Fasting Like Jesus: How to Align Your Body and Spirit for God’s Glory

Episode Summary
In this solo teaching, Coach Alex VanHouten dives deep into the spiritual and physical discipline of fasting. Too often misunderstood as either a diet trend or a hunger strike, fasting is neither—it is a God-given practice that draws us closer to His heart while transforming our health.

Pulling from Scripture, modern science, and decades of coaching experience, Alex explains why Jesus said “when you fast,” not “if you fast.” You’ll learn what fasting truly is, how it benefits your body and soul, and practical pro tips to start fasting well.

If you’ve ever wondered how to move beyond the hype, fad diets, or misconceptions about fasting, this episode will help you embrace it as a lifelong spiritual discipline—done with joy, intention, and wisdom.

Main Discussion Themes
-Why Christians Fast: Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 and examples from Moses, Daniel, and Jesus Himself.
-Spiritual Purpose: Hungering for righteousness, not striking against God or earning “holy points.”
-Physical Benefits: Insulin sensitivity, fat metabolism, autophagy, mental clarity, reduced inflammation, and longevity.
-Psychological Benefits: Self-control, resilience, and agency over bodily drives.
-Psychological Benefits: Self-control, resilience, and agency over bodily drives.
-Beginner to Advanced Fasting: From time-restricted eating to 24–72 hour extended fasts.
-Pro Tips: Setting intention, starting small, hydration, breaking the fast well, and fasting in community.
-Who Shouldn’t Fast: Safety notes for children, pregnant/breastfeeding women, and medical cases.

Timestamped Outline
00:00:00 Introduction to Fasting
00:03:00 Spiritual Benefits of Fasting
00:09:00 Physical Benefits of Fasting
00:15:00 Practical Tips for Fasting
00:21:00 Common Misconceptions and Safety

Move Forward Today
-Take Your First Step: Start small with a 12–16 hour fast and set a clear prayerful intention.
-Feast on Scripture: Replace mealtimes with time in God’s Word or prayer.
-Join a Community: Don’t fast alone—connect with believers in the Better Daily app here: https://BetterDaily.live/invite
Practice Stewardship: See fasting not as deprivation but as an act of worship and stewardship of the body God gave you.

Featured Resources
📖 Faithful Fitness Devotional: 40 Days of Strength and Stewardship for Christians https://faithfulfitnessdevo.com
📱 Join the Better Daily App for community fasts, coaching, and daily encouragement https//:faithfulfitnessdevo.com
🎧 Subscribe to the Faithful Fitness Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/faithful-fitness-by-better-daily--5150768/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Faithful Fitness Podcast. For My Dad. Coach
Alex Van Houghten helps you get stronger and mind, body,
and spirit. He believes that your body is a temple,
so taking good care of it is an actual worship.
I should know. I live with him every week. He
brings truth from the Bible too, from science and stories
that will set your heart on fire. May God bless

(00:23):
you to become everything He made you to be, just
one percent better every single day.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Hey there, what's up Coach Alex fan Houten here Faithful
Fitness Podcast. Is fasting a old religious practice or is
it a new weight loss dieting fad? In this episode
of the Faithful Fitness Podcast, we're going to be diving
into the scriptural understanding of why we fast and how
to fast, and we're also going to look at the

(00:49):
science based benefits for our body and the practical application
steps that you can start implementing today. Let's dive into it.
Hey there, we just had an amazing question from one
of our listeners and one of our members in the
Better Daily community, and I wanted to share with you

(01:11):
the question and share with you the answer. It goes
like this, Coach Alex, I've heard a lot about fasting.
Why should we fast, how do we fast? And what
good does it do for my physical and my spiritual wellbeing?
This is such an awesome question. I'm so glad you asked.
And if you're listening to this and you have a question,
please drop it in the comments. I'll do my best

(01:32):
to make sure we cover it over the coming weeks
here on the Faithful Fitness Podcast. Now, in my last
twenty years as an exercise scientist and faith based health coach,
fasting is regularly a normal subject that comes up in
conversation with my clients, but also in conversations in my
church and in my community, because fasting is a spiritual discipline,

(01:56):
but it's a spiritual discipline that has profound physical benefits
and I can't wait to talk you through that. And
in our world today, there's actually some amazing research that
helps us to understand more and more what powerful things
fasting can do for us. But also there's a lot
of misconceptions scripturally speaking about what it means to fast

(02:16):
as a Christian, how to do it well, and what
the proposed benefits might be for me from a spiritual perspective,
and those are the things that science can't really tell us,
and I can't wait to dive in with you here.
So first, why do we fast from a spiritual perspective? Well,
I guess this assumes that fasting is a good thing
that we should be up to. Jesus said in Matthew

(02:36):
chapter six. He tells us that when we fast, we
should fast a certain way, not as the religious leaders
of the time do. He doesn't say if you fast,
he says when you fast it are In the Gospel,
when the Pharisees are giving him and his disciples a
hard time about their fasting practice, Jesus explains to the
Pharisees that right now my disciples have me with them,

(02:58):
they don't need to fast. But when I go away
from them, there will be a time when they will
fast regularly, and we are in that time. Because Jesus
is in heaven. We have the Holy Spirit with us.
And if you're following Christ, that's amazing. But he's not
right here physically present with you. And that means that
fasting as a discipline is an amazing way to bring

(03:19):
you close to the heart of God. We have some
great biblical examples of spiritual giants who fasted for one
reason or another, like Moses or Daniel or even Jesus.
That can teach us why we fast and how to
fast in a way that brings us closer to the
heart of God. Today we're going to talk about how
that affects us spiritually, but we're also going to talk

(03:40):
about how that affects us physically from a scientific perspective,
and we're going to look at some pro tips. If
you're new to fasting, or maybe you have some misconceptions
about fasting, I want to make sure we dive into
that together here, so make sure you stick around to
the end. But the simple answer to the question about
why we fast from a spiritual perspective is that fasting
teach us to hunger for the right things. In the Beatitudes,

(04:03):
Jesus teaches us, Blessed are those who hunger in thirst
for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Fasting is an
amazing practice that aligns our heart, our mind, and our
body all in the same direction and teaches us how
to hunger for the right things. There are some misconceptions
about fasting, though that I want to address. Fasting is

(04:24):
not a hunger strike against God. Fasting is not going
to get God's attention anymore than anything else you do
in your life. Fasting is about changing you as you
approach the heart of the Father. Fasting is not a
diet trend to be disguised from a spiritual perspective. Yes,
I have taught my clients how to fast, and many

(04:46):
of them have seen the physical benefits of things like
weight loss or fat loss or immune function restoration as
a byproduct of fasting. But we're not trying to say
I'm going to fast so I can lose and there
you know, there's some spiritual benefits too. I want your
fasting practice to be a powerful discipline that helps your mind, body,

(05:08):
and spirit get closer to God and be a better
steward of the body God's given you. And fasting is
not about earning some sort of holiness or scoring points
with God. It's about using a spiritual discipline to get
closer and closer to God's will in your life. Fasting
can help you on a regular basis to make room

(05:29):
for God and your body in your mind by emptying
yourself of the things that are distracting you from Him.
That's great from a spiritual perspective, but what about the
physical perspective. This is the Faithful Fitness Podcast, and we
always look at where the intersection of faith and fitness
come together. So let's talk about what fasting does for
our body. God made your body, and he made you

(05:52):
with the ability to eat and metabolize food and get
energy and nutrients from that food and build yourself new
every single day. That's awesome, But he also made your
body to deal with the time spins where there's no
food available. Now. Fasting is not going hungry because of famine.
Fasting is the conscious decision to go without sustenance on purpose.

(06:16):
The more we study it, fasting has amazing benefits for
the body God gave you. One of the things that
fasting can do is it can improve your insolent sensitivity
and metabolism. Insolent sensitivity is your ability to respond to
carbohydrates without allowing sugar in your bloodstream to cause damage
throughout the body. And we need the opportunity to fast

(06:37):
to teach our body how to burn fat as a
fuel source. When you don't have anything in your stomach
or anything in your intestinal track, your body has no
choice but to use the very natural metabolic pathways that
metabolize the excess fats that our body stores on it.
That's how God made it. Fasting also promotes something called autophagy.
Autophagy is the body's ability to clear out damaged tissues

(07:02):
that don't need to be a part of the system anymore.
Research has also shown that fasting can improve mental clarity
when you condition your body to burn fat walls of
fuel source and when you transition from a fed to
a fasted state. When you're fasted, there's actually some increase
in brain function that can help you solve complex problems

(07:23):
and access certain parts of your mind that might be
cloudy when you're in a fed state. Research also shows
that fasting can reduce inflammation almost immediately, and it can
help to reprogram and to recover your immune system, especially
if you have a particularly sensitive one that's had to
respond to a lot of diseases, illnesses, or damage over time.

(07:44):
And research is also showing that there's markers related to
longevity that is a nice long life that fasting can
help to improve as well. There's also some psychological benefits
to fasting, one of those being agency over my body's drives,
meaning that if I I learn that when my body
tells me I'm hungry, that that's something I can evaluate.

(08:05):
I don't have to be a slave to that need
or that thought. I can actually think through No, I'm fine.
I've got plenty of body fat on my body. I
know that I can fast for eighteen or twenty four,
thirty six hours, or however long you fasted in your practice,
and you can be an agent rather than a subject
to the cues of your body. In the Bible, we

(08:26):
call this self control a powerful fruit of the spirit,
and psychologically, it's also helpful to think of fasting as
an important thing that stresses our body for adaptive resilience,
like exercise. Exercise isn't fun all the time. However, when
I lift weights or I do cardiovascular work, I'm stressing
my system to create a positive and powerful adaptation, and

(08:49):
physically speaking, fasting works much in the same way. It's
a stress around the system that creates powerful and positive
adaptations that help my immune function, that help my metabolism,
help my digestive track in many other things. So when
I'm fasting, it's important to have my mind right about
how beneficial this is for me, both from a spiritual

(09:11):
and from a physical perspective. God designed fasting not just
as a spiritual exercise, but as a regular rhythm that
can help to restore my body in the way He
made it to function. So I've said the word fasting
quite a bit in this video. I think before I
give you some pro tips about how to go about
it in your regular practice, we should probably define the

(09:32):
term right. By definition, fasting is the conscious and intentional
abstaining from food for a brief period of time. Now,
in Scripture, fasting specifically relates to food, and I've heard
it said in Christian circles that I've fasted from social
media or I've fasted from sugar, for instance. Those aren't
scriptural ideas. In Scripture, when we fast, we are saying

(09:56):
that we are taking a break from food. Jesus did
not fast for forty days in the wilderness from facebook.
Jesus fasted from food for forty days before he began
his ministry and was tempted by Satan, in which he
responded with the spirit of the word. So if you're
looking for benefits from fasting from a scriptural perspective, it's

(10:17):
important we understand we're talking about not eating in our
world today. The word fasting can mean a bunch of
different things, So it's important that when you start to
condition your body to fasting that you understand what you're practicing.
Most of the time in the fitness world, when I
mentioned fasting, individuals think that I'm talking about time restricted
eating or intermitute fasting. These are two terms in the

(10:40):
scientific community that are just used to describe a period
of time in the day where and I don't eat
food and a period of time in the day when
I do eat food. And this is a great place
for individuals to start in learning their fasting practice. So
if I don't eat for twelve hours, or if I
don't eat for fourteen hours, or if I don't eat

(11:01):
for sixteen hours, that's a period of fasting. But something
that's intensely important to understand is that twelve, fourteen, and
even sixteen hours of fasting does not actually bring most
individuals into what we call a fasted state. So if
you're looking for some of the physical and spiritual benefits

(11:21):
that I just talked about with regard to fasting, there
is going to be a time in your fasting practice
that you'll need to extend beyond that twelve fourteen or
sixteen hour window. Why is that? Well, from a metabolic perspective,
I am fed, I have food in my system, and
my metabolism is running as if I have food in

(11:42):
my system up until I've run out of energy in
my digestive tract. So whatever I ate yesterday is still
being digested right now. And when my muscles and my
liver run out of something called glycogen, carbohydrates are stored
in our body as glycogen in our muscles and our liver,
there's small amounts in our bloodstream. And so when I

(12:03):
run out of that fuel, that short term fuel, my
body has no choice but to start tapping into my
fats as a fuel source. When that happens, that transition
brings me from a fed to a fasted state. Most
time restricted eating plans or interminute fasting plans are not
actually helping individuals go from a fed to a fasted state.

(12:28):
So my goal for you, if you're incorporating fasting as
a spiritual and physical discipline to improve your walk with
God and to improve the stewardship of your body that
He's given you, I want you to be able to
work into a twenty four or even a thirty six
or more fast, and these fasts are what the research

(12:48):
calls extended fasts. After you've gone from being a beginner
and fasting mean you can go twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours
without consuming food, and you've got the mindset and you
un understand that you're not going to starve to death,
you're going to be okay, and you've started to learn
how to plan fasting into your life, then it's time
to try and extended fast. I love it when my

(13:10):
clients first complete their first twenty four hour fast and
they have the opportunity to dig into scripture, They have
the opportunity to pray, They have the opportunity to see
how much of their life actually does revolve around food,
and what kind of bandwidth is unlocked and their mind
and their spirit when they don't have to worry about it.
It's such an amazing thing to do. But some of

(13:32):
the benefits that we've studied with regard to fasting continue
to accumulate even further after these twenty four or thirty
six hour fasts. In fact, things like neurogenesis, the creation
of new neurons, or the ramping up of autophogy, that
process that I spoke about earlier. That clears out those
those cells and tissues that you don't need, that are

(13:54):
damaged and ready to be gone, or things like increased
growth hormone. All of those actually can continue to build
and climb and grow up until around the seventy two
hour mark. Now, if you're new to fasting, you can't
possibly imagine going seventy two hours without food and that
being a positive and beneficial thing for you. Don't worry.
It's not something I'm telling you you have to do.

(14:16):
But I am telling you that there are amazing benefits
to your faith journey and your fitness journey if you
can learn to condition your body to be able to
fast like that now and then, regardless of how long
you practice fasting, whether you're conditioned to it or not.
A mature disciple of Christ approaches fasting as a spiritual discipline,

(14:37):
as a privilege of worship, not as punishment or some
sort of weight loss fad. So I promise you some
pro tips on how to fast well. And fasting is
such an important discipline and has such profound impact on
the body that in our devotional faithful fitness forty days
of strength and stewardship. For Christians, four of those forty

(14:59):
days are specific to fasting, and for many of my clients,
when it comes to learning how to fast well for
their body and how to do it in a way
that works well in their family and works well in
their community, and works well for their individual metabolism. It's
a month's long process to condition yourself well and to
do it healthfully. But I did promise you some pro tips,

(15:21):
so let's dive into those now. First. If you're going
to fast well, you need to prepare well, spend some
time in prayer, and ask God to help you. Set
an intention. What is the intention of the fast you're
about to undertake. Some redeeming intentions might be, Hey, I'm
going to start small and I'm just going to try fasting.
I'm going to get used to it and see how
i can do that well for my body, for my mind,

(15:43):
and in my own life. Your fasting intention might be
to explore and to push boundaries and to understand how
your body responds to these things so you can fast
peacefully and with the proper intentions. You might also set
the intention that you are seeking God specifically on something
you need Him to speak into your life. It's been
my experience that God is always present and always speaking,

(16:08):
but just like Elijah found him in the still small voice,
fasting teaches me to remove the distractions from my life
so that I can hear him well, so that I
can listen with my heart, and then I can follow
him daily based on what He's spoken to me. You
might also want to seek God for something you want
to see happen in another individual's life. Maybe the Holy

(16:30):
Spirit has laid a family member or a friend or
a cause on your heart, and so what you want
to do in this fast is you want to commit
time and energy to praying over that thing, to meditating
on scripture related to that thing, to journaling about what
your responsibility that God might have for you to walk
in this calling to change things or to serve somebody

(16:52):
might be. And that's a great intention for fasting as well.
Regardless of your intention, make sure you said it, because
if you don't have a prayer full intent for your fast,
all you're doing is going hungry, and that's no fun
for anybody. Your second pro tip is I want you
to start small. If you don't already have a fasting discipline,
then I want you to start small. There's no rush

(17:12):
to become some sort of master faster. Fasting is a
discipline that can serve you for the rest of your life.
There's no rush to get into it. I just need
you to begin with consistent, small attempts at growing in
your capacity to fast again. It's just like the adaptation
of exercise. If I want to deadlift four hundred pounds

(17:34):
on that bar and I've never deadlifted before, then I'm
going to do more damage than good. If I start
loading up a lot of weight on the bar, I
do it with bad form. I crank through the reps
because no pain, no gain.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Ugh.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
That's a bad approach to exercise, and it's a bad
approach to fasting. Pro Tip number three is hydrating well
when you're fasting. Coffee, tea, and water are just fine
for consumption. They won't kick you out of a fasted
state into a fed state. But making sure that you
stay hydrated is going to keep you away from some
of the negative symptoms related to fasting. One of those

(18:10):
symptoms might be something like muscle cramping or dizziness. And
when I say hydrate, I don't just mean water, I
mean having some electrolytes with your water is extremely helpful,
especially if you're new to fasting. If you're old hat
and you've done this a while, then drinking a little
bit of water and not having to worry about your
salt and stuff, you're not going to get dizzy, you're
not going to faint. You're a pro at this, right,

(18:32):
But if you're new to this, some of the things
that deter people from fasting, things like headaches, things like dizziness,
things like fatigue or muscle cramping. These things can easily
be mediated by consuming enough water and electrolytes. Pro Tip
four is to find something to feast on that's not

(18:53):
food during your meal times. It's really helpful to open
scripture and to spend time chewing on the word a
lot of bread, there's a lot of meat, there's a
lot of milk in there that will feed your spirit.
And also to teach you to align that hunger we
talked about earlier with seeking after righteousness. I also like,
if I'm praying about something specific, to make sure that

(19:15):
anytime i feel hunger or anytime I'm reminded that I'm
not eating today, that I'll bring that thing up in prayer.
Something like, Lord, please bless my son. He's really wrestling
with this stage of manhood right now, and I want
to be a good dad to him. That's a very
simple prayer. And every time I'm like, you know, I'm
kind of hungry, maybe I should grab a snack. Oh,

(19:36):
I'm fasting. Lord, please bless my son, help him in
this season of manhood and teach me to be a
good father to him right now. Do you see how
hunger during a fast can constantly bring your heart and
mind back fickle as though it can be sometimes back
to the thing that was your intention in the first place.
I'm also not beyond feasting on a walk or some

(19:58):
time spent in worship or listening to music. Each of
these things can be really beneficial if you would normally eat.
But right now it's lunchtime and you're not eating, So
what do you do? Find something to feast on? Pro
Tip number five go ahead and proactively deal with things
like fatigue or irritability ahead of time. Yeah, you're human,
These things are going to come knocking your sin. Nature

(20:20):
is going to be at your door. But let's channel
this as an opportunity to grow in maturity, to grow
in our ability to do what we said we were
going to do and not be thrown about by our
emotions and our feelings all the time. I find that
if I'm irritable during my fast, it shows me opportunities
in my day where I have not been responding out

(20:43):
of love or intentionality, that my heart's not close to
the Father, and it's an opportunity to show me how
to do that, even though I haven't eaten today. Run
and rah and rah. If you deal with this proactively,
then it'll help you to take yourself out of the
woe is Me mentality and allow God to show you
how you're to respond as the man or woman that

(21:05):
he created you to be. My sixth pro tip here
is don't do your fasting alone unless you have cultivated
this ability over time. Fasting is very well done with
a group. Prayer and fasting as a group is a
very biblical idea, and oftentimes, if we're cultivating a new
spiritual discipline, whether it's daily scriptural reading or we're talking

(21:27):
about doing cardiovascular exercise on a regular basis, having a
group just makes it better. If I'm running beside somebody
at six am, then I know that that person came,
and I won't skip out on my run, and I'll
change my run form, and I'll eat well, and I'll
recover well, and it'll just be a much more enjoyable
experience altogether. And the same thing goes for fasting with

(21:50):
our Christian brothers and sisters. Now, Jesus warns against putting
out your fasting beacon. I'm fasting right now. Everybody should
think I'm so holy awesome. Jesus warns against fasting for
the wrong reasons. But Jesus is not warning us against
fasting together. He's just warning us to do it with
the right heart. So if you want to cultivate a

(22:12):
powerful fasting practice, I would highly recommend not doing it alone.
Here at Faithful Fitness, we have an amazing app called
Better Daily, and their believers gather to continue practicing their
day to day habits like fasting in a community, and
each year we do a few group fasts as a
community to help our newcomers understand how to integrate and

(22:36):
implement fasting in their daily life, and also as an
opportunity to give those of us who have cultivated fasting
as a practice the time and space to do that
as a group there's a link in the show notes.
I would recommend that you join our community if you
need a group of people to fast with and have
questions about how to do it well. That would be
remiss if I didn't include pro tip number seven, and

(22:56):
that is please don't break your fast by binge eating.
If you fasted for a long period of time, you
might feel really hungry, or, as the old Southerners say,
your eyeballs might be bigger than your stomach. But if
you do break your fast with a lot of food,
what you're going to find is that you're going to
feel heavy. You're going to experience a lot of digestive discomfort.

(23:18):
And I don't want you to have a bad taste
in your mouth or a bad feel in your stomach
about your awesome fast. My favorite way to break a
fast is one to two servings of scrambled eggs and blackberries,
and after that's set well in my stomach for a
couple hours, then I'll break my fast with slightly heartier food.
A slight safety note, there are three people who Fasting

(23:39):
is not for children, in adolescents, pregnant or breastfeeding women,
or individuals with medical conditions, especially those that require them
to consume food with their medications. Those should be done
under the supervision of a doctor. Well. Fasting can be
extremely beneficial for so many medical conditions. If you are
going to fast, make sure you do so with the

(23:59):
supervision of your doctor. I hope the answer to this
question has been really beneficial to you. I want to
pray over you and your fasting practice. And if you
have questions about how to implement fasting in your life,
or another question that you'd like me to feel here
on the Faithful Fitness podcast, you can drop those in
the YouTube comments, or I would highly recommend joining our
Better Daily community where you can message me directly with

(24:21):
your individual concerns. So please bow your head and pray
with me. Father God, thank you so much for the
ability to fast. Lord, I pray that you would teach
us to be a people who follow close to Christ's heart,
and that when we abstain from food, when we step away,
that you would teach us how to hunger and thirst
for righteousness. I pray Lord that you would teach us

(24:41):
how to fast as Christ did, and how not to
make food lord of our life, but that we would
make you fully lord of our life. Close to your
heart and walking closely in your purpose. We love you, Lord,
Bless my brothers and sisters, and bless this message in Jesus. Amen.
Guys has been coach Houton on the Faithful Fitness Podcast.

(25:02):
Until next time. You know what I'm about to say,
Train hard, pray harder.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Hey, if this episode helps you, jaret with someone who
needs to hear it, and don't forget to subscribe and
leave us a raving review so more people can find
Faithful Fitness. Oh and my dad's new devotional is almost
out now. You can grab a copy for yourself and
then join our free community at Better Daily by clicking

(25:34):
on the links in the show notes below. We all
have a cross to carry, but it's lighter when we
do it together, so check out both links in the
show notes. Don't be a big well Bob, just do it.
Until next time. Don't forget, Train hard and pray even harder.