Three-day fasting (Mid April)
Once every three month I do a three-day fasting.
This Thursday (April 15) midday I will start my second three-day fasting.
The rules are more strict this time. Usually, I would allow myself a coffee or tea to drink, but lately, I'm drinking too much coffee, so no coffee this time. No tea this time either. The only thing that is allowed is water with lemon. I'm also thinking about vitamins. Last time I took Magnesium citrate, vitamin D3, and zinc. This time I will probably pass on that too.
Everything else stays the same, my routine shouldn't change in any way. Friday is still a working day, so I'm going to work. Besides that, I will get up at 5 am, as usual, do the leetcode, do the opensource, do the coursera routine, write this blog, exercises and finally learn a bit of rust.
That's the plan. I will also update this entry on how I feel each day. Last time I felt a huge spike of energy during the day 2 and 3, so maybe I will be able to achieve even more on that days.
Day 1
I've decided to actually start it on Wednesday. So right now it's 8am in the Thursday and last time I ate at 2 pm Wednesday. That's already makes it for the fasting window, but it's not even 24 hours, so I feel the same as usual. This morning I haven't had a coffee and that's the only difference. I feel a little bit of sleepy when watching coursera lectures because of this, but it's bearable. Moving on.
Day 2
Right now it's 7 AM on a Friday. It's been 41 hours of fasting already. That's nice. So far I've only had water, even without lemon juice. I plan to stick with it, but if it's going to be too hard, I'll drink some water with lemon juice. So far, I'm not really hungry except for the part when I used to eat, so around 1 PM I usually feel a little bit hungry. Also, my mind is playing some jokes on me, like sometimes I would start thinking of pancakes and other sugary stuff which I haven't really eaten in a month now. Eating is a lot like a habit or you can also say that experiencing hunger is a habit or a concept. You are not really hungry if you don't eat for 24 hours, that's natural.
Since this is my second-time three-day fast, I already know some tricks. For example, you have to exercise twice as harder as usual, because going to bed is really hard with all of that energy flowing in you. Although I was able to fall asleep really quickly (I had to walk 15 km for that and do a much more extreme workout with kettlebells than I usually do), I still woke up at 3:30 and my mind was absolutely clear. It was hard to fall asleep after that, but I managed to get some sleep until 5 AM. I'll keep you updated.
Day 3
I have mixed feelings about this fasting. Somehow it feels harder than the previous time. Maybe it's because I just drink water and don't do any supplements or coffee. Or maybe it's because I put myself through more training than the previous time. For example, yesterday yoga felt really hard. It almost feels like I'm at my limit of self-control and pursuing other activities seems hard. This could also be negative self-talk. But I do feel more tired. Right now it's 10 AM on Saturday and I have less than 4 hours left. I will do a summary tomorrow.
I broke my fast with an unflavored protein shake with a small piece of dark chocolate, then in few hours, I ate some stakes.
Summary
I feel like drinking coffee and some other stuff is kinda cheating, so I felt more accomplishment when I finished the fasting just drinking water. I was definitely a little bit more angry and aggressive during the day. The challenge itself wasn't extremely hard, but I also wouldn't say that it was easy. Overall I think that's a good thing to do once in a few months to clean your organism. One question that I still think about is that should be done over weekends or weekdays. Last time I started Thursday, so it mostly falls over weekends, this time I broke my fast on Saturday. On Friday I wasn't as productive as usual. I felt tired and probably it's because I exercised too much on the previous day, but part of the reason is fasting too I think. The last thing to note is that when fasting was almost finished I haven't felt that much of a hunger. That leads me to a thought that probably I wasn't that hungry any time, but thinking about food and about the time that left until the end made me hungry during fasting. So probably should think less about food and about the time left during the fasting.