Extended fasts and updates!

I'm currently on hour 59 of a 72 hour fast. I can either eat today at 5 pm or I can choose to keep going for another 24 hours or so. It's a hard decision. There's so many factors at play. I have food in the fridge that needs to be cooked before it goes bad. This excuse is common for me because I buy food and then decide to go on an extended fast. I have to change that because it's becoming something that I rationalize every time I want to do a long fast. I have hamburger and pork loin. I have lots of rice to go with it. I have the best chicken salad in the world in the refrigerator.

All the food aside, there's good reasons to keep going with my fast as well. I'm currently at the lowest weight I've been in about 18 months. After my divorce finalized in January of 2018, I lost a lot of weight due to depression. I was down to 213 at one point last year. Then, after I worked through that, I quit smoking and gained about 45 pounds. I was up to 257 when I started changing my eating habits in May 2019. That was four months ago. I'm currently at 215. I've lost over 40 pounds over the last four months by using low carb and intermittent fasting. The IF is where most of my time has been spent.

Most of my intermittent fasting has been in the form of 20:4 fasting, which is twenty hours of fasting followed by a four hour eating window. That works great for me to lose about a pound per week, which doesn't sound like much, but it will add up over time. I sprinkle in the occasional extended fast. That is when I really push my weight down to new levels. So basically, I use 20:4 or 18:6 to maintain my current level and then I use a 30+ hour fast to push my weight down a bit more at a time.

This works out great for me because I get to see the results pretty quickly and then step back for a bit to gear up for the next long fast. Long fasts are difficult mentally. It's hard to convince yourself or have the will power to not eat for so long when food is right there ready to eat. In evolutionary terms, our bodies are build to find food. For thousands of years that was what we spent most of our time doing. We looked for food and ate when we were lucky enough to find it. In our modern society, we have a ready available store open 24/7 which we can buy whatever we want to eat. It's a huge convenience, but it's completely against everything evolution has programmed into us.

That's why fasting is something I can totally get behind. It's our natural way of living. It's not natural for us to have food available 24/7 packaged up nice and neat the way that it is. It's not natural and that's why modern society is filled with obese people. It's great to live like kings, but it's killing us.