He kept a record for three days.
From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning until the moment he closed them at night, he wrote down everything related to eating in his notebook. When I felt hungry.
What I ate. How much I ate. How I felt after eating. When hunger struck and how intense it was. How often I felt like eating.
At first, I thought it would be a simple observation. But as I wrote, I began to feel uneasy.
Day One. 7:30 a.m.
The moment he opened his eyes, he felt hungry.
He couldn’t tell if he was actually hungry or if it was just a conditioned reflex. Rice and a fried egg. It took 15 minutes to eat. The feeling of fullness lasted about three hours.
At 11:00 a.m., he felt like eating something again. He held off until noon. Lunch was pan-fried noodles from the market. It took twenty minutes to eat.
At 3:00 p.m., a bag of snacks - not because he was hungry, just habit. Dinner was rice and braised fish.
At 10:00 p.m., he falt a sense of emptiness and ate some fruit.
Five times a day. Hoon sat there for a moment, looking at that number. He had never thought of himself as someone who ate a lot. He just thought he was average.
On the second day, he wrote in greater detail. He described where the sensation of hunger seemed to come from when it struck.
Was it his stomach, his head, or just a habit? The line between them was blurrier than he’d expected.
On the third day, he tried skipping a meal. He didn’t eat lunch.
Around 2:00 p.m., his head felt a little foggy. It wasn’t so much that he was hungry as it was a feeling that something was missing.
After 4:00 p.m. , his concentration began to waver. When he ate dinner, he ate much faster than usual. He ate without really tasting it.
After reading through the three days’ worth of notes, Hoon closed the notebook.
“I was so tied to food.”
That sentence felt heavy. It was an obvious fact.
But just because it was obvious didn’t make it any lighter.
* * *
For the next week, Hoon read and reread.
He started with the structure of the hypothalamus. NPY neurons and AgRP neurons. The mechanism by which they generate and transmit hunger signals.
How the prefrontal cortex responds to these signals. What changes occur in the brain during prolonged fasting. Ketosis. Autophagy. The way cells utilize internal resources without an external supply of nutrients.
This was the extent of what modern science could explain. Fasting is possible for a certain period. However, sustained fasting is impossible. The body ultimately requires external nutrition. This was the conclusion of current medical science.
Yet, beyond that conclusion, there were ancient records.
Taoist “Bigeok” (辟穀). Literally, it meant “to avoid grains.” A training tradition dating back thousands of years. The concept of sustaining life with “qi” (氣) instead of food. At first, Hoon dismissed this as mythical exaggeration.
But there were simply too many records. It wasn’t just a local legend. Chinese Taoism, the pranayama of Indian yoga traditions, and Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. Though the regions and traditions differed, similar stories were repeated.
That certain changes occur in the body during fasting practices. That once one passes through those changes, one enters a state different from before. That one becomes capable of maintaining normal bodily functions without food.
Of course, none of this had been verified. It had rarely been the subject of scientific research. It had been classified as mysticism and pushed to the margins of mainstream thought.
But what mattered to Hoon was something else.
Even if all these accounts were lies, it was still possible to begin exploring that direction. To reexamine that direction using the tools of modern neuroscience.
To ask whether it is, in principle, possible to reprogram the neural circuits governing appetite through conscious practice.
Neural plasticity was real. The brain could change. The question was in which direction and to what extent.
“There is no evidence that it is impossible.”
After writing that sentence, Hoon paused for a moment. He felt he knew where this path would lead. It was a realm he couldn’t fathom on his own. He had to try it himself.
* * *
It took ten days to prepare.
First, he prepared his body. Over the course of several days, I gradually reduced my food intake. From three meals a day to two, and then from two to one.
This was partly to avoid suddenly shocking my stomach, and partly to observe how my body would react. As my food intake decreased, my concentration wavered for the first two days.
Things stabilized on the third day. By the fourth day, my mind was actually clear.
I refined my breathing technique. I combined a method I found in Taoist texts with modern meditation techniques. It was based on abdominal breathing, focusing on exhaling slowly and deeply.
I practiced twice a day for thirty minutes each session. At first, I would lose focus after twenty minutes. After a week, thirty minutes felt too short.
I extended my meditation time. I increased my morning session from about ten minutes to an hour. I also meditated for an hour in the evening. At first, it felt forced.
My mind was full of distractions. When I sat quietly, memories of my life in Seoul, past failures, and unresolved emotions came to mind with startling clarity. Hoon didn’t try to push them away. When they arose, he observed them; when they passed, he let them go.
He also changed his sleep pattern. For a week, he maintained a routine of going to bed at 10 p.m. and waking up at 4 a.m.
He eliminated naps. For the first three days, he felt sleepy during the day. Starting on the fourth day, his alertness during the day increased.
He felt as if something was coming into balance.
During those ten days, Hoon completely cut off contact with the outside world. He turned off the radio. He didn’t watch the news. He closed YouTube.
There wasn’t much noise in Dasol to begin with. The sound of roosters crowing, a neighbor’s motorcycle, the voice of a small child in the distance.
Only those sounds remained.
On the tenth night, Hoon sat on the wooden bench and thought about tomorrow.
He felt fear. He admitted it honestly. He was about to do something medically reckless. He was alone. No one was watching over him.
If something went wrong, no one might ever know.
But along with the fear, there was another sensation.
A sense of readiness. It was hard to explain logically, but it felt as if his body already knew. For ten days, he had practiced heading in that direction. His body recognized the entrance to an unfamiliar path.
Hoon opened his notebook. He created a page to record what would begin tomorrow. He wrote the date, and beneath it, just one line.
“I am not hungry right now.”
It was true. He hadn’t eaten dinner. Yet he wasn’t hungry. It was only natural, since less than twenty-four hours had passed. But writing that sentence was important. It was a way of marking the starting point.
He closed the notebook. He turned off the light. He lay down.
He could see the stars through the window. The night sky in Dasol was clear. There were many stars. Stars that weren’t visible in Seoul were visible here. Ancient stars. Stars that were there even before Hoon was born, and would still be there after Hoon died.
Looking at them, he felt a strange sense of comfort.
He didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. Nothing might happen at all. He might just go three days without eating and then give up.
But that was okay. There were some things you could only know by trying.
Hoon closed his eyes.
This was the first night since his last meal.
* * *
At three in the morning that day, he woke up.
He was hungry. It was to be expected. The body consumes energy even during the night, and an empty stomach sends signals at dawn.
Hoon listened to that signal while lying down. He didn’t push it away. He just listened.
He tried to sense where the hunger was coming from. There was a physical sensation in his stomach. But along with that, there was something coming from his mind as well.
The thought that he had to eat something. That thought seemed to amplify the physical sensation.
He regulated his breathing. He exhaled slowly. It was the method he had practiced for the past ten days. After repeating it two or three times, he felt the signal from his stomach subside slightly.
It hadn’t disappeared. It had subsided. Hoon was aware of that difference.
He fell back asleep.
He woke up at five in the morning. It was the same time as yesterday. His body already remembered that time. He got up and went outside.
The early morning air touched his skin.
The dawn in Dasol was cool. It was the wind coming down from the mountains.
The first thing he did was sit down. He sat on the wooden bench and straightened his back. He closed his eyes. He began to breathe.
An hour passed.
Nothing strange happened. He just sat there. He was still hungry. But that hunger didn’t feel urgent. It seemed to just be there, rather than a problem that needed to be dealt with.
Like the weather. Just as rain doesn’t mean you have to do something right away.
Hoon wrote that difference down in his notebook.
“I didn’t treat hunger as an emergency. When I did that, instead of the hunger subsiding, He felt something open in him.”
After writing that sentence, he smiled a little. It sounded a bit strange. But it was the most accurate way to put it.
* * *
Two days had passed.
On the first evening, he had a headache. On the morning of the second day, his hands trembled slightly. He felt dizzy when he stood up.
Hoon recorded these symptoms.
He wrote them down without judgment. He couldn’t tell yet whether they were bad signs or natural ones.
He drank plenty of water. He added a little salt. He thought he might need electrolytes. Other than that, he didn’t add anything else.
On the afternoon of the second day, something strange happened.
A memory surfaced while he was meditating. It was an unexpected memory. It was when he was in second grade. On his way home from school. His mother was stir-frying something in the kitchen.
The smell wafted all the way to the end of the alley. The moment Hoon opened the gate and stepped inside, his mother turned around and smiled. It wasn’t a special scene. It was a scene he hadn’t recalled even once in decades.
The memory was so vivid that Hoon stopped meditating and opened his eyes.
My mother passed away fifteen years ago. I wasn’t able to be by her side at the end. At the time, I was in the provinces on business.
By the time I received the call and rushed back, it was already too late.
Since then, I’ve hardly ever dreamed of my mother. I didn’t think about her much either. I couldn’t tell if I had pushed the memory away or if it had simply faded naturally.
But now, during his afternoon meditation on the second day of his fast, his mother appeared, smiling as she looked back from the kitchen.
Hoon didn’t chase her away. He just let her be for a moment. Until her face faded.
He wrote it down in his notebook.
“My brain is starting to bring things to the surface. I don’t know if it’s trying to fill the void left by the lack of food, or if something that food was blocking is finally opening up.”
He added one more line below that sentence.
“I saw my mother today.”
* * *
It was the third day, early morning.
Hoon lay awake. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep. It was a state where sleep seemed to be coming but wouldn’t arrive. His body was tired, but his brain felt wide awake.
Then a strange sensation came over him.
It was hard to describe. His body felt light. He should have been weak from hunger, but it was the exact opposite. It wasn’t a feeling of losing weight. It was a different kind of lightness. It felt as if he had found his center.
He sat up. And he began to meditate. It was two in the morning.
He didn’t know how much time had passed. When he checked later, it had been three hours. He had been sitting for three hours, but it felt like ten minutes. No, it would be more accurate to say that time itself didn’t exist.
Hoon opened his eyes just as the first light of dawn began to filter in.
He felt hungry. But that hunger no longer controlled him. For the first time, he physically understood the difference between what it means to be controlled and what it means to be free from control.
Hoon went outside. The eastern sky was brightening. The mountain ridges were taking shape as distinct lines. Dasol Village was quiet. A rooster crowed in the distance.
Smoke rose from a neighbor’s house. Someone was cooking breakfast.
Hoon stood there, gazing at the smoke.
The scent of cooking rice drifted on the breeze. It was the smell of rice cooking. It was a pleasant smell. But it didn’t tempt him. The feeling of it being pleasant and the urge to eat it were separate.
He hadn’t realized until now that these two things were not originally the same.
He came out with his notebook. He stood there and wrote.
“The third dawn. Hunger and I are in different places now. I am not inside hunger. Hunger is inside me. I didn’t realize the difference was this great.”
It wasn’t over yet. Hoon knew that. This was just the beginning. He had only sensed, in a general direction, that something was possible.
He didn’t have a method yet. Nothing was complete.
But he knew this direction was right.
He looked toward the village. Morning was coming. People were starting their day. A day of eating, working, and thinking about eating again. Hoon quietly gazed at the scene.
And he thought to himself.
I can’t let this be something only I know.