si dawson

Hav­ing recently fin­ished a 30 odd day juice feast/fast, fol­lowed by a 4 day water fast, there were a cou­ple of things that deeply con­cerned me.

To be clear, I don't think these are pro­ce­dural issues — that water or juice fast­ing are inher­ently bad — but rather things that, per­haps due to my per­son­al­ity, wor­ried me. I sus­pect these may also be dan­gers for others.

Psy­cho­log­i­cal
There is a lot of talk, if you look around, of peo­ple being on fasts, feel­ing clear, light, con­nected to every­thing, full of energy and so on.

The prob­lem is — if you don't feel like that, it's very easy to start think­ing "Maybe I'm doing some­thing wrong?" This is a very dan­ger­ous & slip­pery road.

After a cou­ple of weeks, I got it in my head that per­haps my diges­tive track still had too much crap in it, left over from bad diet ear­lier in life. As per "offi­cial rec­om­men­da­tions", I was tak­ing cas­cara sagrada (a low key nat­ural lax­a­tive). In addi­tion, I reg­u­larly drank psyl­lium and ben­tonite shakes (which help detox heavy met­als, & gen­er­ally cleans you out). It didn't help that I would "slip up" and occa­sion­ally eat some­thing — this would then spi­ral into a cycle of "I need to clear that out" and "once it's gone, THEN I'll feel light", etc.

I never did feel that light­ness (except when med­i­tat­ing). But the drive to empty my stom­ach? Isn't that anorexia?

My life­long habit has been: I eat what­ever I want, when­ever I want it. I eat until I'm full, and then I stop. I don't stress about eat­ing health­ily, but I do make a point of avoid­ing rub­bish as much as pos­si­ble (except­ing a very stress­ful period in my early 20's where I ate com­plete junk & gen­er­ally treated myself & my life badly).

Since going raw, I've learnt a lot more about what is and isn't healthy, so those bound­aries are mov­ing (cooked food in gen­eral being less healthy than uncooked — whereas before I would eat, say, japan­ese because rice is more healthy than burg­ers), but the atti­tude remains. To eat healthy: think healthy; avoid rub­bish; chill out.

I never get sick. I'm fit enough that I run half marathons every decade or so — I'm not a run­ner, and never run other than the half marathons, it just seems to work out that way (don't ask, I can't explain it. I get spon­ta­neous). I always have tons of energy. These exter­nal indi­ca­tors tell me that while my diet can def­i­nitely improve (& has been), gen­er­ally it's work­ing for me, and my behav­iours are rea­son­ably sound.

So, for some­one like me to be exhibit­ing anorexic ten­den­cies? That's VERY scary.

Phys­i­cal
When I went on the water fast, I knew it would be rough.

Typ­i­cally a water fast works like this. You eat noth­ing, but drink lots of water. Your body sur­vives by using up (in order):

1. what­ever food is still in your diges­tive tract
2. your fat cells (which is where you store tox­ins, so these then get released — this is desirable)
3. your mus­cles (a 10 day fast you'll lose maybe 0.5->1kg/1-2lb of muscle)
4. tis­sues from your inter­nal organs, in reverse order of importance

Now, because I'd just been on a juice feast, I didn't have any food in my diges­tive tract. What lit­tle fat I'd had to start with had mostly dis­ap­peared. I went straight into hard­core exhaus­tion. I spent 4 days pretty much unable to get out of bed.

Remem­ber also, I was still doing colonics every week. Now, if my inten­tion in doing these was to empty my diges­tive tract, I'd be more con­cerned about this, but what they did do was both help me clear tox­ins out faster, and also remove long term build up (I won't get into details here). Plus, from a heal­ing per­spec­tive I've found them.. sur­pris­ingly effec­tive. Suf­fice to say, I don't think they, in them­selves were a bad thing, and they prob­a­bly saved me a lot of pain. How­ever, the com­bi­na­tion of all of these things (fast, colonics, lax­a­tives, inter­nal cleansers) did have side effects.

One of the things that made me realise that I didn't NEED to be fast­ing was the inim­itable Dhru­mil. That what I was seek­ing wouldn't be found "out there" or by chas­ing some ideal goal of (men­tal) light­ness, (diges­tive) clar­ity, or any­thing. No, this was an inter­nal game, and you only win by let­ting go.

The other thing that made me decide enough was enough was see­ing this in the mirror:

That doesn't look so bad. What's scary is, this is me delib­er­ately relax­ing my stom­ach, and let­ting it expand out as much as it pos­si­bly can.

To give this some per­spec­tive. For 20 years, my weight has been between 57kg and 65kg (126–143 lb). This doesn't mat­ter how much, or what I eat. My lifestyle. Whether I exer­cise once a year, or three times a day. I eat three din­ners to try and gain weight, and it's gone in two days. If I hit 65 kg I know it's time to do some exer­cise. I walk a bit more and I'm back down to 62kg (my longterm aver­age, +/- 1kg) in a week. I'm STABLE. I've given up try­ing to gain weight, since it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Now, I don't have scales in the house — where's the point? But I did weigh myself at a friends, before I started the water fast, and I was down around 52kg. I only got lighter after that. What really scared me though? Was this (again, this is as far out as I could com­fort­ably push my stomach):

That? That's unhealthy. And damn scary. And that was enough.