Fasting: Day 9

This is Day 9 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.

Here are my stats for Day 9:

• Today’s Weight: 130.8lbs / 59.3kg
• Diff vs. Yesterday: -0.7lbs / -0.3kg
• Total Difference: -13.7lbs / -6.2kg
• Water consumption: 1 liter
• Body Temp: 35.4 C / 95.3 F

Mental Heaviness

Today I woke up feeling mentally “heavy.” It wasn’t sleepiness or grogginess. It just felt like my mind was very weighed down and wasn’t in the capacity to operate. That was about 8:30 am and I had slept 4-5 hours before. I don’t normally feel this way nor have I felt like this way during the fast so far. The closest analogy I can use is like having a hangover.

So I went back to sleep, hoping to sleep it away. I woke up a few times in the next few hours with the same feeling, after which I’d shut myself off to sleep. I finally felt better at about 12:30 pm, so I got out of bed. I’m guessing it’s mental detox at work. For the rest of the day I felt pretty good though — at least nothing abnormal from what I’ve been reporting so far.

Physical Energy

My physical energy has been picking up. Apart from the light-headedness which can be quite bad (even moving up from a lying position to a sitting position can create some wooziness), I don’t feel as tired as on Days 6-8. I notice I’m able to work on the computer for a set period of time before I feel tired and have to go rest. When I first wake up for the day, I can last 6.5 hrs or so before I need to rest. After a 3-hr nap or so, I get up and I’m able to last for another 3+ hours before I feel like resting again.

Tomorrow I’m heading out to meet my friends at the mall, where I’m going to look for some kitchen tools for my meal preparation in the future. I don’t foresee any problems going out as long as I’m not walking to the point of exhaustion. It’ll be nice to get out for a change I reckon. Lying on the bed the whole time when you don’t feel sleepy can be a dulling experience. I’m amazed at how people at fasting centers get through their 21-day / 30-day / X-day fasts without communication devices or laptops.

Complexion

Since my last update about my complexion on Day 5, I’ve gotten a few zits (three on my forehead and one on my chin) which I take as a sign of detox. Other than that, my complexion has been improving. My pores are smaller, my skin is slowly clearing up, and I look younger as well. My skin is also a lot less oily than before. Normally I have oily skin, and now I’d say my skin is somewhat normal to slightly oil.

(Just to be clear, I don’t have severe acne, not the kind that’s persisting and covers the entire face. However, I do have breakouts every now and then and I also have occasional pimples that are large and painful. This is fairly common among Asians living in a tropical climate.)

It makes me wonder how much our genes affect our skin type and how much of our skin condition can be attributed to our diet and lifestyle. For example, I know that when I ate fast food and fried foods in the past, my skin would be oily with zits and breakouts. It felt as if my body was fervently trying to purge out the toxins and my skin was one of the detox outlets. When I went on a raw food experiment in January this year, my skin condition improved quite a lot, with similar changes as what I’m observing now. It certainly feels good not to worry or bother about pimples or outbreaks for a change. Putting on makeup is even easier now and the end effect looks better since you are starting off with a smooth canvas (your skin).

Weight Loss

My weight today is 130.8lbs / 59.3kg. That’s a -0.7lbs / -0.3kg vs. yesterday and -13.7lbs / -6.2kg since I started the fast. :) My loss for the past 4 days has been alternating between -0.3kg and -0.4kg per day. Assuming a loss of -0.2kg per day for the remaining 12 days of the fast, that means I’ll end up at 128lb / 56.9kg at the end of the fast (which is still well within the acceptable weight range for my height)! I’d be really excited if that happens because I certainly don’t remember the last time I saw that weight!

In the meantime, I plan to start clearing out my bigger-sized clothes. A lot of these clothes don’t resonate with me anymore, and frankly speaking when I was at my higher weight I couldn’t identify with my physical weight because I’ve always been on the thin side when I was young. It was through years of bad (emotional) eating that I slowly put on weight, which made me somewhat disillusioned, resulting in further eating and bingeing. In the past couple of days, I started seeing semblances of the younger me in the mirror, someone I haven’t seen in a long while. It was like being able to finally “see” my true self underneath all the layers — emotional (pain) and physical (weight) — and at the moment I felt peace, gratitude, and happiness.

Food Recipes

Today I spent some time combing through food sites and collected a selection of recipes that I’m most interested in. I skipped the high-fat recipes and headed straight to the low-fat ones. I also focused on the recipes which are easy to prepare, because I don’t want to spend so much time in the kitchen.

Our society today still very much caters for SAD (Standard American Diet, a diet with highly processed foods, desserts, etc.), partly because that’s where the main food demand is, and partly because the food industries are pushing that.

On the other hand, if the majority of people choose to eat healthily, there wouldn’t be any place for so much junk food – we’ll have organic, healthy, whole-food restaurants springing up everywhere, selling everything from gourmet to takeout to daily food fare. That’ll be a utopia for me when that happens, but for now it’s a matter of equipping myself with the knowledge and tools to eat healthily.

With my food recipe research done, my next step is to get the kitchen tools as I mentioned above. I’ll update you guys on how it goes.

Update: Day 10 is up!

This is Day 9 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.