lauray's ten-day fast -- at last!!!

Hi,
I am grumpy as I write this and feel unready to post and have been putting off posting all day, but it is true -- I am going on a ten-day fast!!!! From yesterday, July 22, Sunday, until August 1st!!!!! Oh my God. OK.

I have ten days left in Europe and I want to fast through them and make a really positive transition to my life in the States. I am not feeling really positive about this life that I will have. I am feeling like I really don't know where to go -- that there is nothing anywhere for me and I do not know what to do. I think fasting will help me discover desires and hope.

So, I have now completed 25 HOURS!!!!!!! This means less than nine more days left to fast!!! I CAN DO IT!!!!!!

I spent yesterday dealing deeply with my fears about fasting. i wrote a long letter, really a major work of self-introduction and a sort of life story, toa person who I think might be able to help and support me in my fasting. I have not heard from him today but said in my letter I might blog my fast to his web e-mail for the ten days of the fast and so I will do that before I go home tonight. So, the fears: ****PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS PART OF MY POST****...I have a fear that my body will enter a crazed out of control healing mode and cause me to refuse food for so long that I die. I am afraid of the skeletal state I may in future fasts have to reach to attain healing... I am afraid even to talk about reaching this state, for fear of shaming panicky ignorant responses I may get from readers of this post ... Please, to all who read, please do NOT RESPOND TO THIS PART OF MY POST... it is sometimes very damaging to me to receive certain kinds of responses, and always far, far better for me to experience acceptance rather than response, and make my own mistakes and use the forum to reflect and hear what i myself am thinking and work things out for myself.

So, though I know as of recently from my research and reading that this state -- the skeletal condition which has such a hold over my fearful imagination -- is safe. That being thin, becoming thin via fasting, is not to be feared in itself. I very much fear thinness, perhaps because I fear the rejection of others, who ignorantly disapprove. How hard the life of someone who must fast is made by the stupid assaults of food addicted ignorant vicious idiots who just throw their power and weight around and intimidate people instead of listening to them and trying to be positive and not negative about others and what those others are doing.

So, I am frightened now since I am afraid of not seeming positive. But, so... I will talk about my physical experience... I slept, very unexpectedly, and very unusually for me, 12 hours last night but have nothing -- not even much hunger -- today to report. I have periodically fantasized about food during the day. I wanted to control my thoughts in this direction as well but am just letting myself fantasize.

It is about 7:45 pm and I have spent the day reading about long-term fasts, again to deal with my fears and prepare myself... I plan to take an enema maybe tonight but probably tomorrow morning to lightenthe detox symptoms that so scare me when they occur. I get the symptoms usually starting at about 40 hours into a fast. OH, goody, ten days!! I am totally sincere in writing that -- I am not beign sarcastic. I can hardly wait for the benefits. Freedom from Depression and anxiety and lethargy and brain fog and the poor kinesthetic balance I have suffered from for years... I know from personal experience fasting cures all these things... it gives me calm and the willingness to work in life and thus makes me free from the danger fo homelessness and able to support myself...

One scenario that I have been playing, and trying to work with, in my mind, is the scene of my arriving at my dad'S in ten days' time. My dad is remarried. I am 37 but due to food addiction have had homelessness issues ánd been unable to support myself. I am to some extent dependent on my dad financially... even emotionally, too, which is so dangerous... but anyway... I live on social security for disability, having gotten this for a generalized anxiety disorder/depression... though I never felt I was really disabled, it seemed the best course to take if I wanted to develop my artistic work... I thought if I had a little money and did not have to work so much I would become a functioning artist... which proved impossible as I became sicker due to food addiction... which doctors and hospitals and psychiatric treatment programs refused to recognize as the real source of the problem... My dad has held my dysfunctionality against me, as a moral failing, and followed a policy of trying to humiliate me to the extent that I will snap out of it somehow by the shock of the emotional beating he administers. I have remained in dependence on him despite his many humiliations of me, which began when I was 23 and quit my job trusting he would take me in and help me to get help, which he refused to do, physically chasing me out of the house... telling me on the Christmas of that year that I would be allowed inside his house for a timed period of 24 hours and NO LONGER... he actually enforced this, in the event... all this is also -- perhaps primarily -- in the name of fanatically preventing any disturbing influences at all from entering the consciousness of the Queen, his 2nd wife, who apparently intimated once a couple of decades ago that I was not among her absolute favorite people... with the result that I have been treated like a dog ever since... my father denying all along his own behavior (inviting me over and vanishing, leaving te house locked... not inviting me inside the house... all for what exact sin I am never allowed to be exactly certain...) .. i persist in trying to cultivate my dad, for the help he can give, and because I have been so unsuccessful seeking help elsewhere... but with the result that as of today, I am dreading horribly any interaction I have with him because there is this humiliation to be possibly endured of possibly not even being invited to step across the threshold of his house. i do not know if i can endure this humiliation.. OK, there is the background, and the point is the scenario I have been running about seeing him when I get back from Europe. It is significant because my car with all my belongings in it is stored at his house. (When I am with my dad it is like I can't even talk to him, because when he asks how are you, the proper answer, is, well, my fasting is going this way or that way, and my addictedness to food is this or that, and I have this or that anmount of brain fog today and my progress toward taking the long fasts I need to take to heal and get my life energy back is thus and so.... and if I were to say this to him he would react scornfully and abusively ... so I just am silent and I just seem to him like a vegatative lump of a person, a self-centered, stupid, non-thinking, non-working, uncultivated, vapid, sluggish waste of space, uninterested in others or in the world, dysfunctional, and bad).... so my car is stored at his house... so after I land at the airport the place for me to go is his house... so I will do this... so although I have arranged a (sight unseen but affordable) place to live for myself beginning August 1st, (I land in the States July 31), I really don't want to jump right from the airplane into a new situation... it is so stressful to start in a new home oh God... and what I need is for my dad to let me stay with him for like a week so I can just have a break before going to my new situation. As soon as i wrote that I started to feel guilty since it is really a lot to ask to be put up for a week. But ... so... I really want to be asked to stay for a week anyway... but my fear is... that i will arrive at his house and he will not even invite me inside... not even for the one night, July 31, on which I will not even have a place to sleep.... I think I have a reservation at the youth hostel, wait a minute just let me check... OK I have just emailed them... and started a response to a person who actually emailed me as a fasting buddy from this site! ... anyway, this is preoccupyingme... will I be rejected by my dad.... I believe that fasting is the way OUT! ... FAsting will drive out my sluggishness and my disconnection from others and from life and make me willing to work and support myself and it will raise me up out of this homelessness. It will make me the functional person I dream of being. My dad, unfortunately, is viciously unsupportive of fasting and of the idea that my food addiction, compulsive overeating, is the cause of my dysfunctionality in life. This does not matter since I never really though he would support my fasting -- it jsut adds stress to be unable to say what you really feel and think to a person upon whom you to some extent depend. it is a humiliation.
... So, i thought: suppose I were able to come before my dad having fasted 10 days, full of energy, and being truly independent! And not even WANTING to stay at his horrible house!!!! And maybe he would invite me to stay and i would even say No! Or, he would see my vitality and be interested in talking with me but I would be able to say, No, I am a compulsive overeater and you have never respected that fact or my fasting and been abusive to me about it.... so, no I do not need you any more... of course, as soon as the first word about holistic health came out of my mouth he would withdraw like a squid behind an ink-cloud of scorn for the supposedly "unscientific" nature and, to his mind, dishonest/self-indulgent and worst of all BORING qualities of all that whole culture, which has given me the tools to save my life.. I will need to explain how I achieved weight loss a doz.. or so yrs. ago and he resisted this and I remained a compulsive overeater tho maintained my loss... I jsut binged raw foods... now have to fast to stop the bingeing... no support... I am deemed "anorexic mindset" tho am certified by docs as healthy... no validation from dad.. he basically maintains i am deluded about food... horrible disrespect for my struggle... he and family decree my compulsive overeating to be all in my head... very devastating...
anyway more tomorrow and i am committed in various places now to keeping this fast 10 days,
Laura

i am taking this fast rather publicly and hope to

 

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