Fasting: A timeline

I've just finished a three day fast of what I think is called a water fast, sort of.

Since it's my fast and I get to make the rules here are the things I was allowed:

• water
• coffee (black)
• tea (straight)

I allow coffee and tea because as far as I know neither has any actual calories in it, and are basically just bean or leaf essence dissolved in water. For my purposes this is close enough to water that I don't care.

Day Before

You eat mainly left overs trying to finish everything so that both there is less laying around to tempt you and to chew through anything that might go bad while you aren't eating.

There is a vague buzz of excitement about the task you're about to undertake. First world problems.

Day One

Oddly, this day is fairly normal.

Well, it is if you're like me and you skip breakfast and usually lunch anyway. The only real difference is that you (again if you are a strange individual like myself) don't get to put heavy cream in your coffee. You start to notice it again in the evening when you're expecting food but you can distract yourself pretty easily.

Day Two

The morning is pretty normal.

As the day progresses you notice your thoughts are getting a bit loopier, that you're having more thoughts about food and recipes and my god is it shocking how many ads are food related.

At some point you realize it's been a while since you pooped, followed quickly by the thought that yeah, that is probably correlated to not eating.

Is it really colder in here or is this some strange side effect of fasting? Or am I just imagining it? Either way let me put on some socks and gloves because my extremities are feeling a bit chilled.

You feel smaller, physically shrunken.

I don't have a scale so I don't have weight measurements, but I started wondering if I appear physically different.

Day Three

Conservation of motion.

Somewhere deep in your brain some part of you is evaluating every idea by how many calories it would take to execute and pushing all the low calorie ideas to the top of the docket and sliding the high calorie ideas to the bottom.

You'll notice the things you want to do all involve a lot of sitting. You have to do a bit of hyping yourself up before you actually get into a task that involves standing.

And by the way, don't stand up too quickly. Nothing serious but you could get a little light headed.

You're not exhausted, its just like you're in a continual state of the beginning stages of winded without the stitches on your side.

Focus starts to become more troublesome. You'll find your thoughts wandering without your notice, 50% of the time ending up on some food related issue, and holding to any one topic effortful.

All the things you've been drinking are really boring, made worse by the fact that you have to keep drinking increasing amounts to distract yourself from the hunger. You're reminded how much black coffee tastes like licking the terminals of a battery.

You start to notice how much more time you have without cooking and eating chewing up any of the clock.

Bargaining begins. When is the actual end of the fast? Does sundown count? Is it midnight? What if we cut it short by an hour? What if we start cooking now so that it will be done by the deadline? Promise we won't snack in the meantime. No one will notice.

In your head you start doing the mental math of counting down the hours until the finish line. Dreams of the meal you're going to make to celebrate the finish start swirling.

You think about sleeping. You tell yourself you'll just go to bed and when you wake up you'll have a decadent meal. But you're unable to convince yourself you're not legitimately hungry, so instead you decide to stay up until midnight, checking the clock every twenty minutes in the final hour.

You've already set up the cutting board, the knife, the condiments, all the bowls and utensils, everything is laid out for maximum efficiency.

Day After

The stroke of midnight passes and you charge into the kitchen. You want to eat everything all at once, anything you can think of sounds delicious.

The small snack you make before the main meal, a hotdog in my case, you notice your jaw feels tired already.

No matter.

You make the meal you've been dreaming of for the last several hours, and it feels great to be full. Throw on a couple of bites of snack in the aftermath just for good measure and go to bed.

I should mention that yeah I know you're not supposed to go to bed right after eating. I forget why this is but I know it isn't recommended. However the doctors who advise this clearly have no idea how good it feels to go to bed on a full stomach.

In my particular case lying in bed I noticed my heart in a funny rhythm, which was slightly disconcerting, but rolling over onto my back seemed to normalize things.

Waking up the part of your brain that was focused on calorie conservation is still on alert.

Pooping resumes, as if that first meal was fast tracked through the system.

Final Reflections

Fasting is an interesting experience.

Did this fast accomplish the goals I wanted it to?

No, I don't think it did.

I wanted to use the time to concentrate on reflecting on the past and what I wanted from the future and I did almost none of that. There is some benefit from the exercise of mind over mater but in all this fell short of the goals I set.