As a child, I was told that fasting was about feeling the hunger of the poor and learning gratitude for sustenance from Allah.
That explanation never fully sat right with me.
I was not raised in wealth. We struggled. We even lived in a mansion at one point, but it was not ours.
So the idea that I needed to “experience hardship” to understand deprivation felt incomplete.
Hardship was already familiar.
So I started questioning what fasting actually meant.
Fasting Is Not Starvation
Fasting is a voluntary act.
You abstain from food and drink for a defined period.
You know exactly when it starts and when it ends.
Starvation is involuntary. There is no certainty about when the next meal will come.
Conflating the two is imprecise.
Once I stopped seeing fasting as symbolic hardship, I began exploring it from a different angle.
My Turning Point
There was a time in my life when I weighed 150 kg.
I showed symptoms consistent with Type 2 diabetes.
Constant fatigue. Brain fog. Swollen feet. Pain in my legs just from moving.
I started with food control.
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Cut processed foods
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Eliminated packed juices
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Removed oats and cereals
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Stopped eating kuih or sweets
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Reduced carbohydrates significantly
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No rice, no noodles, no bread
Eventually, I moved to one meal a day.
Effectively, I was fasting.
And it worked.
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From 4XL shirts to XL and 2XL depending on the cut
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From a 50-inch waist to 42 inches
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From 150 kg down to 110 kg
Once the weight came down, I added exercise.
The composition changed. Less fat. More muscle.
Fasting was no longer theoretical. It was transformative.
Religious Fasting Came Later
Islam encourages voluntary fasting beyond Ramadan.
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Mondays and Thursdays
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Alternate-day fasting
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The white days
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Other recommended days
I began fasting regularly. At one point, it was Mondays to Fridays. At another, alternate days.
This time, the intention was different.
Not health. Not weight loss. Not discipline for its own sake.
Worship.
The Hunger Myth
Over time, fasting stopped being about food.
I became accustomed to it. Hunger signals lost their psychological intensity.
During Ramadan now, I break fast with a glass of water. I often skip sahur entirely. My daily activities remain normal. No dizziness. No dramatic thirst. No crash.
At one point, I wore a Continuous Glucose Monitor.
The data was revealing.
When I “felt hungry,” my blood glucose levels were stable. There was no physiological emergency. Hunger was often habitual, not biological.
That dismantled another assumption: “If you don’t eat, you will faint.”
For a metabolically flexible body, that is simply not accurate.
So Why Fast?
If it is not about simulating poverty…
If it is not about weight loss…
If it is not about physical hardship…
Then what is it?
In Ramadan, the answer is direct.
It is for Allah.
Not because we are forced. Not because we are weak. Not because we need to prove resilience.
But because we choose obedience.
The act is simple. The meaning is not.
When food is no longer the focus, you realize fasting is about mastery of intention.
And intention, not hunger, is the real test.