Fasting through Finals

This week is final exam week at Kyungsung. I will be listening to about six hours of conversation between freshmen students of English as a Foreign Language, and I have at least two and a half hours of one-on-one interviews scheduled with my Building Relationships in English students. It's not bad compared to last semester, when I had about 16 hours of conversation to listen to, and didn't even try to do the one-on-one interviews.

Yesterday (Monday) was the final meeting of the year for the Busan Doctors' Band, of which I am a non-doctor member. They treated us to a huge sushi and pizza (not sushi-pizza) dinner. An odd combination, but one which they have embraced for some years. The restaurant where we eat has come to expect it, and doesn't seem to mind. After all, they have a room full of eating, drinking customers (there must have been two dozen of us) on a Monday evening. 

I ate a lot, but not a crazy amount. I had only eaten a pair of boiled eggs for lunch that day, and no breakfast. I was hungry, but mostly in anticipation of a great meal. I had also decided that for this week of final exams, the Doctors' Band Feast would be my last meal until Friday evening (though now I am thinking Saturday lunch). I am doing it partly for my health, and partly to boost me through this week. 

I know that today will be a little rough, especially at dinner time, but I am absolutely sure that I can do it. I've already made the decision, now it's just a follow-through of basically NOT eating. This will be my second 5-day Fast (assuming I last until Saturday dinner), so I have some idea of what to expect: today should be the worst of the hunger. It's not bad now, but tonight I'll hit the 24-hour mark and feel it the strongest. Tomorrow won't be as bad, and Thursday the hunger will be background noise, like the heater kicking on in January. "Oh yeah, I'm hungry. What's next on the to-do list?" On the physical side, this one will probably drop me under 100 kg, which is less than I have weighed since before I got married (in 2001!). It's exciting to think that I may get there this week, before 2024 is finished! At the end, I will (try to) ease back into eating gracefully. The book (next paragraph) suggested a small snack an hour before taking on an actual meal. We shall see. It does not pay off to think too much about which food I will eat this early in the game. Just makes me hungry. Because once again, hunger is more about the brain than the stomach.

I just finished the book Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jimmy Moore and Jason Fung. My clinic recommended it, and I can hear a lot of their advice echoing from this book.

One of my main takeaways is that obesity is a modern disease, as is Type 2 Diabetes, which I had been queued up to take part in. They are a result of a huge environmental change: for most of history (and prehistory) people (and other animals) went through cycles of feasting and fasting. When you make a big kill, or find a huge honeycomb, or a tree full of ripe fruit, it makes sense to pig out in order to lay up fat stores for the winter, or the desert, or the long voyage. The local prey migrates. A hoard of locusts strips the landscape. Drought wipes out the local vegetation. Winter arrives in Canada. Maybe it's only a day or two, maybe longer. But a fast was always around the next corner, if not the one after that. Fasting was a regular part of life, and we are designed for it.

We (modern humans) understand this about exercise. We know (whether or not we act on it) that exercise is good for our health, even though we don't need to be able to run away from a tiger or climb a tree when the jackals come or swim out of the water before the shark gets you. We know that without exercise, the body falls into disrepair, the brain doesn't work as it should, and the emotions get messy. So we (hopefully) make time to walk, or go to the gym, or do yoga or whatever. At the very least, we have been taught that it's a good idea to do so.

But we act as though fasting were dangerous. We have built an environment in which we expose ourselves to feasts daily, but treat fasting as an evil. Three meals a day, never skipping. Snacks in between. Do we need that much food? Certainly not for nutrition or energy. Not unless you are training for a marathon or the Olympics. But eating feels good, right? Eating is comforting. Eating relieves stress. God knows it is for me. 

Some people have adapted to this environment better than others, for sure. But in general, humans don't deal well with feasts being available 24/7. I can find a convenience store or restaurant or grocery store at any time of day, and I have access to refrigerators and cabinets stocked with food that would have blown my ancestors away, as recently as a hundred years ago. Sure, there have always been people at the top with ready access to food, but they were the minority. We have all become that minority.

I believe that this is a hugely important lesson in general health, and that it will have at least the same impact as deliberate exercise has had on society. Maybe more. But it has one disadvantage over the exercise insight: it's hard to make money off of fasting. Sure, I paid $9 for a book about it, and I pay/have paid my clinic for their consultation and monitoring. But I don't need to buy special clothes for fasting. (Smaller clothes at some point, for sure. I'm ready to abandon some of my shirts, and have already left behind some pants.) I don't need to go to a special place for fasting. I don't need to do any special shopping: I buy a little more coffee than usual, and drink hot salt water. It really cuts back on my food budget when I fast, and I don't come anywhere near making up for it when I go back to eating. In fact, my appetite in general is lower.

So no one can make much money off of this (yeah, I bought the book for $10, but I'm not going to buy it again), and the companies who sell me food would lose money. That is where we will see (and have seen) push-back: Big Food doesn't want us to buy less, they want us to buy more. Big Pharma makes money hand over fist selling insulin. Do they want you to know that fasting is an effective way to CURE diabetes? Hell no! (By the way, if you are taking insulin or other medicine for diabetes, don't try fasting without consulting your doctor! There are some potential problems on that journey and you should not take medical advice from a guy with a blog!)

Here's a whole aside paragraph for pre-diabetic people: if you fast for 24 hours (no food between dinner one day and the next) your blood sugar will not drop significantly, because your liver stores up sugars for between meals. However, your pancreas will get a mini-vacation from producing insulin. That break can be the beginning of getting back to a healthy normal. Can you go for 24 hours with no food? Yes. Will you be hungry? Yes. But like any discomfort, you will get more comfortable with it. I am learning to be comfortable with hunger after a lifetime of not tolerating it any longer than necessary. And it is doing me good.

If fasting catches on, the push-back from industry will get more intense. Especially if you live in a country where the people making the most money have the biggest say in the laws of the land. (Which, to the best of my knowledge is every country. Though some take their citizens' health more seriously than others.)

I have more to say about this. My intention was to write about a spiritual aspect of fasting, but I got distracted, so I'll leave you with this:

Drinking only coffee today, with no food, I have gotten a stack of grading done, administered some final exams, updated some lessons, and written a blog post. And it's only 1:00 p.m. This is not the old, eat-when-I'm-hungry me! I feel like Super-Rob! I know that if I eat a snack it will wake up my digestive system, which will demand a meal. If I give in and have lunch (or dinner), it will leave me sluggish and ready to be entertained. Best case scenario I read a book. Worst case, Netflix or YouTube for a couple of hours, then drag through a tiny bit of work, then head home.

On the other hand, if I continue this fast I will wake up sharp tomorrow. I won't need as much bathroom time, I will be more cheerful, focused, and awesome. I might finish my grades in record time and start the planning I need to do for next semester. I never, ever thought I would say this, but I enjoy fasting, and it is clearly benefiting me!

I have other things to write about, such as being Santa Claus. But that will have to wait for another time.

Break from Fasting

On November 15th I finished a five-day fast. Five days with no food. I drank a vitamin juice mix every night, and hot water with mineral salts during the day, as well as my usual ice Americano. My doctor said that keeping coffee is fine, as does the book he recommended. Without the coffee, I can't quite imagine getting through it all.

On the other hand, I couldn't have imagined getting through a fast like that before I started on this journey, less than four months ago.

The week after, I decided to pull back to just a three-day fast. Twenty-four hours into the fast, I gave up and had a meal. It was not just hunger, though I was hungry. I felt down. I felt weak. I felt tired. 

I had an appointment at my clinic on that Wednesday, and we talked about it for a while. They told me that I had made very remarkable progress, and that it was okay to take a rest from fasting for a few weeks. Maybe even until the end of the year. I have been reflecting on this. I am not sure that I have any conclusions, but I do have thoughts on it:

It's been hard. Eating is a central part of my life, and completely eliminating it for days at a time is stressful. I am starting to understand that much of what I think of as "hunger" is mental, conditioned by culture and my own behavior. 

At the end of the five-day fast I weighed 101.7 kg (224 lbs), which is 14 kg (almost 31 lbs) less than I did last summer. That is a lot. I have gained back four kg (8.8 lbs) in the 18 days since then. This feels dangerously close to the yo-yo effect, in which weight loss is followed by gaining it back with interest. I want to figure out how to stabilize my weight at a healthy level, so today I am starting a three-day fast. 

In 2015 or 2016 I spent some time working on a juice cleansing diet. I blended fruits and vegetables, and sometimes that's all I had for food. I think that I got down into this range of weight, but I didn't take notes. I recorded weighing 123.4 kg (272 lbs) in 2019, and wrote at the time that I was up to almost 130 kg (286 lbs), but I'm not sure of that last number. 

What I am sure of is this: my legs and feet used to hurt every night. Now they are sometimes sore if I have been walking a lot, but not enough to keep me awake at night. 

I have fewer stomach issues. Of course, while fasting I have almost no issues at all. I don't get gassy, so no air biscuits. My guts do make a fair amount of noise, especially if I'm putting a lot of water through them. But that calms down in the 2nd day. I have not had any acid reflux problems in the past few months, even after the few late and large meals I've had. 

I'm going to talk about defecation in this paragraph, and you are welcome to skip it. Some people just don't want to know anything about other people's poop, but my time in the Peace Corps pretty much destroyed that taboo for me. Since Nepal, in fact, constipation has been a very rare problem for me. (Personally, I believe that I am still carrying microbiome passengers from those days. Namaste, y'all!) So here is my insight: it is weird to not "drop a deuce" every day. Of course, it's not weird in a conservation-of-matter-and-energy sense: no solids going in means no doo-doo coming out. However, it is weird in that while fasting my morning routine felt incomplete when I fail to "drop the kids off at the pool." Now I am a bit of a regular (though still a newbie) to fasting, so being irregular in this regard feels regular. And it's kind of nice to not require the time and attention on a busy morning.

My clothes are fitting looser, but I am afraid to get rid of clothes that are too big. So far it is not a huge problem. I don't feel like I'm wearing clown suits, and some of my clothes that used to be too tight fit just fine. I am down to the 2nd to last hole in my belt, and the last hole is only a little too tight. I can button a lot of my collars that I just couldn't before, though mostly I still don't. 

I need to really believe that I will not go back to being that big again, but there is a very strong force in my brain that really wants to eat irresponsibly. One podcast I listened to called it "food noise," as in, "It's hard to focus on other things in life when the food noise is constantly distracting you: When will we eat? What will we eat? How about a snack?" I recognized food noise immediately. When I am fasting, it does not quiet down right away. The first 24 hours are rough, but it helps having the same answer to every question: "No." 

As I start this paragraph, I am 48 hours into another fast. (I started writing this entry yesterday.) I am planning for three days, but open to four. The first full day with no food was the worst, but today wasn't too bad. I think it's like exercise: when you take a long break it's hard to get back into it. If fasting were strenuous, requiring great physical effort, I would probably not be good at it. But at heart, fasting is about a kind of inaction. Weaponized laziness, if you will. My wife will be the first to tell you that I am a pro at weaponizing laziness. Even as I write this, it is partly to avoid preparing to teach class tomorrow.

That said, I do need to get back to work. While I will be pleased to find that anyone finds this interesting or useful, you should know that I am writing more for myself than anyone else. This change is happening quickly, and I want to be able to look back and understand what happened. What I did. How I changed, or failed to do so.

Not Hungry Right Now

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.