Week two of Intermittent Fasting

Troublesome math: If you skip eating every other day, that makes for 3 & ½ 36 hour fasts per week. That’s 126 hours. A week only has 168 hours, so it seems counterintuitive to spend 126 of them not eating. That’s 75% non-eating time. Got sick this week, and have been eating normally for three days. I’m going to switch to the 6pm-to-6pm cycle for awhile, which should be easy by comparison. I’ve also made a pledge to not repeat my early twenties vegan-era mistake of making everyone around me uncomfortable with what they ate. Time will tell if I can both stick to this rigorously AND make the exceptions necessary for a graceful social life. And where does vodka fit in? If I’m not eating until 6pm, can I start drinking at 5? That would be a more efficient use of alcohol, as it wouldn’t be senselessly buffered by food. Someone should do a study of the potential savings.

On another front, I’ve been playing with Scott Sonnon’s FlowFit. It’s described on his website (http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/) thusly:

FlowFit™ is a 4-Phase, incrementally-progressing multi-movement chain from Prasara Body-Flow Yoga™ - uniquely constructed based upon Scott Sonnon's years of championship coaching and competing at an international level in multiple sports.

It’s incredible stuff – if I can just get myself to do it. Mind you, I’ve run two marathons (a long time ago…) and can happily bicycle for hours, but I’ve never been able to make myself buckle down and do yoga. I’m clear that my body would be happy if I did. The wife could do a full handstand for two minutes while nine months pregnant – a sight everyone should see at least once. Here, at last, is a form of yoga that really calls to me. Now there’s no way to squish out of the facing up to whatever it is that has me turn my attention away from this sort of thing.

I believe that, to a very large degree, our bodies are our subconscious minds. Physical traumas, emotions that we aren’t ready to deal with, and suchlike get stored in our bodies. When we engage in a deep physical practice such as a martial art or yoga (or fasting, for that matter), it can bring up difficult memories or free-floating anxieties that we can’t account for. Also, it can disrupt old patterns and ways of being. And if there is only one thing we know about long-lasting patterns and ways of beings, it is that they are survivors. They know how to keep themselves alive. You may never have kept that promise to yourself to start flossing regularly, but I’ll bet there’s a habit or two that you do have that is inexplicably persistent. Now before you think I’m infested with Thetans (and count yourself lucky if you DON”T know that that’s a Scientology joke), I don’t believe we have little beings inside us, or split personalities, or anything goofy like that.

But the patterns that run our lives fascinate me. We are in this bizarre position of having minds and bodies that can seem to be on autopilot, stuck, for better or worse, in learned behaviors and randomly acquired habits. And yet, when we bring out full attention and conscious intent to bear, we can disrupt and re-write any of these routines. We are, to use Scott Adams' phrase, moist robots, pre-determined to behave as our genes and environment have shaped us – and yet, we can also learn and re-program ourselves with an astonishing degree of freedom and power.

So why the hell can’t I spend a few minutes a week doing yoga? Don’t know – so I’ve gotten a coach. I don’t care to have this same wonder a year from now…

Week 1 of Intermittent Fasting

This week, I am starting an experiment with intermittent fasting (IF). IF is the habit of eating every other day. There are many benefits to this, which I may get into in another post – Google it if you’re curious. It took me a few weeks of thinking about it and skipping meals for practice. I’d fasted a few times in my twenties and found it difficult. But this time, the first day was remarkable easy. Yes, I was hungry, but not suffering, and most of the time didn’t think about it. In fact, I found the next day to be more difficult, trying to stuff in two days worth of calories in one day. That’s the day I was tired and crabby!

One interesting thing, the day after eating, I tried simply not eating unless I was really hungry – to see if I could make it unfed through the day without a strong commitment. No chance! I thought about food constantly and was ravenous. I was eating by noon. Today I tried the same thing and didn’t make it past nine am! The moral: when my body knows that I’m not going to feed it, it’s just fine. If it knows I’ll feed it if it produces symptoms of hunger, wow does it. That’s kind of cool to know…