The First Element of Self-Discipline is Hunger

The First Element of Self-Discipline is Hunger

I’ve seen the above photo floating around social media periodically.

An ensuing wave of protests often follows that image, with angry individuals accusing the image’s statement of promoting disordered eating.

In recent years, it feels like a buffer has been placed into American society. Like a large energetic buoy, for lack of a better word, has been inserted between the world and the American public.

Individuals in America are so seemingly protected in their procured walls, so righteously minded, and *so* into sanitizing their environment in sake of further protection (this has nothing to do with the dreaded 2020 C-word). It feels like people can’t take the heat anymore.

Everyone gets offended over everything. We have built a culture of highly-bubbled people that are so KEEN on penetration from something that isn’t highly-bubbled that they JUMP at the first opportunity to be #triggered.

These are the people that spend hours replying to comments online, desperate to FEEL SOMETHING other than the soft curation of their whimsical fantasy-land. Does this trigger you, reader? It is with purpose. Call me an annoying a*****e, you are self-righteous in your world.

We jump at the first opportunity to have something penetrate the bubble (if only we would realize that artistic living involves purposely penetrating our own bubbles!).

But the worst dichotomy our little bubbled lifestyle offers is that it is only through the #privilege of living in a curated society that we can even afford to BE triggered.

When I first read the statement of the “first element of self-discipline being hunger” I was captivated. A resonance of truth struck me. The thought of disordered eating didn’t register. It wasn't until I scrolled through the comments that I realized how vastly different my interpretation was… and just how weird our 3+ large meals pLUS SnAcKieS society has grown.  We buffer ourselves with food, and are convinced it’s healthy because corporate food giants invest in studies that tell us to eat more, and then they slap heart-healthy labels on insulin-spiking refined-grains.

To date: my longest water fast, in which I consumed nothing but water, has been 40 days.

To date: My longest dry fast, in which I did not consume any food OR water, has been 7 days.

To date: the driving force of both of these examples was Discipline.

When I speak about my experiences, I get peppered with projections. It came to the point where it shut down my voice for a couple years. I LOVE the world of fasting, I LOVE the world of the body, I’m still in school at the age of 32 learning MORE about the body. I will never stop learning about the body. In car rides, I forfeit music for audio books. At home, I am plagued by books in every corner… plagued because they are all screaming at me, simultaneously, “Read me! Read me!” On the computer, I have 1000s of hours logged reading medical journals.

I love the body, and it was my experiences with FASTING that unfurled my relationship to the body.

For a long time, I struggled to coherently express my experiences with fasting.

I lamely replied with casual variations of... "Well, it really opened me up emotionally!" before placing the subject further down on my list of "Things Not to Speak to Normal People About". I felt as if I couldn't, for the life of me, transmit my fasting experiences accurately.

In particular, I had a horrid experience in Jerusalem while on a pilgrimage with 40 other people. A dozen of us sat around a campfire, talking story at the end of the day.

Inevitably, it came to a discussion of “what do you do…” and a Polish-speaking man heavily focused on me, in front of the group. I replied with my usual variations of, “oh, I do so much that it would take too long to explain!”

He pressed me. He told me not to be embarrassed if I was out of a job.

I was flustered. My Polish language capabilities are 50% less than my English, especially for topics that are out of my “zone”. I tried describing more of my work. Inevitably it turned into a discussion about the body (my line of work!) and he, seeking the FIRST POSSIBLE CHANCE TO INSERT HIS GORGEOUS OPINION, told me that I was a beautiful woman, but that I definitely needed to lose some pounds.

Sigh. He completely ignored my statements of my current project, Secrets of Loose Skin, in which I regained weight to lose it on camera, and instead told me a way to make myself more attractive for him.

Lose weight, Fattie.

So I get it. Guys, I get it.

I say a lot about this buffered culture of #triggered people because the truth is that it IS a lot. And the truth is… if we pull the sticks out of our own asses and simply don’t pay attention to energy vultures who like to purposely state inappropriate comments, then the cycle of energetic consumption ends.

The bubbled-#trigger movement in this society is a massive contraction for me BECAUSE of the cycle of energetic consumption that gets fed from it.

But I get why people are so sensitive about their body. They’ve had a lot of situations with Polish a******s, for example, commenting unsolicitedly about the gorgeous body they have.

As if our goal in life, as women, is to make sure the a******s peckers get hard when they turn their eyes onto us in viewing pleasure…

Not only was I insecure in relying my experiences (the ongoing lesson of learning how to use my voice is... well... still ongoing...) but I also didn't quite know how to formulate the "proper" wording for it. In the one year since that conversation I thankfully have grown 100-fold in being able to state what it is I do, exactly, and being able to handle a******s.

My life’s work with the body is far broader than fasting, but fasting began it all. Fasting was the tiny snowball at the top of the hill, right before it begins to roll down and gain momentum.

I began my fascination with fasting because I wanted to lose 150 pounds without loose skin, over 7 years ago now. After I lost 150 pounds without loose skin, I wanted to put out a lot of information about this miracle healing agent… only to realize that many people cannot fast for as long as I have.

I decided to regain some of the weight and lose it again, but this time using absolutely NO long-term fasting. I needed to find a way to lose a lot of weight WITHOUT loose skin and WITHOUT long-term fasting.

I knew that loose skin was a byproduct of dysregulation… and I knew fasting was so healing for the body DUE TO REGULATORY PATHWAYS… so I began with:

How do I balance my body in regulation while losing weight and NOT incorporating intense fasting protocols? What are the regulatory pathways fasting uses, and how can I best mimic them in normal day-to-day functioning?

That’s how “Secrets of Loose Skin” was born: a 6-month program in which the viewer JOURNEYS with me as I lose the weight, in real time, in a SUBSTANTIAL AND APPROACHABLE WAY while working with hormones, nutrition, fascia, lymph, and musculature.

But in real life, every time I tried to describe my experiences, it fell flat. It felt as if a congruence factor was off, as if the receiving party was interpreting the color blue when I was trying to speak green. This feeling would shut me down.

I was unwilling to dive into a subject that I already felt was misunderstood from the intro. It was much easier, in every single possible scenario, to simply let it drop and pretend I didn’t have much to talk about. I spent years of isolation during which I, quite literally, spent 90% of my time alone in the middle of a rainforest.

And I stopped talking about fasting.

To someone who still believes a human would die after about a week of not eating, hearing information about a 40-day water fast is bound to bring up a hell of a lot of disbelief... and immediate judgement. It goes against our social patterns. It goes against nearly everything that we have been conventionally taught about food and the body. It goes against recommendations of mainstream Western (and petroleum-based, profit-generating, big-pharma) medicine.

Thankfully, the tides are turning now… with Reddit forums about fasting being prevalent, and more people that have experimented and reached levels beyond 40 days sharing their healing experiences. (Psssst: I know a man who has dry-fasted, no food or water, for 20 days!). The edges of what is possible are definitely expanding as more people choose to turn against pill-popping medical disciplines.

Nonetheless, when you fast… you simply "go against” the general tide.

There is a lot of societal sigma with fasting. It draws attention. Usually in a bad way... but that's the general process of going against a tide. People notice you. They finger-point and shake their heads and secretly await the moment that a current pulls you under so that they can hear your redemption story of “I was lost but now I am found!” And proudly congratulate you on returning back to the safety of nurturing the metabolism like a two-year-old child who needs to eat every few hours.

I have had more side-eye looks, worried expressions, and baseless variations of speeches about how incredibly "bad" water-fasting is than I can count. My favorite one came from a distant relative of mine...