writing for fasting support (cross-post)

Hey, Forum,
I have just been reading a site about emotional eating entitled shrinkyourself.com. While I feel this neglects the physiology of the matter and thus opens you to self-blame, I really know I am a so-called emotional eater. I cannot really be helped by this information alone, though emotional eating is (of course) the source of my failures to fast long enough to heal... my emotional eating is .... I guess something I need to share about here. I mean, it is totally overwhelming, and there IS no alternative when I get compulsed to eat.

... Maybe I should say I have not yet discovered and become established in the way to stop the compulsion to break a fast or just eat when I do not wish to eat. ... I have posted before that I have come to some conclusions about what I need in order to become able to fast at the length that I want to.

These things are: meditation daily, silent. Sharing, daily, completely revealing what I am thinking, feeling, and doing. Placing fasting uppermost in my life. (boring but necessary). DOING AFFIRMATIONS AND VISUALIZATIONS that I do with my self-help book of choice, the cheesy but effective Robert Handley's PANIC AND ANXIETY ATTACKS --THEIR CAUSE AND CURE. FOOD SOBRIETY. This equals having green (-colored), living food only, not bloating myself, having a maximum of 600 calories at any one sitting, and waiting 2 hours to process every 100 calories I eat before eating again. Also, as a part of food sobriety, tending my sprouting operation daily. ... I think these are the things that if I practice them daily will really bring me to the point of really fasting as I want to.

Today I have been through an experience of being compulsed to break my fast. It is really sensitive to wrie about. AS I write I am resolved and secure in my decision to fast. But I was really fragile.
It seems like an act of humility to keep the fast. It seems like the binge is a kind of dwelling in grandiosity, while keeping the fast is a rough and humbling experience. Keeping the fast seems to say that, well, the fast is not going to make me perfect, but I am doing it anyway... something like that... I cannot grasp it right now...
I feel very, very vulnerable discussing the passing of a compulsion, because my compulsions really do not pass easily, and because I am frightened the compulsion will return. But no. I only have to wait until 9 amtomorrow. Easy! I AM GOING TO DO IT; I AM GOING TO DO IT;I AM DOING IT,I AM DOING IT,I AM DOING IT!!!!!!!!!!! I CAN stand it!!!!!!!!! ..... I have got to get something for myself to do or read tonight... I am at a library.... I wonder if they have any English-language books... I think with the library card I got today I might be able to check books out.... waht am I going to do? A movie os too expensive. i have no TV. I cannot figure out if this is good or bad. I really cannot. I have radio and I can get both NPR nd the BBC. But I did that last night and I do that every night.
I could go to the newsstand. But I want to sit down. I do not want to go to the newsstand, besides.
I could get involved here and now and write to a New York Times columnist and I could also make a schedule for myself so that I will start again writing my fiction daily. I started in a sort of regime but... anyway I need a feaasible one... I think I have trouble making REALISTIC schedules for myself. I was going to publish here in this forum my proposed daily schedule for myself. I will do this. It is a schedule for school time. I suspect it is too busy. I do not know myself. This is the problem that stands in the way of my fasting as well, that I am terrified to know myself and thus cannot really work with myself. Posting like this lets me know myself; maybe meditation helps that more... posting lets me receive the support I need to succeed...

The doubts are coming in now about the "rightness" of my fasting...I received a particularly toxic post a little while back that was from this invasive, violating person that basically told me -- never having met me, and having once read a single one fo my posts -- the one to which it responded -- that in its opinion I Should Not Fast.... this is SUCH %¤#&!§-and I am SO TIRED OF HEARING CRAP LIKE THIS and I have been wanting to go into the whole thing and assert myself in this way but it is a lot and I am very vulnerable in putting it out there and I need to feel strong maybe before making my manifesto though all this is really jsut an excuse....... I just feel overwhelmed and not really on my feet yet with the business of posting daily like I am trying to do... as I make these posts I just feel sort of disengaged and I am not really doing evenwhat I need to do, which is, post from exactly where I am at. I always have found that truly asserting myself banished the eating compulsion.... I feel fragile saying this .. like I am trying to force something down my own throat.. it is just so hard for meto believe that it is actually possible to oppose the compulsion to eat, and actually be food sober or keep a fast. This is so hard for me to believe. Soemthing in me is very negative. i really want to heal this and I think affirmations and visualiyations heal this and so I have got to get back to really doing this concentrated positive thinking maybe is what it is and I have got to keep a daily regime for myself... the only thing I am really missing is my daily practice of my artwork, really.. this has got to go forward.. i have to do my sitting meditation too... though this is tough... it sounds odd, but in my tense and strenuous (but succesful now and so rewarding) battle to maintain my food sobriety, I find I move physically roughly, repressing my emotions somewhat by hurrying, rushing, and being very rough with my body... I particularly suffer in my knees... so sitting is nasty.. maybe I can sit in a chair... but I have the idea that sitting meditation works best ON THE GROUND... that you need to have the sensation of having "somewhere to stand." Archimedes? :"Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth," i.e., I will move my bowels properly, perhaps; and not be trapped in toxicity and food addiction.


I went through this compulsion and resolution of compulsion today, though..... It is hard to believe that anything could take the place of food, that anything could be satisfying. But I believe other things can. I believe that a physiological process can take place when I do something INSTEAD of eating, that is similar to but less harmful than, what happens when I eat. I want to affirm this. I want to say, yes, it is true. A fast of course would heal and clean me and spare me this daily agony but I have got to learn how to fast first.

I am recommitted to my 30 hour fast. I am afraid I should not have written that. I am very fragile. But OK it is worth it and I don't even have to wait that long to accomplish it -- so I am going to do it. Again I am just pushing and driving myself and not really saying what I really feel. I got up today and thought I really would postpone this fast. Well, I had to wait until 2 45 pm to eat and I am committed to that (by the way, I am feeling very very great on this lan of waiting 2 hours to process every 100 cals I eat so after a 600 cal meal I wait 12 hours ...)... so then it got to be 2 45 and I was in a therapy session (see below) and as horrible and abusive as this session was... or I should really say, rather, that it was neglectful, that my therapist neglects me, essentially... as bad as the session was, I asserted myself at the end in some sense by making a check-in speech to the therapist, saying where I was with the progress in fasting. I said, which was the case, that I was in a total misery at that moment; that I was just dealing with the compulsive need to eat even though my (very toxic, diseased) system was totally unable to tolerate food and even though I had sort of committed to this 30 hour fast... I thought: OK, I was really pushing and driving myself to fast again right away... It has been taking so much willpower (AND WORTH EVERY OUNCE OF IT FOR THE REWARDS) to stay on this program I have of waiting 2 hours per 100 calories that I am jut tired and I can't be strong all over again and do the fast... but now I AM DOING IT ; I AM DOING IT;I AM DOING IT!!!!!!

I am fasting for lengths of time that increase by 6 hours per time. My next fast will be 36 hours but I have learned my lesson now and will not put myself through the stress of announcing the fast to the forum and then waking up and not feeling able to do it... I will first get good and ready and then fast but this CANNOT be an excuse to delay... I think I will set a date privately to myself now and announce it shortly, after I really think I can do it.


I just have to face such profound misery when I fast... the emotional eating is over such pain... but I know it is not that bad because I have gotten through it before.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY I KNOW YOU CAN GET USED TO ANYTHING SO EASILY -- I got used to abstaining from Sugar etc. so easily, or at leaset much more easily than I thought I could -- AND

Looking back 11-12 years to the time I got off junk food and onto a food plan and lost the weight, which I have kept off, I am reminded that I struggled and strained for a really long time alone and then finally achieved my goal of weight loss and a certain degree of food sobriety with GROUP SUPPORT... this is powerful and I think it is the key to my success in fasting... i hope these on line groups are enough. I want to post this post to about 20 groups....


It did not help that I had a very humiliating and ridiculous session on the phone today with my therapist, who is insane. I am overstating my own case and emphasizing my side of the story and .... but I am just so furious... first she says tuesdays are at 1 30 pm but CAN BE at 2 30 presumably if I say the word about changing them... I say nothing about changing them and assume they will stay at 1 30 pm... she independently changes the session time without telling me or bothering to communicate at all.... I just see her as this rich spoiled infant living in her nice house in her so-expensive suburb protected by her husbands job and her blueblood background and totally indulging every infantile rage she has by abusing ME. ... I call and call and call, 4 times, during the 1 30 to 2 20 session; I email... she refuses to pick up her office phone (later making the excuse she did not hear it).... no response..... the real point is that the session was something she simply succeeded in turning into a circus, in which I was utterly overwhelmed; I tried to get out my anger about the changing of the session and my huge waste of money on the phone, and she basically brushed that under the rug while in doing so, asaulting me in a dozen supplementary ways that basically paralyzed me with rage, and not allowing me even to IDENTIFY or HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED why I was mad in the first place.... classic thing that happens is that I iwll say to her, I cannot handle ths or that way of your speaking to me and just as the words are out of my mouth she is slamming down into me with exactly the kind of speech that I have just asked her not to commit... she seems to dance around getting sadistic pleasure this way... I feel really really humiliated and I end up saying things that overstate my case and I cannot be at all vulnerable... I end up swearing and I end up being sarcastic because I have no other way out of my rage... she kept up this little dance of sadistically, repeatedly snapping back with the very things I had just said I could not handle, for 39 minutes of a 50 minute session, then, when it was over abruptly hung up, despite that in the past she has never been abrupt but stayed on with me for the FEW minutes it would take me SOMETIMES to deal with my separation anxiety or difficulty ending........................ she has taken to abruptly hanging up ... with no explanation of her little change in policy.

I do have hope in that before when I have really talked and insisted on certain things that are important to me she has relented... though it is discouraging that she relents seemingly in order not to have to deal with me any more... is this beter than nothing? In my experience any therapy is a lot better than none at all, especially daily therapy which is what I have, 6 days per week... though she is such a scary individual

Enough about her, I think. I really need to write about where I am at right now. I feel vulnerable. I have been posting to this forum for a little while but without really coming out about some things that are really basic and that I need to assert. I do not know if today is the day for this.

I guess I could say that I am in the library now and it is the next-to-last week of my time in Europe and tonight my plan is to leave here at 9 pm, which is when it closes, and then go.... I don't know.... I am fasting until 9 am tomorrow. I can envision doing this. It is pretty easy. But I need to write about the evening and the ride home since these are just large and scary. And the night in bed during which I -- not scarily, but perhaps a bit destructively for the next day, -- I may sit there and lie awake just waiting to eat in the morning. ... It is hard. ... I am scared, since I have a really hard evening. ... Nothing is really open at night. No Starbucks. No bookstores. I have many tasks to complete at home, not the least of which simply packing to leave; but
..... I am returning to this point in the post after finishing up threads of unfinished thoughts above...

I am oK, committed to my fast, but also dreading the empty lonely boring evening.. it is really hard having nothing to read.... in a foreign country it is like this... it is eastern europe too which means there is no vibrant commercialism cheering everything up and enlivening everything and everything is closed all the tiem and I have a poor attitude which makes me simply not discover things to do or places to go very often but...

.. I guess I could go to KaDeWe, the famous dept store, (I am in Berlin), as nighttime entertainment ... but it probably closes at 2 30 in the afternoon... not really but i am staying on line here at the library until 9 pm... its probable closing time... then theres the stress of making an extra train journey, made more so by the fact I cannot afford to and do not pay... I watch for ticket inspectors...

... People used to hate mny guts in high school because I was tense and full of forced good cheer. I have since become much more sensitive to my effect on others and rather more depressed (but with recovery through fasting, food sobriety, and therapy) but I am very present to thsi memory now of people just totally rejecting me and it is painful. It gives me a poor self image. I have such trouble even now making any connection with anyone. I basically live on this pathological connection to compulsive overeating. Modified and controlled and worked on through fasting but still....

... i experienced relief from my lack of connection 2 times when I lived in Calif., as the result of fasting.. once at the 3d day of a fast I suddenly was relieved of all my unwillingness to work hard and be fair to others and suddenly I was safe, relaxed, financially secure, and free... until the next time I ate. If only I had continued that particular fast, jsut think of what a wonderful change there might have been in my life!!! ... I have never had that thought before and it is inspiring.


so i have not made my big manifesto or figured out what to do with my evening so I will just post again later because these things are important but I just want to stop posting now I am committed to my fast and I know i will do it .... I want to post more conscientiously and so I will do so in a bit, thanks for reading,
Love,
Lauray Tweet