I’m on 72h fasts, and not eating is easy.
But a few times a day my thoughts wander to the refeeds. I plan what exactly will I be eating on the refeed day. I think about all those wonderful all-you-can-eat buffets.
My thought process:
>I’m fasting so much, therefore I can indulge myself to eat this food or that food, and I need a lot of calories to sustain myself for 72 hours. Sure, I can focus on tasty low-carb foods now that I eat so rarely.
I hope this addiction thoughts will pass, but any advice is appreciated.
Fasting definitely puts into perspective just how reliant people are on food to deal with their mental state, stress, and so on. The vices of prior generations were drugs and smoking, for this generation it’s food.
If you want advice I’d say the best way to deal with it is to recognize that food is something you rely on to deal with stress. The more restrictive you are the more that stress builds up to a point where you’ll end up binging. The fattest people are that way not because they eat but because they attempt to deal with their problems by eating. So the real problem is the stress.
You need find another outlet for dealing with it, preferably a positive outlet. I think you will find that this is the case for most addictive behavior. Ultimately we live in an intolerable condition. Spending all day cramped into concrete jungles looking at rectangles all day isn’t any way to live and the numbers of addiction, declining health, stress, suicide, mental illness and so on all reflect this but despite that people don’t seem to want to change this dynamic, so you gotta find strategies like this to deal with it.
Personally I lift and walk 1-2 hours everyday and it took about 6 months before my body really started craving doing it but ever since I did that I don’t have any problems with stress as long as I keep doing it. I don’t need to use food to deal with stress anymore so food has mostly become fuel for me now, if anything I under eat now so I gotta force feed myself calories.
I gorge high class cooking videos when I fast. It is definately like dreaming of booze when you sit in the church. But I will say it gives me inspiration to refeed on quality food (seen from a sensory perspective). Eating a truly delicious meal instead of some dry meat and a handful of nuts really helps prolong the feeling of satisfaction as I re-enter the next fast.
Fasting has been good and also really bad for my food addiction (binge eating disorder). I suppose BED might make it different, since it always inevitably led to a binge. I don’t fast anymore but weighing my food and tracking it after my period of fasting regularly really helped ingrain how much food we actually need and helped change my appetite/attitude towards food.