Read through a lot of inspirational success stories in the Water Fasting forum. After 3 hours of learning from this forum, something crossed my mind, and it's the difference between all the successful fasts in the past versus the unsuccessful ones. I suddenly remember and realize that during those times I was successful, I treated fasting, its symptoms, and the food addiction cravings as normal, like they were supposed to happen and should happen. I just rode each craving and detox symptom out like a wave. Each hesitation was totally valid, normal, and ok. Each sensation that came by I totally accepted it, and it was OK and normal. There was this feeling of inner peace and contentment with all that passed. Now let's look at all the unsuccessful fasting attempts. With these, I had feelings about the symptoms, cravings, and hesitations. I was more paranoid and acted surprised and raised high alarms internally at every hesitation, every wavering back and forth between wanting to eat and not eat, every craving. I felt really theatrical and had high drama inside in response to the cravings, the symptoms, the hesitations, and to food on the unsuccessful attempts. There was this anxiety. Almost like a snooty, reactive girl that crinkles her nose, twists her mouth, and says eww and become easily disgusted or dramatized, or another day, another drama, another crisis. No matter which fast I was on, the 14 day juice fast, 8 day water fast, or 22-day fast with first 4 days being water, or any other scores of smaller fasts I've done, this is the experience summarized. The more I reacted immediately internally to the craving or hesitation and being afraid of them, the more the fear mounted until I had a big reaction of eating. But the more I was content with thoughts and images of food and with the cravings and hesitations and not think them weird but totally rode them and thought of them as normal (aka accepted them), I would have large success in the journey. I know that food is on my mind at times, but I think 99.9% of these thoughts are actually not about the actual food, but about who I was as part of my identity. Ever since these fasts, I live a clean eating lifestyle with no added sugar, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives , or food coloring . No flour food either. Lately, have had a tiny bit of chips and such, so an extended fast again would be awesome to reset the system. I was amazed at the 10-month fast done by Stephen on a video shared in success stories. The benefits are amazing. It really inspired me and opened up my mind. Now all the rest of the fasts seem like small feats compared to 10-month mostly fasting.