December 1st 2017

Changing My Fasting Pattern

As we start the month of December I have decided to switch gears and change my fasting pattern. For the past month and a half, I’ve been dry-fasting between three to four days a week. During that period the actual pattern helped me in being more productive, and I saw a considerable increase in my kidney filtration abilities. Before getting started with the new pattern I intend to do an intermittent fast today during the day, and eat plenty at night. Tomorrow Saturday, I am planning on eating and drinking plenty as well. On Sunday, I will start a 36 hour dry-fast until Monday afternoon.

Starting Monday I want to introduce the new fasting-pattern. A 100% juice fast. The idea is to only consume juice and coconut oil for x amount of consecutive days. I am planning on avoiding all solid food. I haven’t decided how long I am going to fast this way. As usual I expect my body to guide me. The idea is to give a break to my digestive system, and at the same time keep my body nourished and hydrated. This experience will also allow me to compare juice fasting versus dry-fasting. I consider myself by now being pretty experienced with dry-fasting, but my juice-fasting experience is quasi nonexistent. I may throw in some dry-fasting days within my juice-fast. It all depends how things are going to unfold the upcoming days.

I’ve been dry-fasting every Sunday since March 2017. I will keep dry-fasting on that day during the juice-fast as well. I have to admit that the Sunday dry-fasts have been acting as important anchors for my journey so far. As if they have been  allowing my body to reboot at the end of each week, so I can have a fresh start on Mondays. The habit of fasting on Sundays emerged on its own. It wasn’t planned. Since this journey is called For A Better Monday, fasting on Sundays has become a sort of leitmotif of the journey, with an actual function. Since I am not much into formulas, I try not to get attached to it too much. At one point I may drop the Sunday fasts, but I have to admit that for the past nine months or so, I was able to maintain this practice effortlessly. It feels extremely natural to me to dry-fast on Sundays. Who knows, maybe this practice will accompany me on my journey for a long period of time?

Religious Practices as Temporal Filters

Speaking of actual function of a practice, when I observe some millenary religious practices, I realize that some of those practices are promoting life in resembling ways to the practices I’ve adopted on my journey as an my attempt for a healthier living. I can’t keep myself from thinking that, if those religious practices have survived for such a long time, there must be reasons which go beyond solely disciples following their religion and passing the practices onto the new generations. If we take the Ramadan fasting as an example; I do think that most practicing Muslims are fasting on Ramadan by faith. If the practice of the intermittent dry-fasting did not have any concrete positive effects in promoting life, I don’t think the actual practice would have survived for such a long time and still be present today,  just to satisfy religious requirements. I have decided to be more open minded towards religious practices, and let them inspire me on my journey towards a healthier life. I want to be able go beyond my natural resistance to dogma and learn from the power of some religious practices. I believe this could inspire me in finding new starting points. This can also comfort me in the sense that the existing starting points that I share on this blog, are going in the direction of promoting life.

To summarize my thoughts on this topic and not be misunderstood; I would say that if religious practices have made it until today from the day they were first practiced, this could be a sign that the actual practices may have something beneficial for the human body on a physiological level. This is why I believe they deserve my respect and attention, at the very least because they have made it through a millenary temporal filter.

Disconnecting

Lately I’ve been interested in disconnecting a lot. I try to keep my phone on flight mode until at least 5:00 PM. I try to only go online when I am doing research or working on my freelancer job. At the moment I am 12 days deep into a Facebook fast. I am trying to protect myself from being overexposed to unnecessary information. At a first glance it looks like this saturation of information is caused by the abundance and accessibility to information made possible by technology . Which is to a certain degree true, but at the end of the information chain, we as individuals can decide if we want to be exposed to the information or not.  The Jewish and the Christian religions have the practice of Sabbath. Which could also be seen as a way of disconnecting in order to rest and regenerate. This shows that the need for humans to disconnect and rest was well understood by great religions way before our information driven era. If back then the need for rest was well understood, since we are way more prone to be exposed to an excess of information today, we can then conclude that our need for rest, at least mentally, is even more important today. This is an other perfect example for me when religious practices can shed light on contemporary issues we are experiencing as a society today, and help us find solutions.  If we tend to function well by working six days and completely resting on one, there must be a good reason for it that could be explained on physiological and psychological levels.

I think being constantly connected, and go check e-mails and social media first thing in the morning is as bad as watching TV if not worst. I believe that this kind of behavior in the long run can kill my capacity to think and to create deep, meaningful intellectual, manual, and artistic work. In addition, it tends to alienate me from others. The virtualization of social life, and the virtualization in other areas are conflicting with the essence of the human nature. Despite of all the great things technology offers us today, the negative effects are more and more obvious to me.

Since the invention of the light bulb, technology has been having terrible effects on our physical, mental and social well-being as human beings. This is why I feel like I need to be responsible with the use of technology in my life. Being able to not connect until late afternoon has been working great for me for the past six months or so. Usually during that period I also do an intermittent dry-fasting. Both practices allow me to fully focus on work I need to do. I know that depending on the work we do and our social commitments, this way of disconnecting won’t work for everyone.  That said, I am convinced that a degree of disconnection can be applied to each specific situation. To give an example, the days I am working for my paid job, I only connect to my Skype account for that particular job, and only connect to my work e-mail account. I remain disconnected from the rest. When I am done with my shift, this is when I go and check my personal e-mails, soccer news etc…

Not Having a Cell-Phone Plan

I’ve also noticed that not having a cell-phone plan has been helping me in a lot of ways. It makes me save money, it lowers my physical interaction with my smartphone, and it makes me enjoy the city more, because my attention is available to observe my surroundings. One other positive effects of not having a cell-phone plan, relies in the fact that it makes me more available socially to strangers. It makes it easier for others to initiate a conversation with me, because they won’t be interrupting me.

Although I don’t use my cellphone frequently in public places, I do realize that I do read a lot outside of home with my e-reader or a physical book. I think it is still better than not doing anything productive on a cell-phone,  and when I am reading a book, a stranger can at least interrupt me by asking me: “- What are you reading?”  That said, reading a book does  probably also alienate me socially to a certain degree. This is why I am going to increase the amount of time of me being media-free in the urban environment. This will allow me to be %100 available for the city, and enjoy everything it has to offer to me at the present moment.

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I AM NOT A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL. I would like to make it very clear that I am only sharing my own experience on this website, and have no intention to give any specific advice on health. Please read the disclaimer section for more information.