DAYS 2-3: God Help Me, Want to Quit, No Hope or Willingness
I want to quit. I'm scared to go on and break my habit of failure. I'm scared I won't be adequately rewarded for fasting
Date: 7/24/2007 6:27:26 AM ( 17 y ) ... viewed 2118 times IT HAS BEEN 42 hours so far!!!!
I am feeling physically fine today. DAy 2 ends 6:15 p.m. But (the feeling lightened slightly as I started writing) I have just been stuck in an old, old mindset, one that has always stopped my fasts before and I just can't see the way out of it and I am scared to see the way out of it...it'S unfamiliar?? scary for that reason??? superstitious fear of the unknown???... it is more that
This is the first time I have ever attempted a fast of more than 2 days, in my recent history; and in my life I have only ever fasted 4 days.
This does not mean I should not have fasted a lot more in my life. Had I learned to fast longer I might be in far better health. No: I WOULD be in far better health.
Nevertheless my mind has just been saying that it is too scary and miserable to go on and I have made enough of an effort already, breaking by dozens of hours already
my most recent fasting records... How did I get all the way to 42 hours, anyway??? How did I do this ? I am really flying blind and alone. Maybe it was the bingeing before the fast that got me through (I have not yet confessed or written about this)...
I know fasting is working. My brain fog is clearing up somewhat. I can walk up stairs more easily today. I felt really positive last night and made up lists of wonderful goals I could have if I succeeded in healing and detoxing through fasting. But, God, I feel I just have this unbelievebly tenacious toxic bacterial condition in my colon to heal which will just take dedication to fasting and to abstaining from getting high on food, dedication, I say, of a kind I simply do not have. I feel I just do not have any powerful enough reason to really forgo eating pleasure ... I ought to place pleasure in quote marks... I feel it will just take years and years of the most grueling dedicated long term fasting... of the most horrifying misery... of just grinding and grinding and grinding away... 2 counterarguments to this: one: the alternative is the greater misery of food addiction. two: time is always passing and in just 8 days and a bit the particularly grueling part will be over for a time, until my next fast.... I ahad another counterargument but my memory is still poor and I forget it.
Is this going to get better after about 3 days? I am really not showing signs of becoming particularly ill during this fast...
Will my mind improve after 3 days????
...I want to say: OK, now I am motivated. Now I am dedicated. But I do not want to be dishones. I just want to forget this fast, tonight. I need some reassurance. I need some support. I am just so alone. I can't do this all by myself.
Well, maybe I need to pour out what my anxieties really are. Asking for help or reporting on this form can be effective if I am really really completely open about everything that is going on. I hesitate to ask for help as nakedly and vulnerably as I need to for the asking to be effective -- because I am frequently met with rejection when I tell the Whole Truth about myyself. So on forums such as this I am constantly trying to conceal what I have been screamed at are Important FActs about myself.
Well, here are the Important FActs. I dread the response to these. Please DO NOT RESPOND TO THEM. I really need to experience just being heard and being accepted.
I am very frightened to begin. However:
I find in my life I have been what I would consider to be very abused by western medicine and by the "eating disorders treatment" industry.
All my life I have gotten high on food.
I began to be conscious of food as a mood-altering drug at an early age. I can remember going into a frenzy at the prospect of being served hot chocolate at age 6. I am told I was fed a choc. ice cream cone age 1 or so (??!! what were they thinking?!) and was so frenzied by this that I held the ice cream directly on my face and screamed when they tried to remove it and ended up with a red "cold burn" all around my mouth. I remember age 7 and 8 stealing desserts in the institutional cafeteria where we ate as a family (grew up at a boarding school). I remember standing before the trays of cake trying to determine which piece had the maximum frosting -- taking a long, considering time to make this decision, so important was the food high. Food was THE drug. It hadn't really taken over my life, but I remember also having the healthy instinct to get sober from at least some foods and swearing off sugar and counting days on this like an alcoholic. I want to believe (despite that horrible so-called therapists told me later that this was neurotic or "restricting" behavior) that this was a very positive and healthy process. I felt really well -- though nervous at the unfamiliarity of the calm feeling... going through a sort of withdrawal or reaction, I guess. And it was a shared process. I would report to my mom, "I had no sugar again all day today," and she would be like, "Good!" and I remember this as a good, though nervous, unfamiliar feeling.
OK, fast forward. Well, around 9 yrs. old first. Here I started to get my first healthy instincts to fast. I want to believe they were healthy. I was in the junk food again - the food that triggers overeating. I could not stay on the no-sugar program. I felt unwell. I was aware that I was fat -- not very fat, just a bit fatter than I wanted to be. I instinctively decided: I will diet (fasting would not have occurred to me). I am NOT frightened by having been visited by this instinct. I am NOT frightened that I had the diet instinct as a child. I do NOT wish to believe as some do (in what I want to call a VERY food-addicted and neurotic current culture) that it is horrifying that a child should want to diet or fast. Oh. I forgot. When I was about 4 I narrated a book to my mother. The story concerned a dog who "ate so many dog biscuits he wasn't hungry for dinner.... he didn'T eat for one day... for two days.. and on the third day he was the thinnest of all..." and then I forget the conclusion... but this is the story of a binge eater healing through fasting, I want to believe... Anyway.
... I think I ought to take up this history again tomorrow. Well -- maybe I will see how far I get. OK. Age 9. I am fat and toxic. I say to my dad: "Dad? I'm going to go on a diet." Dad's Reaction: semi-raucous, semi-incredulous, semi-pitying/horrified laughter. His message: Oh, what a terrible thing, that you should Think You Were Fat!!! That you should Think You Needed a Diet! Oh, oh, oh!!! Oh, oh, Oh!!! Isn't it terrible the Media These Days and Women Thinking They are Fat and oh, oh, oh!!! ..... I want to believe that this was NOT what I needed to hear... that this was a DESTRUCTIVE response... and that those notions that the media is manipulative to women or that its images of thin women are "unhealthy" are actually FALSE notions. Based on my recent research into thinness, which indicates it is safe and not the "dangerous" state western medicine holds it (without substantiation) to be, I feel the criticisms of the media have no real basis. I feel the criticisms of the media, and the negativity about thinness or about the desire to be thin are NOT genuine criticisms -- that they DON'T come from a genuine place... but rather these criticisms and this negativity about thinness are the product of a food-addicted society resisting its OWN impulses to heal itself and get thin again (impulses it expresses through the media, ... expressing its ideals this way... its ideals of detoxification and slimness... But let's look at exactly what my dad was saying to me. One . He was implying that my perception about myself -- that i was fat-- was not valid. He was implying that a consciousness that came to me from my body-mind was somehow to be negated and dismissed as Untrue. .... i disagree.
.... I need to break, however, to take therapy now and to say I need to focus jsut on the present and just on fasting...
... I need to blog mor later. I am so naked and vulnerable, please do not respond to this post,
Trying just to fast through the night tonight, maybe make it to DAy 4,
Lauray
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