A Bowl Full of Juice

So I failed to journal for the first two days of fasting, but I will make it up to you, I promise.

The first day went fine; I started with a healthy and fiber-full breakfast and then moved onto water and a bit of juice for the rest of the day. I was hungry, but I imagine it was mainly psychological pain at the prospect of continuing to fast for six more days. Also, my roommate, who is also fasting, kept talking all day about how hungry she was.

Sunday, I woke up feeling great, sure I would be fine to continue fasting as long as need be, and it all went downhill from there. I savored my communion wafer in church; never has that crunchy bit of cardboard tasted so good. For the afternoon, I worked on papers, my brain eating away at my glucose stores until I was ready to kill someone for a tuna melt. I was feeling none of the real effects of fasting, but my body was so conditioned for food that I was just hungry. After my 4pm DOC meeting, friends and fasters came over for what is usually Sunday Night Dinner, but was instead Sunday Night No-Dinner. Then we went to see Charlie Bartlett, which was not an exceptionally good movie, but some of the acting was phenomenal, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, which I needed. No insomnia so far, but we'll see how it goes.

Today was the beginning of my body beginning to eat itself. I woke up feeling okay, not too hungry, but I began to notice the small signs of my body breaking down: my computer sitting on my thighs triggered the sensation of soreness as though I had just run upstairs, and I started feeling a little light and floaty. I wasn't feeling anything very strong, though, until I was late for class because of a longer-than-expected phone meeting. After hurrying down to my car, up the parking structure, and out to class, I realized that class was beginning in a different room today, so as I ran up those stairs, I stopped in the middle to realize that I was going to die if I kept going. So I stood, and breathed, and went a bit airily to my classroom, where I sat perched on the floor and listened to a woman sing Rumi's poetry in Farsi. My indication that I was not as starving as I could be was that the gentleman sitting across from me was eating an apple, and I realized in a moment of self-awareness that I was still hungrier for him than for the apple. So much for clarity of purpose and sense of self.

Now I am off to have myself an afternoon nap. I came home desperately wanting some vegetable juice, so I heated up to make it taste like tomato soup. I drank it down so fast and licked the bowl that I am now sitting here uncomfortably full with my belt loosened.

I'm full. Of soup.

Feast Today, for Tomorrow We Fast

Today is the day before I begin my fast, my day of preparation. My plan, after class, work, and a practice Truman panel interview, is to head for the grocery store to buy juice, and begin freezing perishables left in our house. I don’t know for sure if everyone in the house will be fasting yet, but since two of them are regularly not home, I feel fairly safe in freezing things that haven’t been used yet, as I feel they can probably use a microwave. Perhaps it will also cut down on the pile of mess that seems to accrete and foment in our kitchen. I may have to get creative when I get to things like spinach and peaches; perhaps some good old-fashioned canning?

As a baseline today, I feel good. I had my standard breakfast of a piece of whole-grain vegan toast and an excess of delicious Skippy Superchunk peanut butter. I am hoping to find someone to steal lunch from, but failing that, today will be a preparatory low-calorie day, as all I have in my bag is a bottle of apple juice and some increasingly un-vegetable-like celery sticks. I think the only listlessness I feel is caused by a lack of sleep, which I’m hoping to remedy by sleeping tomorrow until I cannot humanly sleep anymore.

I still haven’t decided when I will actually begin to fast, because although tonight’s Shabbat dinner would make a delicious last meal, I don’t know that I’m quite ready to commit yet. And falafel would be a rather impressively smelly last thing to have in my stomach.