Day One of my Fast! Anyone from yesterday's posters on this forum up for a Group Fast?

yay!!! I really feel I am going to succeed at this fast. Everything fine. Going to post here about the fast as often as necessary.

I noticed some people yesterday posting that they were all about to start a fast. Is anyone still using this forum for support? Maybe I will write to y'all on the emails you publish...

I may stay in today and may go out. I haven't decided what to do. First I will post here, then I need to sleep a little more. I know from experience my detox "weakness" symptoms will be intense from about hour 40 to hour 48, and I haven't hit that time yet. At that time my skin will start to seem to give off heat -- I'll feel hot, as though I were having what I imagine a menopausal hot flash to be -- and i will feel an inability to move. It is actually difficult to explain the "first stage fasting detox" feeling. Tired? Nauseous? Paralyzed? How to describe the just-can't-move feeling... the feeling that I CAN'T move, and I do not even THINK about moving. What if I were FORCED to move? What would happen? How would I feel? I don't know. When this feeling comes, I will comfort and entertain myself by trying to describe it exactly. It is interesting to try to do so.

One thing I also know is that the more you stay immobile/resting during a fast, the sicker you feel, sometimes. I think this mostly happens when people are more toxic, but in any case, to me the explanation is that when you ... I guess... start off a day with a significant period of staying still after waking, as opposed to undertaking activity, your body enters a healing mode and creates feelings of weakness somehow so as to persuade you to keep on remaining still so it can do detox work... I do intend to stay still and rest during this fast. It also intuitively appeals to me to work out a bit when I feel good (assuming I ever feel good during this fast, hahaha!!). It feels like that helps "toxins" move out, whatever that means. It gets circulation going, so maybe it has to do with that. It does intuitively appeal to me to do whatever I can to help my body get detoxed. Actively. As in, salt baths, skin brushing, cold water baths, ocean swimming, enemas, colonics... those are expensive, but I am thinking of rewarding myself with a colonic after I make it to day 3 of this fast. I even want to try the saltwater flush. I'm so scared of that but I do want to try it. I know there used to be on Curezone somewhere a set of instructions for learning gradually to do the saltwater flush if you are afraid of it. But I'm not sure, because I'm loath to do anything that might really scare me into my troublesome "breaking-the-fast-out-of-fear" mode, which has sadly ended many of my attempts at fasting. I'm excited to build confidence and familiarity around the fasting process and have my fears subside, and this fast is the first strong step I have been able to make toward serious fasting, and building this confidence, in a long time.

All this fasting work absolutely depends, I think, I guess, ???, on my serious commitment to the totally pure, light, raw diet. It feels like I really need to attach myself to a vision of staying for life on non-processed foods. I need to break away from the world of supermarket-based, hedonic eating. My reaction to supermarkets is not normal. i depend on them for an emotional fix, truly -- sadly. I see them as tempting palaces and feel weirdly "at home" in them -- comforted. ugh... I feel about supermarkets like most people feel about Las Vegas. ... Just an interesting side-note about my culture or my addiction. ...But as far as my diet is concerned, I feel like I need low calories low carbs low fat and low Sugar too. The diet I intuitively set for myself for maintenance of health and thriving best after the fast is fresh raw unprepared unpackaged fruit vegetables and (non-starchy, low-calorie-density) sprouts, the fruit and vegetables all of the lower-concentrated variety: 11 calories per ounce or less. So for instance peaches (9 cal./oz) and papaya (11 cal./oz) but not for instance higher-sugar higher-calorie-per-ounce fruit like apples or mangoes. Asian pears, at 12 calories per ounce, feel just that slight bit too sweet or starchy. That's how I decided to draw the line at 11 cal/oz. Sweet -- or fatty -- fruit is the real issue, and thus it is where my "food rules" are focused. Maybe anything that is too concentrated calorically in any way (but especially with fats, sugars, or starches) could be said to be a "processed" food -- "processed" and concentrated by nature itself, but for me, too processed! I like this way of looking at food; it clarifies things for me. Sweet/fatty fruits [avocado= fatty fruit example] are pretty much binge foods for me; so even when i was on raw foods only I was still suffering as long as high-calorie/high-sugar/high-fat fruit was in my diet. I could control it better than real binge foods, mechanically/chemically processed foods, but I still was in a lot of pain from it, always. I just could not get the vision or conviction or support to stop it. People have an irrational reverence for everything natural sometimes. Not every living creature eats everything in nature. Within the natural world you have to pick and choose and find your own way. Most animals and even pre-technological peoples have very specific diets.

Apparently in the first three days of fasting, there is accomplished the "purification of the blood," whatever that may mean. Anyway, for me this seems to intensify, as I say, starting around hour 40 of the fast; so I will be easily able to move about for a little while yet. ...I will do an enema today to make the detox less intense/easier. Ideally I guess I would not rely on enemas but I would like to give myself an easier, rewarding fasting experience so that fasting is something I get more practiced in and return to.

Emotionally, what is going on for me is intense, but I can feel my merely-incipient fast, and my intentions of fasting, already calming things down for me and making me more secure in my life-situation. What I'm dealing with is: I have anxiety/fear and guilt about my living situation. Someone has kindly given me a guesthouse to live in at no charge. it is in exchange for just being at home a fair amount when he is gone so his dogs are not alone. it is a pretty great situation. But it highly depends on the goodwill of the person giving this situation to me. And all my dysfunctionality/illness make it tough for me to maintain myself in people's good graces. Ideally this person's tenant would be someone in perfect health. But I have liver issues that give me fatigue. These are mostly what i am fasting in order to heal. It really is a perfect situation in which to fast. It's in a rural area, and it REQUIRES I be at home a lot... I even envision being open with my landlord about my fasting. And he mentioned he fasted too, once, to overcome a mysterious illness doctors could not help him with... he is basically gentle and , most important, unafraid, but he is also prickly, and basically emotionally unavailable, too, a sort of extreme codependent who is also rather functional (people just are not simple! :) )so I don't know what to fear or not fear. I am really scared right at this moment, to be honest. I am, even when relatively under control, as I have been for the past 3 months or so, an emotional/"hedonic" eater and this does make me basically like a drug addict. I'm prone to becoming ill (from overeating) inconveniently, when I am needed by others; and I'm emotionally unreliable (or unavailable: since I use food to suppress so much emotion); and I'm always basically concealing my means of emotional self-management (ingesting substances -- in my case food, but this is the same as a drug...)... so I live a concealed, dishonest life and I don't "share" with others very much. I'm not open with others. To be truly open, I'd have to tell them: "Well, today i plan to go self-manage by ingesting this and that food, and depending on the effects of that, I may be available for you and I may not." Obviously, I am fasting for a healing from this issue. Fasting being truly the only real solution to food addiction. ...I believe food addiction always has a bacterial basis or is caused by parasites... to me, it stands to reason that only fasting can kill these organisms satisfactorily. Antibiotics just cause the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of whatever is infesting you; and gradual diets just feel like they torturingly prolong the infestation, never really eradicating it. I'm intuitively very impatient and frustrated by the idea of a long-term supposedly therapeutic diet in the absence of really committed fasting. It feels to me like that would have the same effect as Antibiotics : it would foster populations of infesting organisms capable of living on whatever nutrition you provided them with. It seems to me, as long as you are not fasting, and actually starving them, killing them off, you are prolonging the problem. I read that the intestinal system is sterile at the conclusion of a long fast, meaning containing no bacteria, and it's no surprise to me this coincides with a condition of mental health (the gut-brain connection being such a strong thing).... and general health too of course.

You could even reach a point of danger, if you didn't fast soon enough in the process of a general microbial or parasitic infestation; where WHATEVER food you ate, the harmful organisms living in you could manage to flourish on it. Then no food would be safe , and you'd really be in trouble. You'd have to become breatharian. I think for this reason people should be encouraged a lot to fast, in life. Soon, right away, for as long as possible!

In all this I go by my own albeit limited fasting experience and the experience of one Jennifer Thompson, a fasting expert who took her first 40-day fast in response to discovering she had Ascaris roundworms infesting her large intestine. During her fast she did enemas daily. On day 8 of her fast, worms started coming out of her, in her enemas, and the worms kept on coming out of her in the enemas for a long time. It was for this reason she extended her fast to 40 days. She concluded after the fast that the worm infestation was causing her food cravings since these stopped after the fast. She especially didn't crave Sugar any more. It's comforting to think that one's cravings are not from one's body but from an invasive parasite. A craving always feels like a violation and it is comforting to have this validated.

I think everyone experiences a diminishment of food cravings following fasting, and this is what I am all about. This is what I want to achieve. I want to break myself of the habit of using food as an emotional fix. I feel like this behavior is somehow bacterially driven.

As things stand, especially for the past 3 years, when I have repeatedly relapsed into eating processed foods instead of staying with raw food only as i did for quite a long time, (though now, concurrent with my coming back to this forum, i am committed to raw only again, and in a better way, seeking to eat smaller quantities and less fructose and fat) I am coming from having had real trouble and poor health in life, and even having vague "character issues." I've never done anything really wrong or illegal but I'm not comfortable with myself... especially the past 3 years, in my condition of food addiction, people get the general impression of secretiveness and untrustworthiness from me. (It goes along with a general lack of fulfillment and a feeling of living without integrity in some way.) So much so that in my immediate past living situation it all led up to a really humiliating trauma. The people I was living with were so mistrustful that they convinced themselves (totally falsely) that I was actually cooking drugs in my room. They actually banged on the door one morning and more or less threw my belongings in the street. This was march 1st, a few weeks ago, in new York City ... How could I explain to them that, yes, I had a serious addiction, so they were right to feel that "vibe" from me, but my addiction was to artificially-sweetened ice cream? How ill I did get from it. How I did hurt my liver. How I did have similar symptoms to a drug addict. Just being tired, and looking slightly ill. And food ruined my life the way drugs ruin a person's life. It's a pretty strong indictment of processed food, and even food generally. ...But I do not want it to be an indictment of me generally or personally. yes, I was isolated. yes, I had trouble adjusting. But I am a worthy person who was trying her best without any resources or help and also didn't deserve to be treated that way. It'a a trauma that is recent and has stayed with me so I have to process it here a bit.


So I feel I need to sleep now and take it easy. Maybe I'll try to get in touch with others and cross-post this on the Fasting for Spirituality Forum or other forums.