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Fast notes

So we are almost 44 hours through our 72 hour fast, or about 60% of the way. I’ve been struggling a bit today, but I don’t think I’m feeling as bad as I did yesterday. I was very cranky and weak yesterday, but I don’t know how much of that was just due to the weather and the fact that my kids were being extremely obnoxious.

One thing weird happened this morning to me that is worth noting. When I was in the shower this morning and closed my eyes, I saw an afterimage. I stared at it, still with my eyes closed, and it took on a very distinctive shape, and became very vivid. But the strangest thing about it was that it retained its position in space as I moved my eyes around. Normally, when looking at an afterimage in physical space, it seems to move as the eyes move, but this did not. And the pure distinctiveness of the image was very remarkable. I could see it and look at it. I opened my eyes and closed them a few times to see what happened, and the effect persisted for some time.

Now, I’m pretty sure that no, I wasn’t having a stroke, but I was still pretty jarring. Some research suggests that afterimages are formed in the brain, not in the eyes, so what I experienced doesn’t make me think that there’s something wrong.

Other than that, I’ve been trying to keep my belly full with water. I had a couple energy drinks yesterday, which was a mistake; I had some heart pounding after the second one yesterday afternoon. Today I just had tea and coffee and things seem OK. Heart pounding after getting up or going up stairs seems to be similar to what I experienced last time. I had 500mg of melanin before bed last night and slept well, I’ll do the same tonight.

I don’t remember how I managed to do this last time with the kids around. I think I may have done it during the weekend. Part of my crankiness last night was due to the fact that my kids wouldn’t stay at the table and kept getting up or trying to bring food into the living room, which they know is against the rules. I understand why Dr. Peter Attia doesn’t like to fast around his kids. Nothing is more annoying than a small child crying that they’re starving less than two hours after you’ve served them dinner.

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Sixty for sixty challenge completion

So yesterday marked the end of the Sixty for Sixty meditation challenge. I originally started it following a comment Naval Ravicant made on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I’m not really sure how I’d quantify the experience.

I started using the Waking Up app in November of last year, so I have mindful minutes on my iPhone going back to that. It’s mostly the ten minute guided lessons with some twenty or thirty minute bursts, then around late June there’s a couple thirty minute sessions before I quit drinking, then my first one hour session on the 19th. I had originally tried to scale up from thirty to sixty in five-minute increments, but I gave that up after four days and just went straight to sixty.

I was actually very disciplined about it it, only missing one session in August, and even then I still got thirty minutes in. In September, I really seemed to lose steam and the totals start dropping to 40 minutes, down to 20. I think the main reason for the drop has been time. School started back up and as a result I stayed up later, and started sleeping in. When I started doing the challenge, I was waking up around 5AM before everyone else in the house, getting my hour in and making a cup of tea before my youngest would wake up. Other times I might do it first thing in the AM or in the early afternoon before the girls get home.

Now, it’s all can do to get to bed before 11PM, and I get woken up several times during the night by the baby. By the time we get out of bed in the morning now it’s time to go, go, go. I’ve tried making up for it with 20 minute, guided lessons for an early session, followed by another 20 unguided later in the day, but I’ve fallen off.

One thing that was almost unbearable in the beginning of doing the hour long sessions was the physical pain. I would sit on the ground on top of a couple of cushions, and my back would develop these horrible aches that I would have to stretch out every five minutes near the end of the session. And just getting the feet right for that long took some getting used to as well. But then one day, following a workout, I found that the back pain was gone. So now it’s not the physical pain that is the biggest impediment to my practice, but mental ones. Getting started is the hardest part.

One of the things that isn’t so clear to me is what type of practice I’m doing. Since I was coming from the Waking Up course, Sam Harris’s version of mindfulness is what I was used to: focusing on the breathing, sounds, the visual field, noticing thoughts and just being aware of the whole of conscious experience. But Naval had urged people just to sit, without any goal. As a result, I found myself thinking through about whatever was going on, challenges, ideas about whatever. It was a much more creative, effortless practice.

I’m going to have more to say about habits in a later post, all I want to mention now with regard to meditation practice is that the amount of time I spent meditating daily is a pretty good indicator as to how well I’m sticking to my healthy habits. I don’t have any plans to start drinking alcohol, but I have been drinking a lot of caffeine-laced energy drinks lately. And while I don’t think the two are directly related, I think there’s probably some underlying factor, probably stress, that I’m not dealing with elsewhere else.

And I’m probably not the best person to assess whether my practice has affected my interpersonal behaviors. Of course, the goal of meditation is not what happens during practice, but how you carry that practice into the real world. Being able to recognize and interrupt unhealthy behaviors or responses to stress throughout the day is one of the reasons I took it up. I’m not really sure how that’s turned out. I do find myself more aware at times, but on the other hand I think I’ve been quicker to temper, especially with my kids. Part of it may be no alcohol. But the temper doesn’t linger, and less likely to beat myself up about negative behaviors.

And one more point, about clock watching. I’ve tried to refrain from keeping a visual or auditory timer or any other indicator of how long is passing when I meditate. Earlier apps that I used had a soundtrack or a bell to mark intervals, but I found those too distracting. I would hear the loops in Calm’s bird-chirping background and notice it every time I’d hear the same pattern of tweets. So when I first started to do the longer sessions, I’d just set the starting gong, and sit there until I heard the next one, which would mark then end of my session.

I always had my iPhone in front of me, and while I would use it as a visual fixture sometimes, I found I had to put in in airplane mode after a few notifications interrupted the app’s timer. A few times I found myself checking the timer to see that I had been sitting for an indeterminate amount of time. Anyways, the last minutes of a session, whether it’s a sixty minute or twenty minute one, are still challenging. A part of my brain is sitting there, ready to get up and go, go, go, and it’s hard to sit still without checking the clock to make sure that the timer is still running. And no matter whether I’m doing a twenty, forty or sixty minute session, a part of my brain knows that time is winding down, and is gets anxious about getting up and getting on with my day. There was only one time I can remember being surprised by the closing bell, and thinking “wow, it’s over already.”

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Bad habits

I’ve been bad lately. I’ve been sticking to my habits: meditating for an hour, no alcohol, writing a few hundred words every day, sticking to an intermittent fasting schedule. But I’ve been cheating a lot, and consuming a lot of sugar. I’ve been drinking sugary drinks and eating a lot of ice cream. My weight is still stable, but I can only imagine what I’m doing to my blood sugar. I’ve been consuming a lot of caffeine as well. I think part of the reason that I’ve been doing it has to do with work.

I usually work from home. I get up between five and six AM, about an hour before the rest of the family, drink my tea and meditate. Usually I can get my hour in before the kids get up and try to sit on my lap or tattle on each other for whatever reason. I take them into day care, work at my desk for a few hours, lunch, work some more, and then have about an hour or two to work on side gigs before my wife comes home with the girls. Dinner and family time, baths and bed for the kids. Then another hour or two working on writing or whatever until ten, then I read for an hour and in bed by eleven or sooner. That’s how it’s been lately, anyways.

Usually, I may have a day I have to go into the office. That usually involves an hour and a half round trip, depending on the traffic, time, and day. This week I think I went in four days. Normally this isn’t a problem, but most of these weren’t planned trips, and instead of leaving first thing in the morning, I wound up going an hour before or right when I should be breaking my fast. Now having fasted for so long, going a few extra hours isn’t anything to worry about, but I’ve been stopping at gas stations and convenience stores for that extra bit of caffeine, and have just been compounding again and again.

It’s not all bad, though, I have been a bit more active than I usually am. I ran several miles a few days ago, and did a lot of physical work today, including a long bike ride with my eldest. But these excuses will ultimately become justifications and will be come rote. And I can’t let that happen. It starts by running in the store for a drink and getting a second one, ‘for later’. Buying a big box of ice cream cones, and then eating two at a time.

It’s time to put the hammer down and correct these mistakes before they start to compound.

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On a dry July

Today marks 27 days without alcohol. I decided to abstain for the month of July, following a bit of a public bender at the end of last month. The last time I went more than a day or two without drinking was January of last year, following a pretty late New Years Eve/Day drinking session. I’ve got a pretty complicated history with alcohol, as I’m sure some do, and I’m addiction-prone as well, but I’m not sure how unusual that is, when it comes down to it.

One of these days I’ll probably come round to a full accounting of all the crazy, fucked-up shit that I’ve done over the years, but for now I’ll just stick to the last few months. I’m not sure how much of a memoir I want this blog to become, or whether I want to de-anonymize it at some point in time. Suffice to say, I love the drink, I love(d) to smoke, I love whatever it is that I like to do and I will do it as much as I possibly can. Let’s just say for now, that about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that my alcohol consumption was a problem. Not that I hit rock-bottom or anything like that — that happened years ago — but it was just the ramifications of my daily consumption, on both my health and my wallet. I actually had my doctor prescribe me naltrexone to help me cut down. I didn’t want to quit. I like drinking, I didn’t want to cut alcohol out of my life completely, I just didn’t want to get to a place where I get hammered out of my mind and blackout or worse. I’ve been lucky not to kill myself or someone else, but I recognized that it was probably just a matter of time before I did.

It’s such a shitty thing to say that the main reason I cut it out was that it was costing me too much. I’ve acquired a taste for IPAs over the past few years, and the prices have been creeping up to around twelve dollars a six pack. It got expensive, and I was stopping by the store on the way home pretty much every day. The cost was getting out of hand. Trying to limit myself to three a night or whatever rationalizing I was telling myself just wasn’t cutting it. And when I gave myself permission to let loose — I let it go.

So when I told myself eighteen months ago that I was going to do a Dry-ruary or whatever they call it, I did it, no problem. I’m sure my wife was as shocked as me that I didn’t got into the DTs, or have any withdrawal symptoms, but no. The only real negative from the whole experience was trouble falling asleep. I do recall that I couldn’t wait for the month to be over, and I celebrated the day with a cold one out with my wife for one of our semi-regular Friday happy-hours before picking up the kids.

This time, I don’t feel that same way. Someone actually gifted me a bottle of scotch last week — not knowing — and I don’t even really look forward to drinking it. I may just keep going, and see how long I can go. It’s possible that I just traded one habit for another, gave up a vice for a virtue. Who knows what will happen.

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On meditation

This morning I did my first 60-minute meditation session. I’d was listening to Naval Ravicant on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago and he made a challenge for listeners to do 60 minutes for 60 days, and it’s stuck with me since I first heard it. I don’t know when I first started meditating, but I can say with certainty that I started making it a habit back in November, and I’ve been doing it almost every day since then. 

Back in the late 90s I bought a copy of Zen and the Brain, by neuroscientist and Zen practitioner David Austin. I was a bit of neurobiology nerd back in high school when I was taking AP biology, and started becoming interested in how the brain and consciousness works. This was probably following my first acid trip. The book described the work of comparative studies between the brain images of Buddhist monks and people who did not practice meditation. There were notable differences in the size of certain areas of the brain, as well as the brain activity of the monks when they were practicing their meditative state. I don’t recall trying to meditate myself. There was always debates about how long was effective — David Lynch was quoted somewhere that he felt the minimum effective dose was somewhere around 45 minutes, 20 was too little. 

I tried some stints over the past few years. I recall doing a couple 45 minute sessions at some point, but it never stuck. I never really liked the guided meditations.  And the apps with the cricket or forest backgrounds got too distracting when I started to notice the loops. It wasn’t until I started Sam Harris’s Waking Up app that it became a regular habit. The 10-minute sessions were short enough that I didn’t have any excuses not to do it. They were interesting enough, and Harris’s secular approach clicked with me, as well as his promise that one could arrive instantaneously to the place where the illusion of the self was apparent. Not that one would necessarily stay there for very long, of course, but that it was as fast as the sound of him snapping his finger. 

That was enough to get me going, and it was apparent over the first few weeks that something was happening.  It’s subtle, but effective, and about a month ago I decided that I didn’t want the guided meditations anymore, and decided to go from 10 to 30 minutes on a simple timer. I’ve been getting up at 5 or 6 in the morning, and going outside, weather permitting, and sitting quietly on a cushion.  A week or two ago, after talking myself into Naval’s challenge, I started ramping up by a minute or two each day, then to 45 yesterday and 60 this morning. I told my wife this morning, and she asked me how I felt. I shrugged my shoulders, cause there wasn’t really anything to say about it. It’s not really about feeling a certain way, but it’s about making changes in your brain so that you’re different when you’re not meditating. 


I’ve tried to get my kids to start the habit. We’ve got a couple of children’s books about the subject, one called Moody Cow, and another about a dog that chases his tail. Sam Harris’s wife Annica has some guided meditations for children, I was able to get them down for a 5-minute breath exercise one or two times. But the best thing I think is for them to see me doing it, and hopefully they’ll start to emulate it on their own, the way they do when I’m exercising at the house.  

I’m probably not the best advocate for meditation here. I haven’t really tried making a case to people about it, or any far out claims about vast improvements in my mental state or well-being. I think the research speaks clearly enough, and anyways, I’m not trying to convince or impress anyone about it. Like fasting, it’s something I think that has been practiced for thousands of years, and is something that we’ve lost track of in our modern lives. Taking a step back for a few minutes a day, whether it’s 5 minutes, or more, is something that has helped quiet my mind, and help me focus more, to be present with my family, and to strengthen a sort of meta-cognition about the thought processes going on in my own head, as well as the stories that I tell myself, about myself and the world inside my head. 

And being aware of those stories and those voices, and being able to watch them fade away and just be present in the moment, that is what I’ve learned most so far. 

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Thoughts on completing a three day fast.

So there’s been a lot of talk about the benefits of fasting. I’ve been doing time-restricted fasting for serveral months now just as part of my regular diet. I usually don’t eat until after 11AM, except on Sundays when family comes over for breakfast. I’ve been wanting to do a longer, 3-day water fast for some time, and after a 24-hour water fast a week ago, I decided to start a full 3-day one earlier this week.

My last meal on Wednesday was some chicken wings and mixed nuts for lunch around noon. Probably not the best meal, but to be honest my decision to go ahead with the 3-day was a bit unplanned. I had been thinking about it for some time, so I did manage to prepare. I picked up some magnesium supplements, and some melanin to go with the L-theanine. Since fasting can cause the autonomous nervous system to ramp up, I wanted some things to help calm me down so that I could sleep at night.

Day one wasn’t too bad, ignoring my stomach wasn’t too difficult to do. Day two was a bit more rough. I tried to stay active, and did some yard work, but I could tell I had real low energy. I needed lots of breaks. The bit of hedge trimming I did after noon into the third day was absolutely brutal. I was miserable.

The morning on day three wasn’t too bad, and before I broke fast I tried to do my standard 30-minutes of daily meditation, but it was hard. I knew it was the only thing standing between me and my lunch, and all I could manage was to lay on the floor prone for that time until the bell rang.

I broke with some tree nuts, pistachios, walnuts, and the like, as well as a deli chicken sandwich wrap. It was DELICIOUS. I’ve been pigging out all day today: huge Thai dinner; ice cream for desert; and a bag of popcorn earlier. I’ll have a big breakfast tomorrow and then it’s back to usual.

I plan on doing these 3-day water fasts at the 3 and 6 month mark. I heard that the long-term changes really go into effect after the third time, and I want to see if this has any impact on my chronic cholesterol issues.

 

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My Cholesterol

So, a lot has changed for me in the past year or so. My wife and I decided to have a baby, and I was forced to make a lot of lifestyle changes as a result. One thing that my wife insisted on was getting life insurance, which I did back in March. As part of the application process I was required to get my cholesterol screened, and the results came back that I was slightly elevated. As a result, I stopped buying steaks every week from the grocery store and stopped eating roast beef on my sandwiches for lunch every day. I also tried to cut out the Farm Fresh spicy wing zings that I am absolutely addicted to. During that time I spoke to my father, as my grandfather died from a heart attack at a relatively early age, and red meat was always at our dinner table several times a week. My dad told me that his cholesterol was 280, and I thought I was doing OK as he does not eat very healthy at all and basically eats junk all the time.

As the end of the year is here I decided to take advantage of my health insurance eye plan and get my checkup and free pair of eyeglasses for the year, and as I had some downtime between job contracts I decided to go in and get a full physical and see how I was doing. My wife recently upgraded her YMCA membership to a family plan to take advantage of the 2 hours of babysitting so that she can go back to the gym and I’ve decided to go back as well. I had been working out pretty regularly when we started dating but I’ve been in rough shape the past few years and wanted to get a physical before I started doing anything too crazy. I was diagnosed with a heart murmur when I was 15 and haven’t had it checked out since, so I wanted to get it checked out and scheduled a full physical. They took 4 or 6 vials of blood at the doctors and told me that they were going to do a very thorough screening. Well I got the results last week and it turns out that my cholesterol was over 280, so it’s apparent that some more serious lifestyle changes are in order.

I was actually surprised at some of the junkier foods that are cholesterol free, most notably my favorite Oreos, as well as Doritos and snack foods. It’s the meat and dairy products that I love so much that are killing me. I’ve spent the past two days looking at labels on everything I’m eating, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to keep track of my daily consumption. I don’t want to go crazy and keep track of everything, but I do want to keep notes on my specific cholesterol intake so that I can establish a baseline that will be helpful at determining any additional changes after my next screening. The last thing I want to do is go on some kind of pill cure, so I’m determined to fix this myself. I’m just not sure what’s the best tool to keep track of things. I’ve been using my iPhone to track my auto maintenance and workout regimen, so that’s my first choice, however an initial scan of the apps out there didn’t show any sure fire one that will let me track my portions against a daily goal.

I do know one thing though, I’m going to have to be very careful about eating out from here on out. My usual faves are Buffalo wings and potato skins, and looking at the nutrition information for my last meal at Smokey Bones it looks like I ate way over my daily goal (300mg) with just one appetizer. I’m going to have to make a point to ask for the information or pull it up on my phone before ordering from now on.

There’s some additional analysis that I need to do on my detailed results, which were broken down by HDL, LDL and a dozen other factors. There’s one in particular that has a genetic component that I’ll have to take a closer look at, and it also turns out that I’ve actually got a bit of a vitamin D deficiency that needs correction with a supplement. My short term goal is to keep an accurate record of my cholesterol intake until my next screening, which I want to happen in the next 3-12 weeks. Hopefully I will see a reduction in my cholesterol count and fix my vitamin D issue, and then we’ll see where we are.