Sunday, January 17, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Done
I have called a stop to this fast, I made it to the end of day 6, a 144 hour fast. Since my previous post I'd been sick as a dog, with barely the energy to get up and grab myself a drink of water. Extreme dizziness, nausea, and a splitting headache were the chief problems, so I decided to stick to the original date I'd set for ending the fast before my slip up at day 4.
At the end I weighed in at 126 pounds, still with normal vitals. I have to admit, I'm fairly disappointed it ended the way it did. There were moments during this fast that I felt really good, with decent energy and no hunger, but the majority of it was a struggle, which I suspect was caused by improper preparation, several slip ups that kept me from fully switching over to ketosis, and having un-supportive family living with me. I felt like I was trying to quit smoking, while my family was standing outside my door every couple of hours lighting one up!
While it's somewhat early to tell, I was expecting to feel better about having food in my gut, but after being without it so long, it's kinda uncomfortable to be honest. I find myself already looking forward to the next time I can fast. I've already added a much higher percentage of fat content to my diet, in the form of more avocados and coconuts, and I'm also snacking more on nuts and seeds. I think avocado has become my new favorite food!
Anyways, I guess that's it! Thanks for reading. My next trial will probably be another attempt at the Uberman sleep schedule.
GP
At the end I weighed in at 126 pounds, still with normal vitals. I have to admit, I'm fairly disappointed it ended the way it did. There were moments during this fast that I felt really good, with decent energy and no hunger, but the majority of it was a struggle, which I suspect was caused by improper preparation, several slip ups that kept me from fully switching over to ketosis, and having un-supportive family living with me. I felt like I was trying to quit smoking, while my family was standing outside my door every couple of hours lighting one up!
While it's somewhat early to tell, I was expecting to feel better about having food in my gut, but after being without it so long, it's kinda uncomfortable to be honest. I find myself already looking forward to the next time I can fast. I've already added a much higher percentage of fat content to my diet, in the form of more avocados and coconuts, and I'm also snacking more on nuts and seeds. I think avocado has become my new favorite food!
Anyways, I guess that's it! Thanks for reading. My next trial will probably be another attempt at the Uberman sleep schedule.
GP
Monday, January 11, 2010
10 Day Water Fast Day 5 - Not So Strong
127 lbs, 113.5 hours, 36.6C, 54 bpm
I'm not feeling so hot today, it's like I've got a nasty cold. Movement is sluggish, my thinking is foggy, I feel depressed and unmotivated and keep considering ending this fast. No one seems to be too interested in what I'm doing, my family is against me and offers nothing but discouragement, and the food just smells so god damned good... But that's just the negativity talking. We'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow before I actually start entertaining thoughts of quitting. Tomorrow will be the actual tenth day of my fast if you don't count the blip I had at the end of day 4.
I have to admit, I look really really skinny. Not to the point of looking anorexic yet, but it's not far away. I haven't been this light since before I was 16 years old.
It looks like I'm losing about a pound a day now, so theoretically speaking, to do a 40 day fast without my body cannibalizing itself, I would need to start out at a weight of about 180 lbs which would be very large for my 5'6" frame. It's looking like I'll have to put that one off till I'm old and fat, and do a fast that's more reasonable in length. Perhaps just go out there and stay till I get hungry with no set time. I'll think about it more when I'm in a better frame of mind, right now I'm just bagged and ready to go lie back down.
Peace.
GP
I'm not feeling so hot today, it's like I've got a nasty cold. Movement is sluggish, my thinking is foggy, I feel depressed and unmotivated and keep considering ending this fast. No one seems to be too interested in what I'm doing, my family is against me and offers nothing but discouragement, and the food just smells so god damned good... But that's just the negativity talking. We'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow before I actually start entertaining thoughts of quitting. Tomorrow will be the actual tenth day of my fast if you don't count the blip I had at the end of day 4.
I have to admit, I look really really skinny. Not to the point of looking anorexic yet, but it's not far away. I haven't been this light since before I was 16 years old.
It looks like I'm losing about a pound a day now, so theoretically speaking, to do a 40 day fast without my body cannibalizing itself, I would need to start out at a weight of about 180 lbs which would be very large for my 5'6" frame. It's looking like I'll have to put that one off till I'm old and fat, and do a fast that's more reasonable in length. Perhaps just go out there and stay till I get hungry with no set time. I'll think about it more when I'm in a better frame of mind, right now I'm just bagged and ready to go lie back down.
Peace.
GP
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Water Fast Day 4 - The Magic of Ketosis
128.5 lbs, 84 hours, 72 bpm, 36.2C
May as well start with the negative. I'm pretty physically tired, and it takes very little to send my heart rate through the roof, just stripping down for my weigh-in was enough to put it up to about 100 bpm. I had to go up two flights of stairs carrying a finished load of laundry, and needed to lie down once I got to my bedroom.
However, mentally I feel unbelievably good! Not only that, but my vision has seen another upgrade, this time to color quality. To put things into perspective for you, it's like I've lived with an old CRT monitor my whole life, that I could never get the color balance quite right, and now I'm looking at a big screen plasma in HD. HD! It's really that big of a difference, I don't know if other fasters experience this or not, and it could also be the high amount of organic carrots I'd been eating in the previous month (1 or 2 a day, sometimes more).
I also understand the reason I slipped up during the previous day 4, it was the honey in the tea I drank on day 3 that foiled me. I wouldn't have thought that a mere 40 calories of carbohydrates would make such a difference, but apparently they stalled my ketosis off.
I wasn't feeling hungry at all until I started to think about my slip up, and carbohydrates... :P It really goes to show just how connected my body and my thoughts really are. Shut up stomach or I'll feed you vinegar!
Thanks for reading, any feedback is more than welcome!
GP
May as well start with the negative. I'm pretty physically tired, and it takes very little to send my heart rate through the roof, just stripping down for my weigh-in was enough to put it up to about 100 bpm. I had to go up two flights of stairs carrying a finished load of laundry, and needed to lie down once I got to my bedroom.
However, mentally I feel unbelievably good! Not only that, but my vision has seen another upgrade, this time to color quality. To put things into perspective for you, it's like I've lived with an old CRT monitor my whole life, that I could never get the color balance quite right, and now I'm looking at a big screen plasma in HD. HD! It's really that big of a difference, I don't know if other fasters experience this or not, and it could also be the high amount of organic carrots I'd been eating in the previous month (1 or 2 a day, sometimes more).
I also understand the reason I slipped up during the previous day 4, it was the honey in the tea I drank on day 3 that foiled me. I wouldn't have thought that a mere 40 calories of carbohydrates would make such a difference, but apparently they stalled my ketosis off.
I wasn't feeling hungry at all until I started to think about my slip up, and carbohydrates... :P It really goes to show just how connected my body and my thoughts really are. Shut up stomach or I'll feed you vinegar!
Thanks for reading, any feedback is more than welcome!
GP
Saturday, January 9, 2010
10 Day Water Fast Day 3, Going Strong
129 lbs, 72 hours, 36.8C, 80 bpm
Well I broke under 130 lbs today, I haven't been so lightweight since I was 16. I had the mother of all bad breath for a bit today, but it seems to be subsided now. Then again, it's not like I'm blowing in someone elses face and getting their opinion... I'll be sure to check with someone tomorrow. Or, I could go out tonight and drive about erratically trying to find a cop, and then just ask them. The BO is also smelling a bit odd. Also I may as well note, my sinus arrhythmia is really acting up, I had to hold my breath to get a pulse reading, so 80 bpm is faster than actual. That's a bit concerning, but I seem to remember something similar around this time the previous day 3, I'll have to look back. Wow that's interesting, it was at this exact time I was having this same problem with the heart rate, but I have no idea what that means. Perhaps it is part of one of the stages of the switch to ketosis. I recently joined a website run by a doctor who supervises people doing fasts, and I'll be sure to ask about it.
I'll now shift into storytelling mode, so feel free to stop reading if you're into brevity. :)
So I went for a drive today, which I haven't done in a couple of weeks or so. The Civic was happy to get a chance to stretch her legs. These are her last days in my care, so I thought I should enjoy them while they last. My parallel parking has gotten sloppy, so I practiced that a bunch until I was satisfied I was back in the groove and then went driving around the city. It occurred to me that I probably wouldn't need to know how to parallel park for awhile since I'm giving up driving, but it gave me something to do. I went past the old Macs I used to go to buy my crap, and it triggered some old responses. I decided to pick up a Prime Time, my old vice. I wasn't really craving it, but the idea seemed good at the time since my sense of smell has been bothering me, it's just too intense for this environment. People are cooking chicken downstairs and I can smell it wafting under the door, not to mention I'm training my cats to use the toilet instead of a litterbox, so every time they take a crap it just stinks up the whole floor since they can't bury it. Plus, smoking has this odd effect for me, where when I have one the next whole hour just flies by like nothing. I noticed that effect when I was first incarcerated in the Edmonton Remand Center, which is incidentally the same place where I became addicted to smoking. Before that I'd been an adamant non-smoker, but believe me, you'll do anything to make the time go faster if you've got any amount of time to spend in that hell hole, and I was there for 10 months. That damn addiction kept me for 8 years, but I'll forgive myself this slip. I don't pretend to be perfect.
I haven't touched any smoke since last November, so it did burn my lungs and tasted a lot like the first cigarettes I ever smoked (nasty), but I enjoyed the consumption of something other than water. Hopefully that puts a damper on the olfactories for awhile. I also broke another rule of mine and bought a bottle of water, but I've been needing a water bottle anyways so I'll be reusing it a lot. It's just nice to have a different flavor of water for a change. Nice to have some water that doesn't have any fluoride in it too. Supposedly the water filter we've got here removes fluoride, but I've never had it tested since that would require sending it to a private lab for testing apparently, which is expensive. If anyone reading this knows of any cheap ways to test for fluoride in the water, I'm all ears.
Well I broke under 130 lbs today, I haven't been so lightweight since I was 16. I had the mother of all bad breath for a bit today, but it seems to be subsided now. Then again, it's not like I'm blowing in someone elses face and getting their opinion... I'll be sure to check with someone tomorrow. Or, I could go out tonight and drive about erratically trying to find a cop, and then just ask them. The BO is also smelling a bit odd. Also I may as well note, my sinus arrhythmia is really acting up, I had to hold my breath to get a pulse reading, so 80 bpm is faster than actual. That's a bit concerning, but I seem to remember something similar around this time the previous day 3, I'll have to look back. Wow that's interesting, it was at this exact time I was having this same problem with the heart rate, but I have no idea what that means. Perhaps it is part of one of the stages of the switch to ketosis. I recently joined a website run by a doctor who supervises people doing fasts, and I'll be sure to ask about it.
I'll now shift into storytelling mode, so feel free to stop reading if you're into brevity. :)
So I went for a drive today, which I haven't done in a couple of weeks or so. The Civic was happy to get a chance to stretch her legs. These are her last days in my care, so I thought I should enjoy them while they last. My parallel parking has gotten sloppy, so I practiced that a bunch until I was satisfied I was back in the groove and then went driving around the city. It occurred to me that I probably wouldn't need to know how to parallel park for awhile since I'm giving up driving, but it gave me something to do. I went past the old Macs I used to go to buy my crap, and it triggered some old responses. I decided to pick up a Prime Time, my old vice. I wasn't really craving it, but the idea seemed good at the time since my sense of smell has been bothering me, it's just too intense for this environment. People are cooking chicken downstairs and I can smell it wafting under the door, not to mention I'm training my cats to use the toilet instead of a litterbox, so every time they take a crap it just stinks up the whole floor since they can't bury it. Plus, smoking has this odd effect for me, where when I have one the next whole hour just flies by like nothing. I noticed that effect when I was first incarcerated in the Edmonton Remand Center, which is incidentally the same place where I became addicted to smoking. Before that I'd been an adamant non-smoker, but believe me, you'll do anything to make the time go faster if you've got any amount of time to spend in that hell hole, and I was there for 10 months. That damn addiction kept me for 8 years, but I'll forgive myself this slip. I don't pretend to be perfect.
I haven't touched any smoke since last November, so it did burn my lungs and tasted a lot like the first cigarettes I ever smoked (nasty), but I enjoyed the consumption of something other than water. Hopefully that puts a damper on the olfactories for awhile. I also broke another rule of mine and bought a bottle of water, but I've been needing a water bottle anyways so I'll be reusing it a lot. It's just nice to have a different flavor of water for a change. Nice to have some water that doesn't have any fluoride in it too. Supposedly the water filter we've got here removes fluoride, but I've never had it tested since that would require sending it to a private lab for testing apparently, which is expensive. If anyone reading this knows of any cheap ways to test for fluoride in the water, I'm all ears.
10 Day Water Fast Day 3
7:14PM I'm not taking stats, nothing is going to be drastically different than this morning.
This is hard, but I'm being my own worst enemy here. I coached two people today on dietary changes that they would be happy with, talking about all my favorite foods, and the result is predictable. I'm starving. But at the same time I'm happy to help, and this could be just the last thrashings of magic day number 3. If this time is anything like the previous fast, the hunger should disappear by tomorrow. Still, I feel like just sleeping till then. Okay, enough complaining!
I'm quite hungry, and feeling somewhat exhausted mentally. Physically I seem to be fine, I can bound up the stairs without any issue, and last night I did some decent cardio. I've just been online learning so much today already, reading page after page of information on fasting of various kinds, checking out other institutions that support people during their fasts, various diets, and so many emails... This is why fasting in the desert would be better than fasting in the office. I need to focus on myself right now, on exploring this new state of being, not on the things I want to accomplish. Actually, I think some meditation is in order right now. Ciao!
Edit: A breakthrough of sorts happened. As I was meditating my emotional state was getting swamped with anger, hopelessness, and anxiety, accompanied by hunger. The deeper my breaths were, the worse it got. Finally the voice in my head said out loud, "I don't want to feel this way anymore!" and that exact instant I felt it all get even worse, and I suddenly realized what I was doing, trying to deny my emotions. So I tried a different approach.
"I accept all these feelings as my own, and they do not control me." And just like that, everything but the slightest bit of hunger evaporated! At that point I believe I fell asleep for 1.5 hours or so, and while I still feel a bit hungry, I also feel very clean and light. I feel so grateful for the opportunity to do this, while most people are slaving away at their jobs trying to support their standard of life, I've been given the perspective to realize that I don't need a high standard of living. All these toys, these houses, these cars, and all this junk food, they're all completely unnecessary. People are slaving their lives away for stuff that doesn't even matter. If there's one thing that I would like you to take from these writings, that is it.
Thanks for reading.
GP
This is hard, but I'm being my own worst enemy here. I coached two people today on dietary changes that they would be happy with, talking about all my favorite foods, and the result is predictable. I'm starving. But at the same time I'm happy to help, and this could be just the last thrashings of magic day number 3. If this time is anything like the previous fast, the hunger should disappear by tomorrow. Still, I feel like just sleeping till then. Okay, enough complaining!
I'm quite hungry, and feeling somewhat exhausted mentally. Physically I seem to be fine, I can bound up the stairs without any issue, and last night I did some decent cardio. I've just been online learning so much today already, reading page after page of information on fasting of various kinds, checking out other institutions that support people during their fasts, various diets, and so many emails... This is why fasting in the desert would be better than fasting in the office. I need to focus on myself right now, on exploring this new state of being, not on the things I want to accomplish. Actually, I think some meditation is in order right now. Ciao!
Edit: A breakthrough of sorts happened. As I was meditating my emotional state was getting swamped with anger, hopelessness, and anxiety, accompanied by hunger. The deeper my breaths were, the worse it got. Finally the voice in my head said out loud, "I don't want to feel this way anymore!" and that exact instant I felt it all get even worse, and I suddenly realized what I was doing, trying to deny my emotions. So I tried a different approach.
"I accept all these feelings as my own, and they do not control me." And just like that, everything but the slightest bit of hunger evaporated! At that point I believe I fell asleep for 1.5 hours or so, and while I still feel a bit hungry, I also feel very clean and light. I feel so grateful for the opportunity to do this, while most people are slaving away at their jobs trying to support their standard of life, I've been given the perspective to realize that I don't need a high standard of living. All these toys, these houses, these cars, and all this junk food, they're all completely unnecessary. People are slaving their lives away for stuff that doesn't even matter. If there's one thing that I would like you to take from these writings, that is it.
Thanks for reading.
GP
10 Day Water Fast Day 2 - Complete
4:00AM, 48 hours SLF, 130 lbs, 68 bpm, 36.3C
There were more cravings for food today, similar to the ones that influenced my decision to break my fast once already, and interestingly they occurred at the same time as the last ones did. There wasn't even any hunger, it was just a craving like for a drug. As of now, those cravings are gone, but I can't say I did anything specific to deal with them, I just ignored them hoping they went away. I think a better strategy would be to find a way to handle those cravings as they happen so that I don't have to fight with them in the future, because it's stressful to stop yourself from having something you want. I will try a method similar to how I quit smoking, using my thoughts to help my goal, instead of to tempt me. I'm sure I'll find the proper mantras when the time comes, but something like, "I'm grateful for this opportunity to fast." would work, "I'm happy that my body is getting the rest it needs." stuff like that.
Also, I've decided to make my upcoming 40 day fast a sort of pilot project, assuming there is any interest, and am opening up my trip to anyone who wishes to join me. I will arrange transport to and from the site, and will provide supervision. You can feel free to join me for as long as you wish, 2 days, 10 days, or the entire 40. If you are interested in a spiritual experience, a healing experience, or just want to get away from civilization for a while and try deep fasting, you are more than welcome to join me! I might include juice fasting on this retreat, I'll have to see where the interest lies.
If you would like to join me for my fast in the semi-arid desert of beautiful British Columbia this summer, you can write me at gaianretreat@live.com. Just put "desert fast" in the subject line. My privacy policy is to never share your address with another party under any circumstances, as I wish was the case more often these days.
Edit: After considering this for a few hours I've changed my mind about opening this up to others, I consider this fast to be a rite of passage of sorts, a spiritual communion with the universe that I need to do alone. It is my definite intention to learn the ways of fasting and cleansing, and provide a place where people can come to do so, but now isn't the time.
Thanks for reading.
GP
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