2016-04-19
in
4 min read
I guess this week will be the official start of this fasting experiment. Last week I got one day in, and it went a lot smoother than I thought it would. But travel and a family wedding made carrying it through unrealistic. This week I have no such constraints, but allergies and self-sabotage were definitely lurking behind the scenes.
The goal of each week is to get 3-4 fasting days in per week. So, I have some flexibility on starting on Monday or Tuesday. I don’t want to have two fasting days in a row. While I plan on doing that cancer-reducing three day fast, it’s too early for me to attempt something like that. After getting a face full of nose irritating dust on Friday my sinuses which were already going to be on edge due to allergies have been full blown irritated. I’ve done what I can (like gargling oil of oregano solution) to avoid a full blown sinus infection but you can’t stop post nasal drip. That made the morning ritual a bit off. I felt like I needed to eat something this morning and vacillated back and forth about delaying it until tomorrow. Then I was thinking maybe just eat healthy this week and start the fasting protocol next week. It was at that point I realized I was just psyching myself out so left my health bars behind and went into the office.
Once there I was actually a bit queasy from all the post nasal drip. I tried settling it with a Coke Zero since the green tea and warm water weren’t helping. It was about mid-morning when a lunch invitation arrived so I just said, “Screw it!” and decided today was not the day to start fasting. In the lunch room there was a bowl of grapes and melon. I took a small helping of that (less than a cup total) and munched on it for a bit. At that point someone pointed out that there was a lunch meeting I wanted to attend. Well, there went the lunch plans, but I’d make this a regular eating day anyway. Oh, and there is going to be free pizza at said meeting. Alright, now it was time to hit the brakes again. I may be okay with eating healthy, but I’m not turning this into a whole cheat day. With way less than 100 calories eaten total, throwing in another 60 calories of broth in the evening, I’d still be within my fasting protocol. So that’s where I ended up.
While I didn’t get any of the loopy feeling I had the first day I fasted, by after dinner my stomach was growling for something. I could have continued the Michael Pollan food documentary, but that’d be setting myself up for failure wouldn’t it? I’m already torturing myself enough following my bread blogs and thinking about baking loaves on Sunday. That would easily push me over the edge. Luckily I had a backlog of Naked and Afraid episodes to watch. You want to not feel bad about fasting for one day, watch those people tough it out with far less to eat per day while having to survive in the wild. It reminded me of when I was doing some planning for toughening up for an Appalachian Trail thru-hiking adventure. In an interview once Manu from the dual team episode (one of my favorite contestants from one of my favorite episodes) said some of her prep came in the form of fasting for periods of time so her body would know what that felt like. I was going to do the same thing (this is long before I got reading up on it from other places). The more I watched the shows, the less food cravings I dealt with. It’s another reminder, that a lot of the challenge is actually mental not physical.