One step at a time
Happy Friday everyone! Sorry this is late…I’m trying to get back into the groove but my plan for last night to get this finished just didn’t happen in time.
I just completed a 48 hour fast last night (yes you read that correctly, I actually fasted for 48 hours and consumed nothing but black coffee, tea, and water…something I never thought I’d be able to do) which is in line with what it felt like the theme of my week has been…“LESS”. Less eating (aka overeating), less mess and less clutter (and hopefully a little less of me by the end too, ha).
I’ve just finished reading the book “Fast like a Girl” and it seems like every time I listen to a podcast or open a new tab on the internet, there’s something about intermittent fasting jumping out at my eyes and my ears and I’ve been hearing so much about the health benefits of it that I decided to give it a go.
I feel pretty darn proud of myself for completing it, I have to say. The longest I’ve fasted prior to this was only about 17 hours so I really didn’t know if I’d be able to make it. Overall, I’m not sure I quite achieved what I’d been hoping to, since the ultimate goal of doing a fast that long (for me, anyway) was to reach the elusive “autophagy” phase, where your cells begin to repair themselves and even eliminate damaged cells from your body. My quick googling on the subject informed me that “you will know you are in autophagy when you feel a great sense of well-being and no longer feel hunger”. Well, let me tell you, I definitely never achieved that feeling. I was damn hungry right to the end.
The major benefit that I DID get from completing this fast, though, was to now feel so much more confident that I can actually implement a once or twice monthly 24 hour fast into my life. Before this, I never would have thought that would be possible and wouldn’t have tried, but now that I have done 48, I know I can handle a 24 hour one once in a while. And though I probably won’t reach autophagy in those 24 hours, I still feel like the health benefits are more than worth it. I’ll keep you all posted on how those go in the weeks ahead, wish me luck!
As I said though, this fast is pretty much in line with the theme of my week, but also my goals for 2024. Less food, less stuff, just LESS. With the timing of my daughter’s birthday being in November and then Christmas coming just a month later, I’m looking around the house and just see stuff everywhere. We hadn’t even found a good home for all the birthday toys before Christmas added even more to the mix. The piles in the house right now are out of control, and basically the whole house is just overflowing. The house is in desperate need of a purge, so I’m getting back to the basics and starting with baby steps.
As luck would have it, I just came across this quote from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits as I was thinking about my goals for this year. "New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results." This really resonates with me right now, as I’ve learned over and over again that when I set goals for myself that are results based, such as “lose 20 pounds”, I get frustrated when the goal isn’t reached quickly and then tend to give up. When you focus on the process, and the habits you need to build to achieve the goal, you are more in control of actually achieving those goals. I can’t really control what the scale says every morning, but I CAN control whether or not I did a workout that day, or if I took 10-15 minutes to do a quick tidy up around the house.
So I’m going back to basics for the month of January and implementing the nightly tidy up routine to just do a quick ten-minute tidy every night to chip away at any clutter (and/or just at the very least avoid even more from occurring). I’m also going to try to do a drop off to the donation center at least once a week. Slow and steady is the name of the game for me right now. Hoping this will help to avoid burnout and overwhelm and keep me consistent. I’ll give you an update next week.
I hope you are all having a good start to 2024 so far!