The fast

This weekend, my husband and I are fasting.  Friday breakfast will be our last meal of the weekend.  Sunday, “dinner” will be some watermelon.  Monday, back to vegan eating, but maybe a little lighter if our stomachs are upset.

Upon my husband getting a book a month ago titled “Fasting and Eating for Health,” we decided to give it a try.  This is our third week being “vegan”.  I put it in quotations because vegan is the best way to describe it, but we are not actually vegan.  We still eat meat and dairy, but not on a typical day…maybe once a week.

No, we are not insane.  No, we are not sadists.  No, we are not religious.  We are doing it for health.  The idea of the fast is to give you body time to rest totally.  When you are digesting food, your body is not at rest and may try to conserve energy by ignoring other less urgent processes.  Think about when you get really sick and food just sounds gross…it even tastes different.  Your body doesn’t want you to eat so that it can focus on beating the virus or bacteria.  We have been raised to believe that we have to eat 3 meals a day everyday, even when sick or not hungry…or we are going to die.  I remember this as a child, my parents would always force me to eat “to keep my strength up”.

The first time I was really sick as an adult was in college.  I was a freshman, so I lived in the dorm.  I was far to weak to get up to walk and get food, so I didn’t.  I just drank juice from the vending machine on my floor.  The next day, I felt absolutely fine.  I don’t get sick all that often, but the next time I got really sick (and my husband too) was right after our honeymoon.  We had the flu, bad.  I really thought that I might die.  I could only get out of bed to barf (my husband was lucky enough not to be barfing).  I didn’t eat for at least a day, maybe two, but at the end of the second day of being sick I thought “I have eat, or I am not going to be able to fight this”, so I made some soup.  This soup (Minestrone, my favorite) tasted like crap.  I could barely taste anything except for this terrible sewer-like taste.  I couldn’t even finish it.  It was the same with juice…I’m a scientist, I had to check to make sure it wasn’t just the soup being spoiled.  One more example before we learned our lesson was just recently when we were in Europe.  My husband was really sick towards the end.  Everything he ate basically went right through.  So what did he do?  He kept eating…and then again, right through.  After a few days of this, he stopped eating for maybe a day and we were so paranoid the next day, “he just had to eat something”…again, right through.  He didn’t get better until he stopped eating entirely and just drank a light electrolyte solution.  Only in retrospect do I realize the value of not eating when you are sick.

Mark my words: I will never force my children to eat when they are not hungry.

Anyway, I plan on doing nearly nothing for the entire weekend.  I have been feeling mentally exhausted also.  I plan on watching lots of movies, reading some books, working on my area rug and working on my flexibility.  There will be no research, no ballet (aside from the stretching), no running, no cooking, no cleaning.  It sounds awesome, and it will be guilt-free because I am not allowing myself to do anything.  I am really looking forward to it.

My weight as of this morning is 1XX+3.  I imagine that I will lose about 1.5 lbs of fat/muscle during the fast and who knows how many lbs of water.  I’m interested to see what it is.