By Mike Parker
For the last two days, I have been eating nothing and only drinking one protein shake as a meal. In addition, I limit the amount of tea, coffee, and cordial I drink to keep the calorie count for the day under 300 calories.
This is the second day of protein shakes and I'm starting to hallucinate. I can smell food even though I'm not hungry. However, I can't feel any need coming from my stomach. I find that I have an increase in energy, so I use it to workout and do the housework such as cleaning and ironing, which also acts to distract me from thinking about food. I'm afraid that I will start thinking about food and then give in. Along with the extra energy, I have been feeling light headed and kind of good from time to time in between the feeling of being fat.
In order to complete this fast, I have taken the week off. The weather is bad so I'm unable to go out and do a serious workout. As a result, I have been working out at home mainly on my legs. After a while, I will just not have the energy to do any kind of workout at all. I know this from previous experience; I have done this before.
Today, I have noticed that I feel a little angry and still have that feeling of hopelessness that has been hanging around for days now. I just don't feel that I can function correctly as a person until I have lost the weight I have gained from over eating the few days prior to starting the fast. When I feel fat, I can think about nothing else to the point that it takes over my mind. Every thing becomes about losing the weight or just thinking about the fat on my body.
Tomorrow, I will see how I feel about continuing for a third day. I have vegetables in the fridge that will go off if I'm not careful and that will just serve to make me angry at myself. My fear about eating is that it might turn into a larger amount of food than I planned to eat; thus, ruining my progress from the past few days. I'm also concerned about muscle loss. I know that most of the weight I will lose will be water weight, so that is another reason for fasting again tomorrow. However, I read in a book on fasting that I can avoid losing muscle and still lose weight by fasting just two days a week. This seems appealing to me. Nonetheless, I will still not want to eat too much tomorrow.