Fasting: Day 2

This is Day 2 of my 21-day fast in Feb 2011 and probably the most in-depth fasting series you will ever find online. If you’re new to fasting, get the full background here: Fasting Experiment. Access all my articles on fasting: The Fasting Series.

Today is the end of Day 2 of my fasting experiment and I’m feeling great still! Here are the stats for today:

• Today’s Weight: 139.8lbs / 63.4kg
• Diff vs. Yesterday: -1.3lbs / -0.6kg
• Total Difference: -4.6lbs / – 2.1kg
• Water consumption: 3.9 liters
• Body Temp: 36.3 C / 97.7 F

Overall Review

Overall, I’m still feeling as good as yesterday, with no hunger pangs. My stomach churned lightly a couple of times, and at some points my mind thought about food and how X food would taste in my mouth, but other than that everything went very well! I merely observed those signs/thoughts as they came, and they went away as fast as they came. I was definitely very conscious the whole time — I suspect all the mental prep I did on Day 1 and Day 0 really helped.

In the past if I was to hear my stomach growl, I would immediately get food, thinking I would starve to death if I didn’t eat. But now that I know my body has all the fat reserves to last me for at least 40 days, I don’t worry about it anymore.

Lack of hunger

A part of me feels that it’s really strange how easy this fast is going. I’m able to look at food and watch my parents eat without feeling hunger or resistance at all (be it Chinese New Year goodies or regular meals).

Given that Days 1-3 are supposedly the hardest in terms of food resistance, and it’s already the end of Day 2, it’s possible I may not experience physical hunger at all during this fast. For sure, it makes it easier and I’m excited at what’s to come next. A part of me wonders if it’s because I have a large reserve of glucose and glycogen in my liver due to all the food I ate on Day 0. o_O I’ll continue to track this tomorrow.

Detox — Nothing so far

Detox-wise, I have not experienced any pains, aches, etc. which are signs that your body is healing the toxins. I am tasting a slightly bitter taste in my mouth now, which might be a detox indication. I’ll continue to observe this aspect.

Temperature

In the morning when I woke up, my body felt warm, somewhat mild feverish. However, it cooled down almost immediately after I woke up. Overall my body has been quite cool, probably since my digestive and other organs are taking a break from digesting/processing food. Nice to let them take a vacation. ^_^*

Food, Love, Family

One thing that made me feel sad today was that my dad specially prepared a vegetarian breakfast and dinner for me today, but I couldn’t eat them. He woke up early to cook fried rice, complete with mushrooms as he knew I like mushrooms. He also bought vegetarian spring rolls and dumplings and prepared them for me.

For simplicity’s sake, I didn’t tell my dad that I’m doing a water fast as he is not going to understand, at least not without going through the volumes of materials I have read on the subject. So when he got back in the afternoon and saw that there was still food left (my brother had some for breakfast), he told me that these were all vegetarian, so I could eat them. I just told him that I had already eaten (I didn’t obviously).

Later, he prepared dinner, again a vegetarian meal, for the family (I’m the only vegetarian). This time there were the leftovers from breakfast on the dining table and a big spread for dinner. He reminded me to eat before he turned in for the day. I hope he’s not disappointed with the leftovers when he wakes up in a few hours.

Anyway, I felt sad when I knew he had prepared breakfast (and later dinner), plus with the vegetarian food to boot. Food has constantly been a symbol of love in my family since young. This is also the reason I emotional ate for a large chunk of my life. Eating what my parents buy/cook/prepare is my way of accepting their love for me; not eating this food would be a rejection of their love. Of course, this is not true. It is just a belief — a fallacious one at that. When you eat for any reason other than true hunger, be it for love, comfort, solace, happiness, etc., this behavior will continue to be present all your life. Because food is not love/comfort/solace/happiness, period. It’s merely serving as a proxy for it in this case. Since food inherently isn’t any of that, no amount of eating will fill up the original void of those elements. You’ll keep eating, eating, and eating, and the same situation of unhappiness/etc. will present itself over and over again, with no end in sight. It’s a bottomless pit.

So I was reflecting over this when I felt the wave of sadness, and I realized again that eating is never going to be the solution. Not in the past, not now, and not in the future either. A long-term solution is to work directly on expressing love itself, starting with daily actions. Just now I accompanied my parents as they caught their favorite 7 pm show (爱, a crazily long-running Taiwanese drama that’s airing in Singapore now). Since I don’t watch TV, it was funny sitting in front of the telly like in the past.

This whole thing — emotional eating, food being tangled up with love, relationship with my parents — isn’t a situation with a quick fix and it’s something I’ve been aware of and working on for a while. The interesting thing is that as I progress in my growth journey, I see a trend in how my issues are processed. It started off with me working on the most recent issues in my life, then slowly progressing to issues from college, high school, and then childhood. Since embarking on conscious living in 2008, I’ve been working through my personal issues, one by one (which you can observe by looking at the content I’ve been writing on PE over time).

Right now, I’m starting to deeply explore and address my relationship with food, myself, and my parents. These are multi-layered issues deeply rooted in childhood, and by corollary, how my parents were brought up by my grandparents in their culture, so there are by no means no overnight fixes. I know that every day I’m gaining headway in this area and the whole discovery process is incredibly exciting.

For sure, I’ll continue to write about this in the future and I’m really excited that all of you are here with me in this journey. :)

Stay tuned for Day 3!

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for Day 3’s update tomorrow! *hug*

Update: Day 3 is up!

This is Day 2 of my 21-day fast in Feb 2011 and probably the most in-depth fasting series you will ever find online. If you’re new to fasting, get the full background here: Fasting Experiment. Access all my articles on fasting: The Fasting Series.