Day 20 - A Curious Thing

OK I’ve been on this fast for 20 days now, it’s been remarkable easy, I’ve seen market improvements in my health and energy and my waistline. I’m moving easier, I can walk for longer periods. I have been simply amazed by the progress for relatively such a short period of time. But that’s not the curious thing.

I’ve eaten now twice, since I started this, the day after Thanksgiving, and I’m struck with two very interesting things.

First, how little amount of food I eat when I do eat, which I somewhat expected, but is still surprising to me.

The second is the other end, each time I eat I get bound up for a day or two, which is surprising because I try to eat bulk, raw vegetables, broccoli, and the like, things that should just pass through me. But my body what’s to hang on to that food, suck every practical of nutrient from it. But when I don’t eat, I’m as regular as can be, three times a day. It’s just totally backward to what’s supposed to be happening.

I’ve long thought that the bowels play a major part in obesity. Everyone wants to concentrate on the stomach, let’s cut up, make it smaller, put bands around it, fill it up with biodegradable sponges, whatever. But I have noticed in my own life, and maybe I’m unique and different from everyone else, (if not please let me know), that when I’m regular I ate less than when I was constipated. I would binge and not feel full when I was constipated, but as soon as I went to the bathroom, I didn’t have that great erg to over eat anymore. Maybe there’s a switch somewhere in the bowels that says, “I’m receiving nutrients you don’t have to eat any more”, but when it’s back up it thinks the bodies’ being starved.

I was watching an interesting documentarily the other day. “ Fat – What no One is Telling You” For the most part it’s a huge commercial for bariatric surgery, but there is a section in it that talks about the gut being like a second brain, and how it controls the impulses to eat, which bares out a lot of my thinking.

I’ve also noticed that diet drinks, make you hungrier. I don’t know why that is, the conspiracy theorist in me, want me to believe that the food conglomerates put something in their diet foods, low in calories but makes you want to eat 5 times as much, hay the big tobacco companies do it, why not  General Mills, or Coca Cola, or it could be just the empty calories in the substitute sugar,  somehow triggers the body to want to eat, whatever the cause, I try to avoid diet drinks, especially on my fast.

Well that’s the curious things that I wanted to talk about, if you want to see that section of the movie I was talking about go to ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/takeonestep/fat/video-ch_07_vid.html?tos=vid&filetype=wmv&bandwidth=_hi ) be aware though, that they’re going to make you feel like it’s just impossible to lose weight if your obese, and the only way to lose it, is to surgically alter you digestive system, which I think is a bunch of bull, but the movie has a few interesting points about obesity, that’s not normally mentioned, so all in all if you can get past the blatant commercialism, it’s worth watching.

Peace

F.M.