Sunday Matt said, “So… you wanna go long on the fasting?”
My response. “Yeah.”
So I had a wonderful ribeye steak (ribeyes are fatty, and I ate the damn fat, and it was delicious) and a salad with lemon juice instead of dressing at our favorite restaurant last Sunday at 4 pm.
Have not had a bite of food since.
As I write this, it’s 8:23 am on Thursday, and I won’t have anything to eat until our regular mealtime at 7 pm tonight, when we break our fast.
Why am I posting early?
Because this has been Hell Week.
I’ve been buried all week in GDPR compliance work, digging into the details of the course I took to know what I had to do.
Massive overhauls of privacy policies, changes in email forms, conferences with Dan about the GDPR “account close” option we’re adding to allow folks with my classes to close their accounts and delete their personal information instantly and on their own.
I’ve been sneaking in time on the forums to talk to my folks at 4AM when I wake up because I can’t sleep because I’m worrying about missing something important.
I’ve been working from 7 AM to 9 or 10PM or later.
And I am amazed at two things:
- The enormous amount of work I have accomplished.
- The fact that I have been on-task the whole time. No digressions, no diversions, no mind wandering, no drifting off to read emails.
I have not gotten a word of fiction written in the past week. Have not gotten Lesson 4 of How to Write Short Stories past the introductory paragraphs and an outline. There has simply not been time. I still have some small GDPR work to do this morning before I actually dig into both fiction and nonfiction again.
But the fasting was a help. Not a nuisance, not a hindrance, not something that caused me problems. It gave me days of open time in which to work without interruption, and a clarity and focus that allowed me to do large amounts of tiny detail work without screwing things up and having to start over.
The Fast Details
I’ve had water (mostly seltzer) and coffee, black, no MCT oil.
Matt looked at the MCT oil, thought about our objective of staying in ketosis so our bodies would burn our own fat, and said, “Wait a minute… if we’re throwing readily accessible fat into our systems, won’t that slow down our bodies burning their OWN fat?”
And he did research. Yep. He’s right.
So the MCT oil is gone.
We’ve both stopped testing our blood glucose. Mine was fasting – 60s, 2h pp (2 hours after eating) 70s. His are equally good, but ten points higher on both measurements.
If you’re not eating sugar, your body makes its own from fat — gluconeogenesis. So if you’re not on medications, your blood sugar becomes a non-issue. It’s going to be good because your body will make the right amount of what you need from your fat to keep you healthy and alive.
Your body, after all, has a vested interest in you not dying, and a lot of built-in systems to prevent you from dying — if you let it use them.
So poking my fingers twice a day for the same results became an exercise in masochism, and I’m a lot of things, but masochist is not one of them.
I’m getting all the results I need just by moving through the day.
My clothes are hanging off of me. My favorite pajama bottoms fall off — I’ve had to go to the few pairs I had that have drawstrings.
I can see where the backs of my arms, my inner thighs, and my abdomen are all thinner.
I’m not measuring now. People get addicted to seeing progress on a scale or a chart or an app, and that becomes their reward. (How do I know this? Because I’m people too, and I’ve been there.)
When you hit your goal, and you don’t see any more “progress,” you lose motivation.
I don’t want progress. I want “healthy as a stable state.”
The fat I’m losing now has an end, after which I won’t see any more progress. I’ll hit a size where my body has the right amount of fat (something like 30%) and I won’t have any more abdominal bulge below my rib cage, and at that point, I have to be able to walk away from the tape measure.
I have to be able to say, “Good enough.”
At that point, we’ll just eat our one meal a day, and I’ll do a couple of longer fasts a year as a way to fight cancer with autophagy. (The body’s own recycling system.)
So I’m avoiding the addiction of the scale, the chart, the app. I can see this is working. I’ll do one more waist measurement this month, just to report in and let you folks know what two months in with one meal a day, plus one four-day fast, looks like.
And then I’ll do little monthly updates until the belly fat is gone. I’m guessing it will be the last fat to go completely, so you should be able to see the whole arc.
At that point, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. LCHF. Low carbs, high fat. One meal a day, because it’s easy and it doesn’t waste our time. And because you can eat really good food and still live on a miser’s budget.
Anyway…
Back to work. I should have the last of the GDPR stuff in place in a couple hours, and then will do some of the Vipers’ Nest revision, and some work on Short Stories Lesson 4. My brain has been working on both in the down-time, and gave me a nice twist for Vipers’ Nest AND a really cool demo on putting subtext into a story drawn from the one story I sold where I failed to include subtext.
It was an awesome revelation.
HA! More Brain On Fasting! BOF
This is some pretty good shit.
That could be the fasting slogan… Fast more. BOF more.
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