests. Fasting is not just some trend. It’s baked into the very fabric of humanity.
The Primal Origins of Fasting: Unlike fire, or penicillin, fasting wasn’t invented, but discovered the hard way. Our prehistoric ancestors fasted because they missed the mammoth, not because they were following a biohacking podcast. But over time, what started as accidental fasting evolved into a ritualized path to vision quests, grief processing, spiritual elevation, and occasionally, epic mental downloads. Eventually, people noticed that fasting brought wondrous side effects like clarity, focus, hormone regulation, and even healing. Fasting became a spiritual scalpel and, later, a medical prescription.
The Stoics and Their Stomachs: The remarkable evolution of fasting was practiced for wildly different motives. Ancient philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Epictetus weren’t just fans of thinking, but fans of thinking on an empty stomach. They fasted not to be trendy, but because they believed it enhanced mental clarity, discipline, and resistance to excess. Forget coffee shops. Plato probably brainstormed “The Republic” somewhere between hunger pangs and moral epiphanies.
Steve Jobs, The iFast Prophet: Steve Jobs believed fasting sharpened creative and spiritual vision. His fruitarian diets, extended fasts, and Zen obsession weren’t quirks; they were part of his search for purity in thought and design. Jobs wasn’t a coder, engineer, or even a good email responder, but he had a laser-guided gut instinct for what the world needed. Steering the tech world, he fasted, meditated, disrupted, and championed the message: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Thomas Edison – Fasting and Filaments: With 1,093 patents and a war on sleep, Edison treated fasting like a secret mental weapon. He didn’t eat to live; he munched like a monk-engineer hybrid, convinced that minimal input led to maximum insight. “Sleep,” he once said, “is a criminal waste of time.” This from a man who once electrocuted an elephant named Topsy to challenge Telsa. When he died in 1931 holding his wife’s hand, Edison had his last breath captured in a test tube by his friend Henry Ford. Really? He invented sound recording by replicating “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He also helped develop modern electricity, and perhaps intermittent fasting before it had a hashtag.
Pythagoras – Loving Mystic with A Triangle Fetish: You know him from math class as the founder of modern geometry, but Pythagoras was also part monk, a vegetarian, part numerologist, and part cosmic DJ. Believing that fasting was a prerequisite for enlightenment, he required every student to fast before entering his school, because according to him, a clean gut equals a clear channel to math, music and universal harmony. He combined fasting with silence in order to tune the self to the vibrations of the cosmic universe. You don’t get a theorem named after you unless you’re really vibing.
Buddha – Rice, Enlightenment, and the Middle Way: In one of the most iconic fasting fails of all time, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) went full breatharian, eating one grain of rice a day until the dude looked like a cross between a mummy and a spiritual raisin. Eventually, a woman named Sujata handed him rice milk, and he realized: starving to death isn’t enlightenment, but just starving. The realization led him to create the Middle Way, a path between indulgence and self-destruction that expanded spiritual history. Fasting, he taught, is powerful… until it’s pathological. Today, monks still fast, but in moderation.
Moses – 40 Days, No Snacks, and a Download that Became the Foundational Laws of Western Civilization: Moses didn’t just fast, but annihilated the concept of brunch. The man went 40 days without food or water, which is not humanly survivable unless you have a direct line to the Almighty. After fasting atop Mount Sinai, he returned with the Ten Commandments and a radioactive face. When he saw the Israelites worshipping a golden cow they had made, he smashed the tablets, climbed back up Mount Sinai, fasted another 40 days and asked God for mercy. That’s 80 days of supernatural keto. Following in his footsteps, Elijah also fasted 40 days. Even Jesus mirrored this when he fasted 40 days in the Judean wilderness and endured the spiritual trials that shaped Christianity.
Hippocrates to Biohackers: Hippocrates, the Father of Modern Medicine and original health guru, recommended fasting as medicine, not a miracle. Thousands of years later, Dr. Otto Buchinger from the Buchinger Clinic in Germany supervised over 200,000 fasts, finding that fasting could trigger something wild: autolysis—where the body eats its own trash before it eats itself. Today’s scientists like Valter Longo promote fasting-mimicking diets for longevity and regeneration. Then there is Benjamin Franklin, who said, “To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” Franklin may have owned Twitter if he were alive today.
Fasting as Revolution – Gandhi, Mandela, and Chávez: Mahatma Gandhi called fasting “the sincerest form of prayer.” He used it to purify, to unite, and to dismantle British Imperialism in India by applying nonviolence—one skipped meal at a time. César Chávez fasted for farm workers’ rights. Nelson Mandela fasted behind prison walls to demand an end to Apartheid in South Africa. These weren’t hunger pangs. These were powerful statements. Fasting became the quiet thunder behind nonviolent resistance.
Empty Stomachs, Full Minds: Nikola Tesla used fasting to focus his electric brain. Mark Twain said fasting cured more than medicine. Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, fasts like a Silicon Valley monk and credits it for clarity and focus. Conclusion: Eat less, perceive more. Fasting has never been just about food—it’s about control, clarity, purification, protest, healing and power. Across every era, great minds from prophets to programmers have emptied themselves to access something greater.
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