The Fasted Mindset

Have you ever stopped and wondered why our modern society is so fascinated with eating?

Every time we turn around there seems to be some new person telling us different strategies for stuffing food into our mouths. Many of our daily routines are planned around eating times and locations. Our modern healthcare and pharmaceutical systems surely reap the benefits of our cultural obsession with eating. Each month it seems, I drift further and further outside the eating construct and grow weary of planning my whole life around ensuring I eat my daily “required” amount.

Study after study is published on the health benefits of fasting, and archeological evidence most assuredly supports the notion that our ancestors most definitely did not spend their Sundays planning out their meals for the week and countless hours in the kitchen cooking. In the distant past we consumed foods as medicine and survival. There were no pills for blood pressure, blood sugar, heart disease, weight loss, and countless other diet-induced maladies which plague our current population.

That’s my tiny soap box, of which I will now step down from and get to the point of this article. If you don’t believe any of my claims, please feel free to google it yourself. This article is about my attempt to reconstruct my own norm from a satiated (hunger avoidance) mindset to what I’m going to call a “fasted mindset”. I want eating to be something I do the minority of the time rather than the majority of the time. I no longer want to have to worry about carrying food around with me everywhere I go or making sure I “get all my macros” every single day. I want freedom from my appetite and antiquated mindset.

I want to begin eating only when I need to for additional energy (workout days). I want to give my body and mind the opportunity to rest, rebuild, and reconnect with my natural human state. In theory, if we want to ascend to our highest states of potential, we will want to remain in the fasted state as much as possible. The science has proven time and again that it is when we have no food to digest that our bodies turn on all the “magic juice”. I plan to retrain my body and mind to do what they were naturally meant to do rather than responding to the constant expectation of immediate gratification and stimulation.

When the body and mind are in this bogged down (satiated) state, they are docile and silent. Maybe it is time our mind and body complex are allowed to be free from the constraints of constantly digesting and have some walking around time to explore humans’ true potential. I have set myself on a mission to experiment with only eating four days out of the week and only exercising on those days as well. I choose four days per week because I have four meals per week delivered to my apartment from Purple Carrot (delish by the way). At first, I was irritated that they would only allow so few meals to be delivered to me. However, I see now it was a blessing in disguise.

Before, I was irritated because I was going to have to find other sources of sustenance when I didn’t have a meal to cook. Now I see I was given a gift of freedom on those days from consumption, digestion, cooking, and cleaning. What a blessing from the Universe?! For the record, I am not suggesting anyone else try this for yourself. I treat my own life as a constant experiment and continuously look for new opportunities to improve myself and my quality of life.

All that being said, I’d love to hear your thoughts about fasting vs. constant consumption, our society’s obsession with food, and where you think it all stems from. If you’ve got your own experiences with restricted calorie or fasting, I’d love to hear that as well. I have done between 24 and 36 hour fasts before, and I regularly intermittent fast on a 6/18 schedule. The biggest difference I typically notice when fasting is how heightened my senses are. I do typically get very tired at first as my body searches for food as an energy source, so I am curious how it will react to days without eating. I’ll let you know how it goes!

With my hunger, I fight for freedom from food! I fight for freedom of my mind and body to reach new heights of human potential. I fight to get back what was taken from our ancestors by a society hell-bent on keeping us controlled and dependent. Let the new norm take over my psyche into a new way of living life to the fullest!