fast day 3

Last night I woke up around 3am and had to use the bathroom - probably due to all the water I have been drinking. When I went back to bed, I felt a bit nauseated.  Luckily I was able to fall back to sleep pretty quickly and the nausea passed.

I had planned on getting up at 8am, but I am finding with this fast that I am the most sluggish in the morning - I think I would sleep all day if I could.  So I finally rolled out of bed around 9:30am. When I did, I felt a bit light-headed and nauseated, but I was not hungry at all.  It took about 20 minutes for the nausea to pass.

After drinking some water, I took a quick shower and headed out the door to one of my CYSO chamber music group's outreach performances at a Chicago-area school.  During the performance I continued to sip water and felt pretty good overall.

Then I was off to teach my theory class and coach chamber music at CAA.  An interesting thing I've noticed is that I don't even feel the hunger pangs when I'm teaching.  I also noticed that I seem to have an extra keen sense of mental clarity.  This makes me appreciate the fact that I did not try to completely clear my schedule for this fast.  I am lucky that many of my students are on spring break this week, which has made my teaching load much lighter. I also don't have any rehearsals or concerts until Sunday, the day after my fast ends.

After teaching at CAA, I picked Andrew up from work and we headed home.  Once I got home I developed a case of the hiccups, which lasted about 20 minutes.  How bizzarre!  I then occupied myself with catching up with emails, designing a postcard and creating a new blog for my trio's summer chamber music workshops.

At around 10pm, I got the hiccups again - they lasted another 20 minutes.  Go figure.  In terms of other side effects, I did not feel nauseated or light-headed again after this morning.  The hunger pangs were a bit more intense today, but not overwhelming.  I also felt a bit colder this afternoon and evening.  I did not really experience any food cravings, but it does feel weird not to eat.  I am happy for the extra time I have to do other things, but at this moment I just feel annoyed that I can't have something warm in my belly.  And today was the first day I had no bowel movement.  I lost another 1lb and 00.7% body fat.

After finishing this blog post, I headed to bed around 11pm.


"Therapeutic fasting is not a mystical or magical cure. It works because the body has within it the capacity to heal when the obstacles to healing are removed. Health is the normal state. Most chronic disease is the inevitable consequence of living a life-style that places disease-causing stressors on the human organism. Fasting gives the body an interlude without those stressors so that it can speedily repair or accomplish healing that could not otherwise occur in the feeding state."

~Joel Fuhrman, M.D