48hrs

Some call it a cleanse, others call it fasting... or the starvation diet. But whatever you call it, last weekend I tried it, with a few caveats.

In my family history, I have Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and MS, and one of the ways, statistically, to cut your chances of getting all of them was the 48hr fasting thing. Since it was free (about the only kind of medication indie authors like me can afford) I figured why not... food was a frivolous indulgence anyway, I needed to cut back.

So Friday night was my last meal until Sunday night, 48hours later.

Believe it or not, the weirdest part of all was how weirdly easy it was to do. I expected to be starving all the time. I expected to be in pain. I expected to be lightheaded, feel faint, dizzy, weak, or even-- I expected to quit by lunch time on Saturday, but by Sunday night, I was feeling fine, like I could go the next week if I needed to.

A part of me was hoping for hallucinations, you know a real vision quest like the indians have, but I'd likely have had to push it well beyond 48hrs and that just sounded unhealthy/crazy to me. 48hrs was about as nuts as I was prepared to go right now, and everything I read said anything beyond 48hrs was 'medically counterproductive'.

The gold standard for this sort of thing is no food whatsoever and only water.

For me, someone that is addicted to coffee (in the winter) and green tea (the rest of the year) I used green tea, because (and I know how this sounds) going without food was one thing, but going without tea was WAY TOO Hard, perhaps even unthinkable.

I'm now several days worth of perspective from it and, I have to admit, I feel a little different for it. It wasn't the life changing vision quest I wanted it to be, but it did reframe my entire perspective with my relationship to food. It revealed something about myself I didn't know before.

It made things seem more possible, in a way.

Like maybe, one day, in the far off distant future, I might, eventually, quit coffee and tea-- too far.