Confession

I am about to share something pretty controversial with you. More controversial than my “no poo” lifestyle. Brace yourself and keep an open mind when I say:

I recently completed an 8-day fast.

That’s right. Eight whole days without consuming any food.

So let’s go ahead and get the basics out of the way. No, I’m not anorexic. Seriously, I love food more than air. If I could I would trade air for food any day!

No, I wasn’t trying to lose weight. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those who fast for reasons that weren’t mine), weight loss is an inevitability when you fast. I can’t say how much weight I lost, but I will say that I’m looking forward to getting it back. Not just because it means I get to eat food again, but because I don’t actually want to be gross skinny. And I’m small enough as it is, so gross skinny is a real danger for me.

So why did I do it?

Well, let me back up. It all started with a candida cleanse. Which, by the way, I had great success with. I needed to clear some (or a whole lot) of yeast from my body which were messing with all kinds of things, but most especially my skin and my hoo-ha (sorry, but it’s true). I explained the cleanse to some of my friends as they commented on me not drinking alcohol and not eating certain things at parties or events or what have you. (And by the way, apparently when you are my age and live in this city and politely tell someone you’re not drinking, they will, without fail, ask you if you’re pregnant. I was tempted on several occasions to answer ‘yes,’ but alas, I never did).

One of my friends was particularly excited about the cleanse and told me how she and her boyfriend had read an article in Harper’s Weekly about fasting and had really been wanting to try it. It turns out there’s a fascinating medical history to fasting and the benefits it can have for the human body – from alleviating diabetes or stopping seizures, to even some tests on rats showing that it increases longevity.

If you think about it as I did, this makes a certain amount of sense. Humans are the only species that have the option to eat every day of the year. True, not all human are able to due to a variety of circumstances, but if you’re a working American, you probably eat three to four square meals a day every day of the year. Well, back just a couple of centuries ago, this wasn’t the case. Sometimes you were between harvests and had eaten your winter store of food and that was that. It was some dried roots or nothing at all for a couple of weeks. This alone didn’t really kill anyone as far as science can tell. It’s the same for all other animal species – none of them eat every day of the year. Sometimes there just isn’t a gazelle or some plankton or whatever. You just keep a lookout until there is and then it’s party time in your belly.

So of course it made sense to me that fasting wouldn’t kill you and was maybe even part of the natural course of living your life. The health benefits were the most interesting to me though, namely 1) detoxing and 2) repair.

I was on the candida cleanse because I needed to detox my body of some of the gross things it had built up over the years from frequent antibiotic use, especially in my youth, as well as several years of a processed, Western diet. (Can you say high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils for a solid 20 years?) The detox was my number one priority. Well, a fast is like a detox on steroids. Because you’re not taking in anything new really, you just are continually flushing the bad things out. –In theory anyway, I’m not a doctor, just an internet article reader.

Related to that is the idea of repair. Because your body isn’t spending energy digesting food, it can redirect that energy elsewhere. Say, to repairing cells. Repairing your digestive system. Finally fighting all those stupid yeasts that have been crowding out your good bacteria and making you break out and have athletes foot and yeast infections and tons of other really un-fun things. I definitely came a long way fighting the yeast on the candida cleanse, but the fast seemed like a nice way to top it off.

So basically, fasting is a total body reset. I fasted for 8 days, although generally speaking people recommend 10 days to get the full benefits. Given my size, I thought I’d be just fine doing 7 instead (the 8th day was a bonus). I also wasn’t committed to carrying it through no matter what since I didn’t feel I had to do it, it was just a nice add-on to what I was doing. So from the start I felt no pressure. One day? Fine. Three days? Hey, way to go! Five days? ROCKING IT! And then seven days would make me the ballingest of all ballers.

Not having the pressure to continue no matter what definitely helped. I also did a lot of research to distinguish between normal detox symptoms (many of which I experienced on the cleanse like breaking out, general fatigue, etc.) and indications that I should break the fast (e.g. dizziness, disrupted vision, fainting, serious shit like that). I knew I would stop if any of my detox symptoms crossed the line. Luckily, none of that happened to me. I was able to carry through and I’m so proud. This was also an incredible test of endurance for me, pushing my willpower and helping me to see food differently in a good way.

How’s that? Well, I proved that you can bypass cravings if you want to, for one. Just let those cravings walk on by, or, in my new eating life, replace the craving with something else (hopefully better).

So there you have it. I didn’t eat food for 8 days and I didn’t die, didn’t even really feel all that bad, and am now on my way to eating normal foods again. I was going to post my reactions/descriptions of each day, but since I waxed on so long already, I’ll save that for my next post, and then I’ll do another post about how I am following up. How do you break an 8-day fast anyway? What kinds of foods am I going to eat from now on? These were all questions I had to answer for myself, and I think I’ve settled on some reasonable ways forward.

So, as with the “no poo” saga, stay tuned for the next installment.