On hunger...

We’re now going into our fourth week of fast days, the results are pretty encouraging and I will post them soon but I thought today I’d share my thoughts around hunger pangs. Before I do that, here’s what we’re eating this week. Is it wrong that I’m quite enjoying the challenge of coming up with meals for our fast days?

Today:

2 hard-boiled eggs

150g filet mignon with a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and asparagus spears

Tomorrow:

Grapefruit

Chicken satays with a Thai style salad. The satays recipe is from here:http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2014/08/chicken-satay-low-calorie-reci  though I have had to drastically tweak it (reducing the chicken from 2lb to 300 grams, making the coconut milk a light brand and slightly reducing the amount of it) to get it to work. I have no idea how they worked the original out at 220 calories per person! The Thai salad will be 100 g carrot, 1 cucumber 150g mango (all Julienned) with a dressing of tsp sesame oil, tsp rice vinegar and tbsp of fish sauce.

So on hunger...

Hunger is okay

One of the interesting points that the Fast Diet book makes is that that all other diets promise ‘you won’t be hungry’, but actually being hungry is okay. I think we need to break down ‘okay’ here because the fact that being hungry is ‘okay’ is one of the things I’ve been focusing on whilst feeling hungry.

First off, ‘okay’ doesn’t mean ‘good’, this is not a pro-ana blog and I’m not sitting here telling myself that the hungrier I am the better I am and whilst I’m at it, it would be better to be hungry seven days of the week because hunger is good, or however those though patterns work.

Most importantly to me ‘okay’ means not harmful; I’m not damaging myself by allowing myself to be hungry for a few hours a day, a couple of days a week. Normally discomfort means that your body is trying to get you to do something; thirsty, drink, hot, move to somewhere cooler, cold, put on a jumper, getting cramps, move. I’m viewing short periods of fasting as akin to going for a run or doing a hot yoga class, uncomfortable but because you know (because of the research out there) that it’s good for you rather than bad for you, you ignore your body’s signals.

Lastly, ‘okay’ means not unbearable rather than ‘as-wonderful-as-a-hot-fudge-sundae’; it is uncomfortable but I can deal. To continue to compare it to running or hot yoga, running is uncomfortable for me, but if I notice a persistent pain somewhere as I’m running, I stop (in fact I continuously scan my body for pain whilst running hoping against hope to find some unusual pain, but rarely have any luck, I’m really not one of life’s runners). Hot yoga is uncomfortable at points, but when I feel nauseous or dizzy, I take a rest, if it persisted despite resting I would leave the room. Likewise being hungry is fine, but if I start to feel faint, I’ll call off the day’s fast (luckily this hasn’t happened to me yet.

Hunger pangs pass

This is a bit of a revelation to me. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry for a bit, and then it goes away. I read somewhere (on a blog I think) that each hunger pang is your body unlocking some fat to use as energy, when the hunger pang passes you’re body has unlocked that stored energy and that’s what you’re running on. This probably has no basis in science, but I’ve still found it a very helpful way to think of it. Thinks *so hungry now, that’s a bit of fat making a useful contribution rather than hanging around my abdomen and stopping my jeans from doing up*.

3Ways of dealing with hunger pangs

Knowing that hunger isn’t damaging me, and fantasising that it represents a bit of fat self-destructing has mostly helped me be okay with just being hungry. However these are some specific things I do on fast days:

Make sure I have something to do at lunch time. I find that I’m hungry because it’s lunch time rather than because I’m hungry so I’ve been finding other things to do. I might buy a herbal tea and sit out reading my book of the weather’s nice, or go to the mall to pick up something fun (I bought a Goa guidebook and some new gym socks last week), today I have some errands to run, just at the pharmacy and the cash point, but it’ll get me out of the office.

Drink water and herbal teas, If I’m hungry I’ll go and make a herbal tea and find that it really helps, I make sure that I have some nice ones on my desk (sometimes going to buy more is my lunchtime trip, see above).

Keeping busy, this one is key and is one of the reasons why I’m so glad I’ve found exercise options for both fast days now. I also like planning non-food related treats; this can be going shopping to buy something nice, a hot bath, a new novel, a new page of a colouring book whatever, it’s nice to have something other than your next meal to look forward to.

So those are my thoughts on fasting and being hungry, I’d be grateful for any tips if anyone reading this is fasting too.