The month of practicing Siyam or Fast is coming soon. This will begin later in March for the year 2023. I found a YouTube video by Sam Gerrans on getting the benefits of Fasting.

I am sharing the Video as well as the transcription from the video for those who love to read (and also for the search engine to bring readers here.)

So here is the video from Sam Gerrans' YouTube Channel.

Main Text with slight omission (in the beginning and end) and minor edits. The video was recorded on 22nd September 2019.

Getting to the Benefits of Fasting

What I want to talk about today is fasting. What I've learned and just share some of the things I've learned about it over the last couple of years because fasting has become more important to me and the reason is that it, as we know in the Quran fasting is made incumbent upon us as it was upon those before us.

And I don't want to talk about you know the technicalities of when you should fast and all this sort of thing. I just want to talk about fasting in general.

Fasting is a huge benefit and it's a huge benefit because it draws you closer to God and so that's why I've just seen the benefit of it in my own life physically to some extent but also from the point of view of just you know being closer and that you know seeing closer to the things that are actually important because hunger puts things in perspective and opens up a wellspring of inner vision if you want to call it that.

The Weaponization of Food

But let's be honest about it fasting in this day and age is tough and it's tougher than I think it's ever been before the reason it is tough is that food is weaponized and I want to sort of work through some of that. If you eat a modern American standard diet or Western standard diet and you try to fast it's going to be like trying to do two or three fasts at once and if you're not used to it it can be very discouraging to the point of depressing and it gets that way really quickly. The food is not what we should be eating in the majority of cases. I mean some people understand that and they've made adjustments but most people if they eat what most people eat are addicted. They're not eating because they're hungry they're eating because they're having withdrawals and that's just the fact of it.

Getting Rid of Sugar

So going to my experience if people who follow my channel a lot will know that at some point I had a health issue that has been solved thank god to a very large extent anyway but by various means. But one of the things which changed after that was my relationship with food. I've never been a huge eater or anything like that but the first thing that happened was I gave up sugar and when I say sugar I don't just mean adding sugar to food I mean sugar in anything.

I understand that they've done experiments with rats where they got rats addicted to sugar and cocaine and then put them in a situation where they could have one or the other and they chose sugar. Sugar is highly addictive and I'm not just talking here about white sugar I mean any form of sugar that doesn't naturally occur in food. I can honestly say that I don't miss sugar. I haven't knowingly eaten anything with sugar in it for I don't know 14 months or something like that and it was tough but it made a huge difference a huge difference and it's a form of freedom not being addicted to it and what I'm trying to say is if you are addicted to it and then you try to fast I mean yeah you can do it but by the end of the evening you're going to be absolutely strung out and what I've seen a lot of people do is that they you know they fast according to whatever system whatever they've been told and they follow that but by the end of the day they're exhausted and their body is crying out for sugar.

And then they just stuff themselves and so what it turns out is yeah okay so you haven't eaten for the day but you've had three meals for supper that's not really fasting.

What I would say is if you are planning to fast and for your fast to mean something to you then get your body free of sugar first. And it's going to hurt because it's an addiction so expect it to hurt it's going to take, I don't know, six weeks or something like that you'll feel depressed you'll feel down you'll feel strung out. Just stop eating sugar. That's a fast right there once you've got that one under your belt and honestly, I found it once I'd done that it's just it. Just made things so much easier.

Getting Rid of Addiction of Coffee / Tea

The next thing you've got to get out of your system is coffee or coffee and tea. I can tell you how I gave up coffee and I wasn't a huge coffee drinker it wasn't like I was drinking 10 cups a day or anything like that I drank I drank one cup a day but I did drink it every day and I drank a big cup and I just couldn't justify it to myself financially and also just the fact that coffee has on people it really makes them debilitated or it can affect certain people in that way. Also, look at the culture it's in everything have a cup of coffee you know the two detectives got to pull an all-nighter or sit and have coffee no you shouldn't have coffee you're going to be strung out and irrational if you drink a lot of coffee although you know maybe it's American coffee maybe it's not small it's not so strong but European coffee if you drink a large cup of that you're going to be wired for some time and then you're going to crash and what it's doing is I mean I'm not giving you nutritional advice but I'm just saying that if you are a coffee drinker it's going to inhibit your ability to fast because you're not just fasting from the food you're coming off a drug and so I would say get you to know get that drug out of the way first.

The way I gave up coffee where I did it was I stopped drinking coffee and drank green tea for a while which kind of took the edge off of the caffeine withdrawal. And I used caffeine tablets and then I uh I which meant I could control the dose and then I I didn't particularly like the green tea so I drank less and less of that and I was eating like taking one I think it was two a day and then I over a couple of weeks. I brought it down, I tapered it off and cut it down by quarters, I think until eventually, I was just taking a quarter of one a day and then I just forgot about it I think. But it took about six weeks you know coffees it's a drug and that's why there are so many coffee shops everywhere because they want you addicted to this stuff.

Wheat and Yeast / White Bread / Flour

The next one is wheat and yeast and you know bread basically unless it's unleavened bread. I haven't eaten white bread for years but I mean even brown bread. And I'm talking about Russian brown bread which is by western standards it's excellent. The stuff you get in the west it's not bread unless it's in an organic shop of a particular kind. Yeast and wheat and all that's what's making you fat that's what's giving you what I call a married tummy. Pasta all of these things. If you can get rid of those three things I would treat those as your fasts to start with because that's enough. Just getting rid of coffee, just getting rid of sugar and I do mean all sugar and then getting rid of all the wheat products if you can get rid of those three things and drink water and purify your system to some extent then when you fast you've only got one fast instead of four. That's what I would just share from my own experience.

It also means that when you get to the end of the day of fasting however by whatever method you fast you drink water and maybe drink whatever it is water with lemon or something. You're not going to be screaming for all these other things and if you decide to go beyond the structure of just not eating in the daytime you wish to know fast in a more thorough way you can continue you do for much longer. It becomes much easier and more pleasurable and you get to the blessings of it much quicker.

What this video is really about is how to get to those benefits how to get to the benefits of fasting because I think it's something that a lot of people experience, they don't like to say it because they feel like fasting should be wonderful but fasting isn't wonderful for them because they're actually going through withdrawals from weaponized substances that they confuse with food and they think that that's fasting.

Of course, fasting is tough in any case fasting is tough there's no question about it but it's a different kind of thing if you're just fighting one battle instead of four at a time I just wanted to share that.

Control of Your Eyes

Another aspect of fasting that I'd like to mention is to do with that I isn't to do exactly with food but it's related it's to do with controlling your eyes and I mean I speak to men my audience is about actually about 92 men and you know what I'm talking about guys you just do so it's a habit and obviously we're bombarded from every quarter now. But if you can get into the habit and it is a habit of controlling your eyes I mean obviously you're not going to walk into lampposts and stuff but yeah I say you know you're responsible for what you look at and you know these vixens out there this they're drawing you in.

I think in Christianity they would call it like a Jezebel spirit and you know they know what they're doing they know they're wrestling with your head. They're not lawful to you anyway and they'd only drag you to hell. So just think of it in those terms. If you can get out of the habit of allowing your mind to be drawn in a sensuous direction, that will help with fasting because these things are related.

I learned this many years ago before I did what I'm doing now when I lived a very different life and I was in Moscow 15 years ago 20 years ago something like that I can't remember a long time ago and I had a bottle of champagne in the fridge that was had been half drunk and so I put the cork back into this thing and I went back to the fridge I can't remember in the morning or something I can't remember but I opened this bottle and this cork went bang straight into my face straight into my eye and gave me a great big black eye and it also made my eye red bloodshot I mean really bloodshot I think people say you know what happened to you and you explain they go yeah sure it did you I'm the bottle of champagne into your face.

Anyway, the reason I'm telling this story is that for whatever it was about a month afterward I was very self-conscious of this and so I controlled my eyes. And so being in the Moscow metro which in the 90s perhaps, the metro then was well you know was a cesspit, and however I wasn't looking at anybody. Because I was conscious of how my face and where my eye looked. So I kept my eyes down for about whatever it was a month or something. And I noticed this inner vision opening up new strength. So understand we're living in a war and all of these things are directed against strong men, against men who can make a difference, and all of the men.

But if you want to benefit your fasting then learn to control that as well because these things are related. And when you are fasting make sure that you know that's a priority. That you're controlling your thoughts over that period. This is a benefit to us. This is medicine spiritual medicine and it's free and it can you can change your life.

So that's why the whole system is just designed to fight against it and that's all for now.

Additional Resources

Science of Fasting (YouTube Video)

The Evils of Porn, Sexual Immorality, and How to Defeat it for Good (YouTube)