Over the past few years I've experimented with intermittent fasting and found that it has helped me with so many issues in health and happiness that now I feel a need to start talking to other people about and so joined this forum for support, sharing and encouragement.
I began fasting in as a child instinctively, not exactly knowing the concept behind it. Then I would eat TONS of food at social events and people always appeared baffled that I would stay so skinny and joked that I had a hollow leg. As a teenager I learned more about fasting and did about a week of water fasting while going to highschool.
Since then I've experimented with all kinds of fasts- short water fasts, longer juice fasts,fruit fasts,fasting every Sunday, modified low calorie fasts and a kind of fast that some purists might consider unhealthy - what I call entheo fasts where one consumes green juices, leaves and some form of entheogen.
I've come to intermittent, modified and entheo-fasting as the best protocol for me now. For a couple years I've experimented on and off with this lifestyle and found that weight and emotional problems would creep up if I stopped. Because I have a tendency to binge on food the way I did as a kid, but binging every day would give me unsurprising results and I know now that I binge for emotional reasons and not because of fasting.
So I'd like to work on this and maybe keep a log here for anyone interested and as a form of therapy. I'd like to maintain this form of fasting workdays and eat on the weekends before attempting any kind of longer water or dry fasting just because I feel that the emotions that come up and some of the symptoms feel a little too overwhelming right now. When I do eat, my diet needs some work. I often feel conflicted about what to eat because of so many contradicting views led by the intellect of others rather than bodily experience. Personally, I find the lighter I eat the better, so I'll probably aim for that and see if I can work on the reactions I have that lead me to exceeding my limits with food.
Anyway, I weigh 105 lbs right now and look forward to shedding some excess weight and keeping it off through a combination of intermittent fasting and light diet and maybe resistance and or interval training. Hope all goes well with all of you fasting and looking forward to create a dialogue about this. If anyone wants to buddy with me let me know and I'd sincerely appreciate any advice people have about what they do to manage the tendency to binge or overeat things that cause more harm than benefit.
Finished the first day. Nothing interesting happened. Though I tried jumping rope for the first time as a form of "exercise" and it felt hard at first then got easier. I seem to exercise more on days I don't eat and my mood and thinking feel more lucid.
I think about food and what I 'll eat this weekend. I figure if I have something to look forward to, I'll feel less tempted to overindulge in something before then. Maybe I will take a single square of dark chocolate and hold it in my mouth until it melts. And then have a cup of sweet cinnamon ginger chrysanthamum tea with a persian salad. I could make it really extravagant to far exceed the pleasure of binging or eating mindlessly and then repeat it the next day before fasting again.
I'll allow myself to indulge in this way for now because I tend to eat "healthy" food with my mind rather than my body and then end up devouring "unhealthy" stuff anyway. I think that creating this dichotomy of forbidden food and heavily advised food has something to do with why I tend to overeat. I hope that by fasting and allowing myself to enjoy what I crave the most, I can heal myself of this separation between mind and body and accept my flaws to go beyond them.
And then I can write about it here to give myself a nice appetite suppressing panic attack.
hey, i have so much the same experience with eating as you, on so many points. i really appreciate your post. i am going for a long fast right now but am totally interested in supporting you. what is an entheo generating food/entheo fast? sorry i forget the exact way you used the word. i have never heard of this.
Hi,
wow, I didn't think I'd get any replies. It comes as a wonderful surprise. What sort of longterm fasting do you do? Maybe we can buddy up and message each other for support.
I made up the term entheo-fasting so you probably won't find it by looking it up on google just yet unless it already links to this page. I use the term entheogen loosely as anything that opens the doors of perception. Its' etymology signifies a substance that "induces God" and most people consider psychedelics like ayahuasca, psylocybin or LSD as having entheogenic properties. For me even green tea could have something close to it.
So I include any form of entheogen, green leaves and water in the entheo-fast just as long as it doesn't produce the sensation of taste as in spices, sweet fruit or oil, etc. Yesterday I just drank tea and water and chawed Celery . This morning I chawed lemongrass and had guarana and water. So by most standards in a typical fast I think this wouldn't count. But I've felt some spiritual benefits that seem more powerful than if I added say an apple to it.
day 2 passed without any thing significant happening. I made the mistake of doing structured aerobic exercise and found myself exhausted, unable to do any other form of exercise after, except the sleeping kind. Did a lot of cleaning and thinking.
The meal fantasy from day 1 doesn't sound as appetizing today. I came up with a new plan that if it succeeds it may help transition easier into having a state of mind ready for a long term water fast.
3 months seems like a decent amount of time to see what kind of result this plan has. The biggest obstacle I face resides in my own mind and its' reactions.
It helps to bring my attention back to the moment to avoid getting overwhelmed by the future or over-analyzing the past.
At the same time it feels like a staggering disorienting way of perceiving that makes me want to plan or reflect. I guess it all depends on the snake in the room - in other words handling whatever presents itself.
Anyway, this morning I feel more refreshed than the last 2 days and wondering how to make the most of today.
great to hear from you again. please elaborate on your plan! going to read your other post now. yes... in answer to your questio ... the diet makes sense, green tea being probably the strongest entheo substance i would use but maybe that is just prejudice on my part. but i am committed to being totally "clean" so the less i involve myself with drugs the better. just speaking for myself.
kindest regards and i look forward to writing back and forth a lot more. it seems like we have a lot in common and i am so glad to meet you and be a mutual support person for you. if you are in LA - i am starting an in-person fasting support group. i have a free venue at a center I belong to.
Hi Powerray,
For this intermittent fast I plan to fast on negligible calories ( entheo-fasting, water fasting or green juice fasting)on the weekdays and then eat anything ( I changed my mind about the strict diet) on the weekends. ( By balancing freedom and restriction I'll have a better chance of succeeding with this). I hope I can stick this through for 3 months before I attempt a long term water fast.
If I drop below 80 lbs which I don't think will happen, I'll make the conscious choice to stop before the end of 3 months. My mind presents a bigger obstacle than getting too skinny right now, though I have gotten that way in the past but under totally different circumstances.
I hear what you say about keeping it clean and just doing water and I definitely respect that choice and feel it takes first place when it comes to liquid fasting. I would do the same but I don't quite feel pure enough just yet. I still consider myself a compulsive binge eater and entheogens provide a way to look closer and see these issues in a different light and it makes it a little easier than water fasting which tends to shock me. I live in an area with a lot of pollution and this makes me more adaptable. I hope to get there eventually :).
While walking around, I found a church with AA meetings and grabbed their brochure and thought of you! I might try out your idea. I use to get drunk a lot and it might also help to go just to remind myself not to get in the habit again anyway.
I have a friend in LA but don't live there but maybe if I visit him I'll stop by those meetings and we can meet face to face. I feel soooo happy to finally meet someone like you. No one I have ever met shares these quirks andI feel so fortunate to have stumbled here at this time. It makes it so much easier to do this with the support.
Well, I have to get ready to meet a friend. Talk to you soon!
Day 3 has passed now. I had a lot of fun and spent most of the day outdoors in the blistering heat, drenched in sweat. At times it felt cool and then unbearable.
Sometimes this feels easy and then a moment later it feels hard. I'll experience terror followed by calm. Something will appear dumb and then genius. Then I begin to feel an ecstatic confusion at how little I know for sure about this world.
I said I would eat today but I feel anxious about it. I started halfway through the week after beginning the first 3 days of the week entheo-fasting, eating and then entheo-fasting the last 3 days recorded here. I have doubts about eating right now. But I'll follow through anyway so I can reinforce the concept of sticking to a plan.
Today I weighed 101 lbs. I attempted my earlier plan of drinking citrus water, but that triggered me the way I feared it would. So I decided to adjust it to make it less overwhelming by deciding I could eat anything as long as I fast on the weekdays.
I fasted 6 days total the last week with the intention (before I started posting here) to go on a long term fast but realized that I still have smaller limits to transcend before I take on anything too lofty for my mind to handle. Today I feel like I could have gone longer on the fast but I had planned to eat (unlike other times when I may have broken the fast simply out of craving).
It feels vital to keep up with something I have the ability to maintain and avoid imposing too many rules that will make me more likely want to rebel.
Now I have a feeling that I don't want to let more than a day pass between fasts, but still continue to go for as long as I can on each fast with the aim to beyond the three day hump I keep stumbling on.
I keep having to adjust this as I encounter new information.
cool. i came to this same feeling and decision myself at one point recently and it is a milestone in thinking. it was an achievement for me in my thinking & attitude about fasting. & another thing in common for us. how is your day? i will be fasting again soon. i wanted to respond earlier but couldnt. please forgive i will write soon.
woops! I pressed alert on your post by accident when I meant to press reply and then I pressed favorite. Sorry about the absent mindedness. How do you take that back? This format feels unfamiliar to me.
I ate again on Saturday and it didn't sit well with me. I did all I could to keep it down. It felt very debilitating because I had no control. I felt weaker from eating than from not eating for 3 days! At least it reminded me what NOT to do.
Started fasting again this morning and hope to get through at least 6 days. The trouble begins with how to break it. Morning feels like a disastrous time to eat for me. It might make me want to eat all day long as well as incapacitate me the way it did yesterday. I still feel confused about what to eat when I do because planning hasn't worked and eating anything doesn't work. . .
Don't worry about writing back within any time frame. Your support, no matter when you write, helps beyond words. It still baffles me how much we have in common when it comes to food. By the way how have things gone for you lately?
Got through another day of modified fasting. Thinking about eating days and how to make the most of an intermittent style of fasting. If eating less than 100 calories on an eating day would make it easier to continue counting the days. I feel as though eating any more than that would suffice to start over.
I still have a tendency to binge and would like to overcome this frightening compulsion and count at least 108 days without binging and to learn to eat in a slow attentive way. I tend to rush while eating, barely tasting anything and then suffering for it.
This never feels okay, even when I did this as a kid and even though I've never weighed on the heavier end of the spectrum. It makes me obsessed with eating because I don't feel nourished by the experience. It also feels like a very dangerous, stupid thing to do. Overeating on a regular basis would feel bad enough. But not eating and then eating as much as possible has killed people in the past.
Maybe because I don't have a lot of weight on me I run into issues with scarcity and fear of starving, but I still have a healthy amount of body fat that could sustain me through it if I let it. Also I wouldn't mind if my metabolism slowed down a little. Food often feels like love and relaxation, a vacation from worry and hyperactivity. But it has too many side effects and doesn't feel very effective in the long run. I might start doing yoga to help care for myself in a more appropriate way.
Yesterday I did more structured aerobics and some yoga in the morning and then rested most of the day. I felt a little depressed after eating the day before having around 2, 500 calories spread throughout the day. But today I feel happier and in a clearer state of mind, looking forward to the day.
My emotions got the best of me again. I cried a little while talking to someone on the phone and this led to feeling panicked and unsure of what to do. I let myself eat to distract from the feeling and now it feels like I can't stop. I'll start again tomorrow. I feel so depressed to keep going through this. Does anyone have any tips on how to avoid the first bite of food when feeling compelled to eat out of a desire to ground emotionally? I could really use some support right now.
hey,
I don't know when you posted this, but i just wanted to let you know I had read it. I don't have the answer for you and also am struggling with being really terrified myself,havign brought myself through a SORT of abrupt process of stopping triggering food. Then I feel guilt and shame about this abruptness and fearfully anticipate being screamed at for being abrupt. ....i just have had the HORRIFYING series of thoughts that "I need to get more intuitive with how I eat and need to be a little defiant and binge a little --" sort of akin to the emotional grounding you are talking about. ... help. I feel like I can't /am not allowed to decide to give up the triggering foods now. As though this decision would be "forced" and "prudish" and self-forcing and lacking in some sort of "integrity." ... what I DO know thank God is that my body is in such a poor state of health that I CANNOT binge to my satisfaction . i guess that once I get healthier it will be an extreme temptation to go back to triggering foods. But ... I guess also my body is just one of those bodies that will probably never be safe to put triggering food in...
Also, then, if I, once healthy, start determining to use triggering food again, I have to examine my values, the values I am holding, if I make such a decision. I am valuing an EXPERIENCE of OBLIVION over other things... do i want to do that? And the experience of oblivion... leads to chaos in my life and lack of control.. as far as I can tell from my experience -- I guess -- or am I merely TELLING myself that, since I am afraid to examine myself REALLY and discern what the truth REALLY is? -- Either the truth is (a) I can handle triggering food or (b) I can't. But... oh I am too tired to finish this. Sorry.
I have tried for years -- no, decades -- to get clean from my food addiction. Finally I have succeeded in bringing myself to a mental emotional place of STOPPING the triggerign food -- ALL triggering food -- forever. I really am able to conceive of living clean, and of not even SEEKING comfort or an emotional experience or "impact" or ... Do I want o throw all this work away? ... Why will my supposed best friend not call me, in this crucial time in my life? What is the "right" thing for me to do? What is going on? .. I think I am beating myself up with notions that I ought to do "right." I think I am "right" to do exactly what makes me happy.. and that is food sobriety and fasting.
I am in such a whirl I am not even thinking about the fact that I am fasting. Oh my god and it is so scary too I had almost 3000 calories yesterday. that's crazy. Keep that up and I will be the Goodyear Blimp. Why am I allowing this behavior in my life? It just isn't safe or honoring to me to put myself at risk to get fat this way. Oh God - forget it! Let me feel secure and happy again knowing how much better a person I will be if I just stay sober and fasting! I DO feel this. I guess. But then there is the voice that sneaks in and says that i OUGHT to binge , and merely CONTROL MY emotional distress about the bingeing -- as if that course of action/way of life were somehow "more authentic." I am terrorized by this thinking because I have no rebuttal to it, only my own intuitive resistance to it.
... the bingeing/triggering food is never not-distressing... am I not allowed to avoid something distressing???
.. ok I see I am out of control. so - it is good and necessary for me to stay with my sobriety decision( and my fast of course). I worry so much about whether my sobriety decision (bitter green living foods only and push away the food when so much as slightly uncomfortable [in any way and for any reason] with eating) is "valid." I am terrorized by evaluations of the "validity" of my choices.
Addiction is so hard. i ... will go to AA tonight ... but... to speak of all this explicitly there... I can't explain... I feel pain... I feel fear... about sharing any of this out loud in the group. I am frightened and guilty because of the possible inappropriateness of sharing about addiction to food. I .. wish it were different. i ... wish I were correct to share. But i guess what makes me happy is correct. i am too tired to resolve this right now.
One thing helping me is that i see that if I give up the self-indulgent food behavior and get sober, I am renouncing pleasure in a way that is "grown up" and I can become a more appealing positive person this way and I can become more attractive by making this renouncing, grown-up decision. The decision to fast is a temporary decision of the same nature. I think working with these concepts could help me make a firm decision to fast and stick with it.
Just letting you know someone else is going through it, too. kind regards.
I keep going back and forth between making very strict plans and then rebelling against them. Then feeling ashamed and devastated and making even more strict plans.
I like your idea of making the adult commitment to end food addiction. It does feel childish to keep going though this. To get through at least 3 months without binging, not just for my own sake, would mean so much to me, and prove that I have what it takes to grow up and contribute more. This pattern of binging has made me feel stuck and only fasting has helped me get out of it, but I've never gone out of it long enough to make a difference.
So I want to see what I can do to stay away from the things that trigger me and know to stay away from them. I think about how to break a fast in a conscious way. I might experiment with breaking fasts with The Master Cleanse mix using agave nectar, cayenne and lemon in a more diluted way than the recipe and limiting eating to non-sweet fruit and greens and see if this triggers me at all. Also staying hydrated seems like a determining factor for how likely a binge will happen.
Thanks for responding. It helps to hear your story. It feels a little taboo to mention food addiction at all, but any form of pleasure that causes so much pain needs a closer look and a way to heal from it, no matter what form it takes.
Anyway, best of luck on your way to food sobriety, I'll write again soon.
awesome response love you love you no time to write
seriously thanks so much i am in exactly the same place of need for seriousness
text me 661 - 5 3 7 - 3 4 0 2 if you want I really am helped by texting maybe you are 2.
Powerray
Is this your Cell Phone number? Do you mind if I call instead? I don't have a cell phone right now, so I can't text until I get one. I'd love to talk, though - it would help to have someone to reach out to for support when the cravings come on and I'd do the same if you ever needed it. Let me know-
oh my god yes please call me. this support is coming at just the right time -- I am both in need and also able to change & I think you are too and this will be transformative if we work at it.
you mentioned coming to LA and I know you are not about to drop in but I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank you for being interested in coming ....
well, I look forward to hearing from you!!!!!!
just letting you know I hear you and identify on just about every point... i have really worked through my fears of thinness and am so glad I have. i worked really hard on it and am now not afraid to get really skinny, as skinny as necessary, as I fast and restore my health. I am not focused on it neither am I scared of it. best to you
Powerray
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