You know what's kind of funny? I'm not really hungry right now. It's almost 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 30th, 2024. My last food was lunch on Monday.
Quinten has the week off for fall break, and Maxine's schedule didn't start until 2 p.m., so I took them both out to Hello India! (the exclamation point is in the name, though it does reflect my excitement with the establishment). We had some really good conversation, and the food was excellent. The kids went on a mission trip this summer, and told me that they were the only kids who tried eating every food that was put in front of them. Some of the adults would, but the other kids were too picky. They both agreed that we have to revisit Hello India! (once again, not expressing my surprise, but the spelling of the establishment).
Afterwards, I felt a little sad, thinking that soon these wonderful people would some day be making their own homes, and leaving ours behind. Not that there is any set plan for that. Even Maxine is on a pretty hazy schedule. We're thinking of sending her to America to seek out her fortune, assuming that the USA doesn't go full fascist in the next couple of weeks. And Quinten is only 15 years old. But time does tend to fly.
Back to the point.
I'm not hungry right now. It's been 45 hours since my last meal. I've had a vitamin drink both evenings, because you have to take care of nutritional requirements. When my stomach does start to gurgle and complain around noon today, I will drink a hot salt and mineral water, like I did yesterday. It totally fools me into thinking that I have eaten, which is crazy when you think about it. And when I finish my iced Americano I will keep drinking water throughout the day. I will be hungry in the evening, especially if I let myself think about it, or even smell food. But it will not be overwhelming.
I am in the middle of a three- or four-day fast. It is my third. And I have learned some interesting things:
1) The level of my hunger does not keep increasing the longer I don't eat. By dinnertime after my last lunch, I felt hungry, and again the next morning. But it was the same hunger. Now that I am writing about it, my stomach is growling, and I do feel hungry. The only thing that has really changed in the last half hour is that I am writing, and therefor thinking about it. My conclusion:
2) Hunger is mostly in my mind. I've heard this idea, and read it before, but now I am learning it in a way that I did not learn in previous fasting.
I used to fast before Easter, though not every year. No food on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, then I would go nuts on Sunday, as though I were the one who had been raised from the dead and had to get over it. The lesson I took away was, "Being hungry sucks!" It was a constant battle with myself to get through it, and I stopped doing it many years ago because it was just too hard. But guess what?
3) I do have the will power to just not eat. I didn't think that I did. I thought that my appetite was a force of nature, and honestly speaking, I love eating. (This is really gonna roil up the stomach, but here goes!) Salty, crunchy, savory, juicy, bring it on! Sweet? Come on in! Sour, why not? Bitter? I've been taking my coffee without sugar or milk for years now. I like eating. When I'm bored, when I'm worried or upset, when I just need comfort, I eat. I prefer the good stuff, but I'll eat a lousy convenience store sandwich and a bag of chips and some M&Ms and enjoy it all.
But here I am, not eating today. Didn't eat yesterday. Won't eat tomorrow. I'm not sure what the difference is. It might be that I made one big choice about food that covered three days. I don't have to make the little choices of what food to eat, or whether to go get a snack. One thing that has really helped is that...
4) Having someone to help really makes it possible. I've been going to an Oriental Medicine Clinic (feels a bit wrong to say that, but it's how everyone translates it) for the past couple of months. I am doing this fast under their direction and with their support. This current fast is the culmination of what I've done so far.
5) Monitoring my health throughout the process made me more confident, and completely eliminated worrying about the health impact of fasting. At the clinic, they hook me up to a machine with metal clamps on my wrists and ankles. (I know, I was thinking the same thing: Is this machine actually going to make quacking noises?) It measured a lot of things, including muscle mass and balance (upper/lower, left/right), fat percentage, size of fat cells, and more. They put me on it every time I visit, to track my progress. Frankly, I don't have a lot of faith in the machine, but I do have faith in the doctor who trusts it. If it's a placebo, I'm going to let it work for me. I measure my blood sugar every day, and do a home urine test every two weeks. I also do a ketone test at the end of the 72-hour fasts. I'm still learning about ketones, so I don't feel confident enough to say more than that right now.
6) Having a trustworthy plan makes a big difference. A couple of years ago I decided to try intermittent fasting. I pretty much eliminated breakfast from my routine, and I did lose some weight. But I hit a plateau, and got stuck. I didn't know what to do next, and felt like cutting more would take too much will power, and be too painful (see points 1, 2 and 3). Here is a quick summary of the steps the doctor put me on:
A) No snacking. No sweet drinks. (Ah, snacking, I miss you so much! But without you, I could see results almost immediately.)
B) Monitor my own blood glucose (sugar) every morning. Part of this program includes a home testing kit. I can see my results getting better day by day. After a couple of weeks, and coming back in to monitor my condition and see what my baseline looks like...
C) Attempt a 24-hour fast: eat lunch one day, then nothing until lunch the next. The next couple of days, eat like normal. I did not find this too onerous, though I would hardly call it pleasant. I was really ready for lunch the next day! After three successful 24-hour fasts,
D) Three 24-hour fasts in a row (a.k.a. the 3-day 24-hour fast). If the hunger becomes unbearable, have a hard-boiled egg. Then three or four days of eating normally (which for me still did not include breakfast). I managed this one fairly easily. Again, I felt hungry for a lot of the time. I didn't realize that I was training myself to get accustomed to hunger.
E) The 72-hour partial fast. Lunch on one day, then a real dinner three days later (so more like 78 hours, but best to keep it simple). For the middle two days, they gave me a little meal-supplement drink mix to have for lunch. It tasted like a handful of low-calorie Cheerios ground up and mixed with water, and looked only slightly worse than it sounds. But wow, it hit the spot! The fast was rough, but that was when I started to see that my hunger did not actually grow over time. It was very interesting to have food related activities disappear from my schedule: the time I spend on getting and eating food adds up. And let's just say that it cuts down on my usual morning bathroom time.
F) The 72-hour full fast. My first one was last week. I got a headache the 3rd day that came and went, but it wasn't bad. I had forgotten to pack my salt water, so that may have been part of it. But I fully succeeded in fasting for three days.
Weird things happen with a fast like that. Your digestive system eventually looks around, shrugs its shoulders, and goes into hibernation. I never noticed how often my stomach was "talking" to me until it went quiet. I do not think of myself as an overly gassy person, but my fart frequency dropped way off as well. Which is kind of sad, in a way. When I returned to eating, I felt bloated and sluggish. I certainly enjoyed the eating, but not so much the feeling afterwards. I am trying to be mindful of this, because a day or two after the fast is finished, I no longer notice it.
I believe that during the fast my mind works better as well. I can still get into a doom scroll, but I can also sit down and work on a Roblog post for two hours (with occasional breaks to stand up and move around). I have a couple of big tasks today, as well as an hour of students testing, and I feel up to the challenge.
Now I am on day three of my second 72-hour fast. It is almost noon, and I just started in on my hot salt water. My ice Americano still has some coffee flavor, but it is pretty watered down at this point. The hot salt water feels like food to me. It's less than a tablespoon of salt, and I find that if I keep adding hot water after drinking some of it, it can be satisfying for quite a while. I may make this a 4-day fast, if I do not feel dizzy, or weak as it continues.
My good friend Rick asked me if this lifestyle is sustainable. Honestly, I can imagine fasting a few days every week for the rest of my life. I can even imagine doing longer fasts. I've lost a lot of weight on this program so far, but the doctor assures me that it will not shoot back up if I stay on the program.
Honestly, there is a lot to unpack with this. I've stayed away from mentioning my weight, but it has gone down. I haven't talked about my mood, and it has been complicated. All that will have to be for another day.