Confession: I Quit My 21-Day Fast on Day Five

I have to say it plainly: I quit.

The 21-day fasting journey I had prepared for, livestreamed, and declared as my challenge to the world ended not with a blaze of triumph, but with the quiet clatter of dishes in a café and the weight of unfinished plates. Day five — that was as far as I went.

When I began, I told myself I was ready. The plan was clear: broadcast the process, share my reflections, inspire others, and prove that fasting could be more than starvation — it could be rhythm, medicine, and spirit discipline. I imagined an audience watching, learning, perhaps even cheering me on. I imagined myself crossing the threshold of day twenty-one with a kind of radiant victory.

But fasting has a way of cutting through illusions, faster than food ever could.

My Excuses

Three reasons — or, more honestly, three excuses — broke my fast.

First excuse: no audience. I started livestreaming with expectation. I thought people would tune in, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds. Instead, the digital silence mocked me. I stared at the empty viewer count and felt like a fool talking to no one. A fast without witness felt invisible, and the ego in me revolted. “What’s the point,” I asked, “if no one sees?” I had tied my commitment to attention, and when attention failed, my resolve weakened.

Second excuse: a business lunch. An “important meeting,” I told myself. The truth is, I could have sipped water and explained. I could have rescheduled. But business provided a noble-sounding reason to compromise. I told myself, “Networking matters. Relationships matter. This is bigger than one day of fasting.” But really, I wanted the out. I wanted the meal. I wrapped my hunger in professionalism and wore it as justification.

Third excuse: family. My daughter’s farewell dinner before she moved into her university dormitory. This one cut deepest. How could I sit at the table, refusing the food, while she prepared to leave home? How could I let ritual and discipline overshadow one of the last meals we would share as a family before she stepped into her own life? Love trumped fasting. Or maybe I let sentimentality become a loophole. Either way, I ate.

I didn’t order my own dish at the café. I told myself I was still “half-fasting.” But when my daughter and her mother didn’t finish their plates, I could not bear to see the food wasted. I cleaned the dishes — not with soap and water, but with my mouth. The Daoist alchemist reduced to a dishwasher of leftovers.

The Hard Truth

It is hard to fast.

That’s the simple truth people don’t like to admit. Books make it sound like transcendence. Instagram makes it look like glowing eyes and monk-like willpower. But fasting is the grinding encounter with your own excuses, your own weakness, your own boredom. It is the humbling confrontation with hunger and the voice inside that whispers, “Just this once, it won’t matter.”

On day five, that voice won.

And here I am, confessing.

The Context That Stings

This is not my first encounter with fasting. For more than a decade I have lived by intermittent fasting. I do not eat before noon. Many days, I eat only one meal. I have alternated rhythms of daily discipline that most people would call extreme. My body knows the pattern of emptiness. My spirit is familiar with the clarity that comes when the stomach is silent.

And yet, that decade of practice did not save me on day five of a water-only fast. The lesson is humbling: discipline in one arena does not guarantee discipline in another. A man who can skip breakfast for ten years may still falter when asked to skip it for twenty-one days in a row.

This contrast matters. It shows me that mastery is not a trophy to be carried forever. It must be renewed with each challenge. My years of intermittent fasting are real — but they did not grant me immunity to the fear, the excuses, or the sentimentality that ended this longer fast.

The Shame and the Lesson

I could dress this confession up. I could say that five days is still impressive. That most people cannot last past twenty-four hours. That I demonstrated discipline even in breaking. But that would only be ego trying to salvage a trophy from failure.

The truth is simpler: I failed at what I said I would do.

And yet, here lies the paradox: fasting is not just about food. It is about truth. It is about bringing into the open the little lies and excuses we use to bend reality to our comfort. By quitting, by cleaning the plates, I revealed my attachments: to audience, to business, to family rituals, to food itself. Fasting stripped me down — not into perfection, but into confession.

Shame is heavy, yes. But shame is also a teacher. It burns the illusion that I am already beyond hunger. It exposes the pride that wanted an audience. It reminds me that spiritual work is not about looking strong but about facing where I am weak.

Daoist Reflection

In Daoism, the path is not linear victory. It is rhythm. Expansion and contraction. Advance and retreat. The sage does not boast, “I never fall.” The sage says, “When I fall, I return.”

What is Wu Wei — effortless action — in this context? It is not gritting teeth through 21 days just to prove a point. It is aligning with the real rhythm of my body, my family, my life. Maybe the lesson was not in completing the fast, but in failing honestly, in confessing openly.

My daughter’s farewell dinner was real. The feeling of cleaning those plates was real. The sting of shame the morning after was real. The Dao moves through that too.

Starting Again

So, what now?

I do not declare another 21-day fast tomorrow. That would only be my pride trying to erase the bruise. Instead, I confess. I stop. I breathe. I reset. Maybe the next fast will be seven days. Maybe it will be private, without cameras or livestreams. Maybe it will succeed. Maybe it will fail again.

But I know this: every broken fast teaches me more than any perfect fast would. Every confession strips me of ego and leaves me closer to truth.

The dishes are clean. My stomach is not empty. My spirit is humbled. And tomorrow, I will wake up again, not as the man who conquered fasting, but as the man who dares to confess his failure in public.

I confess, I reset, I continue.