For novices, Hour 41

Hi, novice and perhaps nervous dry-fasters,

Just wanted you to know that I too am relatively new to dry-fasting of more than a day's length and I am on Hr 41 and am doing fine so far and there is nothing to fear. You can read more about my experience in the post I just posted on this forum a few minutes ago, if you are interested in what it is like at this point.

In case you are looking for guidelines, I will tell you what my plan is. I am looking at three things, mainly, in order to tell when it would not be safe to continue this dry fast. If I get alarmed, I will check my blood pressure and if that is different from usual by any great degree (either much higher or much lower) or if the monitor shows an irregular heartbeat (which would be most unusual for me, even when I feel I am going to die of a heart attack) or if my pulse rate were really hugely high, like 120 or more, I would stop the fast with some water and would switch to water fasting. If I get to the point where I do not urinate for eight hours, I would stop the DF (that would be a long time for me, because I generally urinate about twice an hour! but you might want to say in your own case "twelve hours" instead of eight, if you can usually go many hours without passing any urine). And I am checking my "skin test". This is to pinch some skin on the back of your forearm a little bit below the wrist area. Hold it firmly up in a "tent" and then let go and count how many seconds it takes to return to normal. I think you can expect that during a DF the time it takes to return to normal will lengthen somewhat from your usual time, but, speaking for myself, I would probably stop the DF when I could count three seconds. I think it is not yet two seconds, at this point in my DF. I suppose I could push it until five seconds, but I'd have to be feeling good with no other signs of trouble or of courting trouble, to consent to pushing my DF to the point that my skin test took five seconds.

So that's just what I'm thinking in terms of how to monitor myself and keep it from getting dangerous. Like many of us CureZoners, I have absolutely no desire to go to hospital or even get myself in such a state, physical or mental, that I consider going to a hosptial or am tempted to.

So far, then, everything seems okay and I have rather a lot of drooly saliva (that can't be a sign of perilous dehydration, surely?), but in DF-land, the distance between Hour 41 and Hour 72 must be very great indeed, and I have started to fantasize that I might try to go that long, 3 days. So that's a long time from now (in DF terms), but I just wanted, when I started this DF, to go for longer than I had ever gone before, and that I have done by quite a bit. The more you do DF and WF, the longer fasts you do, I guess the more you realize that the phobia put about by our culture and by so many on the Internet we are influenced by just does not fit the truth, and that the only way to find this is to be brave enough to go into your own terra incognita and find out about what it is and what it isn't _for you_. The downside of this is that, if you are like me, you will find that the hype and claims of cure and exciting change and miracle do not fit the truth, but the good thing is that the fear and scare tactics and bizarre panic propaganda don't, either, and these things, responsibly, cautiously, and knowledgeably done, are really not as scary or as much of a big deal as we have been told to think they are.
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