I DID IT: HOW I FASTED FOR 5 DAYS
Life is about balance. The good and the bad. The yin and the yang. The same applies to eating and fasting. Fasting, after all, is simply the flip side of eating. If you are not eating, you are fasting.
Here’s how it works:
When we eat, more food energy is ingested than can immediately be used. Some of this energy must be stored away for later use. Insulin is the key hormone involved in the storage of food energy.
Fasting differs from starvation in one crucial way. Control. Starvation is the involuntary absence of food. It is neither deliberate nor controlled. Fasting, on the other hand, is the voluntary withholding of food for spiritual, health, or other reasons. Food is easily available, but you choose not to eat it. This can be for any period of time, from a few hours up to days or even weeks on end.
Having talked, read and experienced fasting, I can say that it has been a rational experimentation for me and our current relationship with food. The current economic and marketing trend leads us to eat food until we can not eat more instead of to satisfy the energy demand of our daily activities.
Last week I was fasting for 5 days. Here is how I split my fast:
- Starting on Sunday at 8 pm, when I ate the last meal.
- Monday and Tuesday I drank only water and black tea (because it is what I had available, green tea is also recommended). When you are fasting for 5 days you are allowed to have: Coffee, Green tea, black tea, all types of nuts, and chicken bone broth.
- Wednesday and Thursday I ingested a total of 168 grams of assorted nuts.
- Friday at 8 pm I broke my fast with a feasting. Every day I consumed magnesium and vitamins D and C, once a day.
On previous occasions I have fasted for religious reasons, but this time, I did it for a mixture of reasons and with a mixture of religious, nutritional and emotional objectives.
In my case, I am a compulsive eater. I love to eat and eat until it’s over, not until I’m satisfied. My emotional goal for this fasting was to understand that my mind is more powerful than my stomach and my anxiety.
This fasting helped me to understand that I can manage my diet from another perspective and that our body has a high level of energy accumulation. During these 5 days I maintained my level of training, I was able to go to the bathroom regularly 5 days, which made me question, if by the 5th day there were still solid waste in my body, what happens with these wastes daily?
My fast was wrapped up under a spiritual mantle. One of the intentions of this process was the healing of an injury to my leg. And every time I was hit by the waves of hunger, I would raise a prayer for the healing of my injury.
The first three days I was full of energy, but on the 4th and 5th day I could feel my energy level going down, and how my body responded but I felt that I had no control over it. I considered following another day, but decided to do it another time. My next fasting will be 7 days.
In conclusion and results about Fasting I can say:
- Currently, most of us treat food as an addiction. I am able to feed instead of eat. I can eat to nourish myself.
- Fasting is not negative. It has been practiced since the beginning of time and helps us eliminate waste, to level the levels of fat and sugar in our blood.
- Always make sure you are in optimal conditions to do this or to be under medical supervision. In my case both aspects were met.
- I lost 7 pounds and I felt great. My weight remained the same after my dinner Friday night. I feel much more empowered with my nutrition and in control of my nutrition.
I invite you to further research if fasting is for you and be supervised by a health professional before carrying out a process like this. The basic information source we used for this purpose were:
