My life had just recently experienced a seismic shift of such enormous proportions that my emotional state could not process it properly. My mind was reeling and I did not yet properly appreciate the changes that were headed my way. My wife had left me in a very sudden and shocking way. We were divorced and she was already in another relationship and I still was stuck right in the middle of our old relationship. I was dumbfounded. I had seen it coming for quite some time, and yet like all the people before me in similar positions, I ignored the gigantic grotesque misshapen statue of that mutant elephant in the room. I managed to look around it and never right straight at it. I allowed myself to be blinded by my own unwillingness to take a closer look at just how bad things had become.
I was knocked back on my heels and presented with only two possible life choices to make.
One choice would lead me down a dark and ugly path; a path without light, without hope and ultimately, one that would lead to my demise.
My other choice would take me on a journey down a path of light, of hope, of change and of renewal and rebirth. I chose the latter.
The implosion of my old life killed the man that I that I used to be. Unfortunately, it was not a quick and painless death. Instead, it was long, drawn out and excruciatingly vivid. It was like being awake with no anesthesia during a major operation and not being able to stop it from happening. I was watching my old life literally come apart at the seams. It was as if nothing that was made over the last 15 years of my life had any substance. The bond that held everything I held dear together quickly crumbled before my eyes in less time than I could have imagined possible. Were all my efforts of the past so utterly worthless that everything I had built could crumble away to nothing in less than a month? Evidently so!
So shocked was I at the rapid collapse of my farce of a life that I forgot to eat food. A day went by and I was still not hungry. I kept drinking water and taking my supplements, but I did not have any desire to eat food. By the third day, I was wondering when hunger would come. I still struggled to try and put back the thousands of tiny pieces of my life that lay scattered around me like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but to no avail. That life was gone and no amount of effort, begging or even praying would restore that old life.
Several days later, I was still not hungry. But I did have a new understanding of what I was doing. I was fasting. At this point, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I had heard about fasting before. Gandhi fasted when the British wouldn’t leave India, and some IRA prisoners fasted in Northern Ireland for some reason that I never paid attention to. But for some reason, the act of fasting was always revered as something extreme and something to be admired.
I was fasting and so I began to record. I know I started at about 245lbs. I was fat. I was heavy and I was in very poor health. By the third day, I had lost a lot of weight. I was around 230lbs. I had lost 5lbs a day in a three and a half day period. I was impressed and I still was not hungry.
So what was fasting? How was I still not hungry seven days into this fast? My mother was convinced it was adrenaline. I looked up fasting and tried to explain why I was not hungry. I looked for answers everywhere and came up blank. Not only was I not hungry, but I wasn’t tired, I had plenty of energy and I still went to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and had more energy than all of my coworkers. What was happening to me? Seven days into the fast and I had lost another eight pounds. People worried that I was losing weight too fast or that I was jeopardizing my health, but I felt absolutely great and full of energy. I now knew that the supplements I was taking were the real deal. They not only seemed effortless to digest while not eating food, but with a little help from a natural laxative tea called Senna, their minute amount of matter passed through my bowels one time during my entire 24 day water fast.
By the 14th day, I was becoming well versed in the art and the science of fasting and was really starting to see the difference in my fat loss. All the authorities on the subject could only give their opinions on why I had not experienced any hunger the entire time. I thought that maybe my mother was right and that the extreme nature of my divorce and my emotional state after had kept me from feeling any hunger. I knew that I would need to test that… but not while I was in the middle of my fast.
I called a Naturopathic doctor to set up an appointment by day 19 or 20 because I was a little worried about my health in spite of how good and energetic I felt. Everything I read about fasting told me I should not have all this energy, and that I should be taking naps in the day and quickly running out of what little energy I had. But that was just not the case. I was so full of energy that most people would not have believed I was not eating food if it were not for the fact that I was losing so much weight.
Finally, at the end of day 24, the beginning of day 25, I felt the sensation of true hunger. Something I had never experienced before, or at least something that I had never recognized as hunger before. It is a sensation like thirst, but one that cannot be satisfied by drinking liquid. I broke my water fast by juicing some carrots, apple, orange and tomatoes and watering them down to about a 25% juice, 75% water ratio. That very night, only mere hours after ingesting the first real calories I had ingested in 24 days, my bowels awoke with a lot of grumbling and me running to the toilet to evacuate them again and again. It was exhausting work waking up my digestive tract. This was the end of my water fast and the beginning of my juice fast.
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