Unscheduled Day Off … ugh!

By Holly Lisle

If it’s been a while since you’ve done a longer fast, you forget.

Intermittent fasting, where you maintain a no-snacks rule and eat at around six or seven every evening is dead simple. You adapt, you don’t feel hungry or deprived, and every day you have plenty of energy to do everything you need.

Longer fasting isn’t like that. You’re running on yourself — feeding yourself out of fat stores — and breaking down those fat stores requires a fair amount of energy. But the weird thing is, you have energy to burn. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to relax, because your body is keeping you up and running so that you can, you know, run down a gazelle or go out with the rest of the gang and bring down a mastodon.

The objective of our bodies is to keep on living. Our bodies remember starvation, because they’re the offspring of the people who survived it. 

They know that you burn fat to keep the body up and running, set its energy to HIGH, keep it awake, keep it moving, because the creature that keeps moving is the creature that has a chance to find food.

When food hits your system, however, Primitive Body says, “That’s enough of that.”

And the energy doesn’t just drop back to normal. It drops to way below normal, so that you can rebuild those necessary fat stores that will keep you going through the next famine.

I’m in that trough right now (and reminding myself that intermittent fasting doesn’t have energy peaks or troughs, which is why I like it). I had to drag myself out of bed. It was an effort to shower.

And even thinking my way through this post is a struggle. So.

I’m taking today off. When I’m done, I’m going to stretch out on the couch and maybe read. And probably sleep.

And ask myself if I really want to make a three-day fast a weekly part of my regimen. Anti-cancer… very good.

Self-inflicted feeling like shit?

Maybe not my best choice when I’m getting words and finishing books.

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