Not so fast

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Wow. It’s Tuesday morning. The day after the three-day Memorial Weekend. Did you have a good weekend? I had kind of a weird one.

I did an 84-hour fast with my girlfriend, Joy. I don’t want to go into the whole thing now, as you can read about it in Filet of Soul, but there were some things I learned after the fact that may interest somebody.

First, after three and a half days of near starvation, on Monday, I came off the fast. I felt fine, but the caloric deficit had definitely caught up with me, and I was tired and famished. I started the day with a steak and egg breakfast, followed by a sardine snack, pork chop lunch, and then a sensible picnic dinner on the Truckee River with spinach salad, steak fajita, broccoli and three glasses of wine. We drank the wine over about two hours.

As I mention in Filet, during the fast, I never felt horrible. Just crabby, and food was at the forefront of my mind the whole time, but even though what I was doing was considered a “cleanse,” I never felt particularly … cleansed or pure or different, really.

Today is a different story. I feel like I took poison. It’s really weird. I’m headachy and grouchy, like a hangover if I’d had three bottles of wine instead of three glasses consumed over hours. My fasting glucose numbers—the measurement of pre-diabetes—were off the chart this morning, well into diabetic numbers.

I didn’t notice the absence of anything chemical during the fast, but I’m sure noticing the addition of something today. Maybe someone who does regular fasts and cleanses will have some insight.

One final thing I learned. Until I went without, I had no idea how completely our culture revolves around food. Costco, Barnes & Noble, Galena Park, literally everywhere we went, the aromas and marketing for eating were right there. I’ve found new sympathy for those in the world who don’t have enough to eat.