Homemade Graham Cracker Spoons with Marshmellow Whip Cream and butterscotch/ Chocolate Sauce
In light of a friend who recently, and I quote “spoke freely,” at work, I figured that i’d do the same. I have been asked a lot lately about the methods and mindset behind my reason for fasting and it has caused a lot of thinking in the old brain up there. So I thought I would try to write it out on “paper” and see what happens.
It is 2am as I stand here next to the stove writing, my roommates just went to bed, I am working on a stock for this upcoming singles holiday party and dipping a thinly squashed frozen bagel in some butter for dinner. As I stand here eating, as I often do at this hour, I am going over some of the recent questionings behind the meaning of my recent four day fast.
“Are you trying to loose weight?”
“Is this that fast where you drink water with some lemon juice and hot sauce?”
“Is a doctor tracking your physical progress?”
“That doesn’t sound very healthy, are you sure you aren’t becoming anorexic?”
“Must suck to be you right now”
No. There were a lot of questions. I always appreciate questions, helps me understand what I am doing a little bit better. While there was a lot of thought behind my latest, and any for that matter, fast, it is not something that I can validate outside of myself. I have no medical or scientific proof that what I was doing was healthy, was right, was safe, and so forth. Not to say that there isn’t some sort of justifiable reasoning along those means out there, just that I don’t know if there is. That wasn’t why I decided to fast.
The reason that I fasted was, and still is, the reason that I do anything. Same reason that I started eating in, cooking for myself, writing and singing songs, sleeping with the lights on, abstaining from sex (wha?). If I wake up one morning with an idea, that idea will either find it’s way out or it will burry itself inside, perhaps to come out at a later date. I can’t say that I have always been this way. I used to be more of an “I’m gonna doer (do her)” than a “doer,” but that has changed now. Simple, if I have an idea I will try it out and go from there.
There are all kinds of great people out there with a lot of wonderful things to share with you, and as a suggestion I would highly recommend participating in the sharing, but I have spent these past years getting in the habit of thinking for myself, filtering what I hear, experience and see from my own understanding of the world. I can’t really validate anything unless I experience it for myself. Who knows, maybe it is a curse, maybe it is leading me down a destructive path. But that’s just the thing, who knows? I don’t. So I don’t assume. I trust myself and I learn along the way.
Do I fuck up? Sure I fuck up constantly. But that is also why I did a one day fast, and then a two and a half day fast, and now a four, and eventually a week and so forth. Because I want to ease in to my situation without always doing something overly dramatic. Take a day off from eating, see what happens. If it isn’t all that bad, try another day, or two, and go from there. I wasn’t in terrible pain, I didn’t feel my energy being sucked out from inside of me, I felt great. I felt 115% the entire time. I wasn’t waiting for some insane crash to happen, although if it did I know that I would have been prepared to deal with it in whatever way was necessary. The hardest part of the fast is not the physical side, I had recognized that I had been eating too much and that my body needed a break to focus its energy in a way where it wasn’t constantly breaking down food, it needed a break from that. The hardest part is the mind, getting it to play along nice. Because the mind wants to fuck with you. It wants to convince you that you need food, it wants to make you feel hungry so you start to worry that if you don’t eat then something will surely happen. Tricky bastard. That is why I ease in to these things, so I can mentally prepare myself to fight the urges to give in and not freak myself out with worry.
So no, I did not fast because I was advised by a doctor to do so, I did not fast because I wanted to lose weight, because I read about the newest way to diet, I simply did it because it seemed right at the time and I knew, one way or another, that I would learn and grow from it.
