To Fast or Not to Fast

To eat or not to eat, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to deprive

The core and mind of your temple,

Or to take arms against a depth of dysfunction,

and by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

Seriously though, have you ever sat at the point where it’s been just long enough since your last meal that a fast seems like the next logical step?  It’s been eighteen hours since dinner.  I had a Total Zero Red Bull for breakfast (those things are ADDICTIVE and a LIE -- more on that later) and am now sipping a cup of coffee for lunch.  I could just not eat today.  That would be okay.  After all, it is so much easier to choose no food than to choose safe foods.  Funny, I don’t remember that ever being the case before. 

I’m almost ashamed to admit my need to fast stems from the bloody scale.  My weight hasn’t budged in almost two weeks and it’s starting to get to me.  I’ve been exercising.  I’ve been eating healthy.  I’ve been doing everything right but that freaking number refuses to reflect my hard work.  Of course, I said I’d never do this.  I’d never stop eating on purpose to lose weight.  To gain clarity, yes.  To reset a pattern of binging, yes.  To lose weight?  No.  Never.  Not me!  That’s dysfunctional!  (Okay, MORE dysfunctional.)

Still, the urge is there.  I haven’t decided whether I’ll give in.

It’s just that my body responds super well to fasting.  I drop weight like I’m sloughing dead skin.   And I need to see some forward progress.  Last December I gave myself one year to get down to my GW1.  That seemed like plenty of time, but I’m now halfway through and I’ve only lost 39% of the weight.  I’ve got to do something or the ants slowly nibbling away at my insides will devour me whole.

A side note on the new Total Zero Red Bull.  They claim to have zero calories, zero sugar and zero carbs.  That is a LIE.  If you look closely, you’ll notice that an 8oz cans are labeled as zero calories, the 16oz cans are labeled as zero calories, but the 12oz cans are labeled as 10 calories.  How can this be you ask?  Is the 12oz can a different formula?  Nope.  Remember in a previous post where I said that food items with less than five calories per serving can be labeled as zero calories?  Well, here is a perfect example.  Each serving has less than five calories (supposedly, though the math doesn’t add up).  The 8oz and 12oz cans are labeled as one serving while the 16oz can is labeled as two servings -- hence the zero calories claim.  I’m not sure why they didn’t just label the 12oz can as 1.5 servings to preserve the lie.

Ah well.  I won’t be giving up my habit over five calories, especially when said calories come in the form of delicious, metabolism-boosting, energy-giving liquid.