Current mood:

determined

Twenty-Four Hours, Thirty Minutes

As of about now, the last time I ate food was 24 hours ago. It's a good feeling, bitter and clean; the feeling of just purging. My gut squirms, empty of anything but diet soda - soda which rushes through my system, unhampered, to drain directly out half an hour later.

I'd forgotten what it was like to fast.

When I was a teenager, I was fat and unwashed, and I hated myself for my weakness. I joined the swim team in an effort to lose some weight - but as it turned out, I hated swim team. My hair, never very good to begin with, absorbed two hours' worth of chlorine a day and melted into a tangled mess that stopped just short of dreadlocks. My skin always itched. And worst of all, not only was I the fattest boy on the team (I discovered then that even when I went down to 160 pounds, I still had a tiny, embryonic beer gut), but I wasn't a very good swimmer.

I was the third-best swimmer at the backstroke. That oughtta tell you my mad skills at the aquatic motions.

So I began to fake illnesses before big events. The rules said that if you had a cold twenty-four hours before any competition, you were automatically excluded since they didn't want your nose dripping pure viral loads directly into the pool; I began to come down with the sniffles on an astonishingly regular basis. I did my year and quit.

I felt tired, and exhausted, and worn out. I wasn't quite a failure, but I wasn't a success either. And I was still gaining weight once the three-hour, ten-mile daily swims went away.

Then one day, I just stopped eating. Just stopped; it amazed me that I could, but something in my body told me that no, you don't need to do this right now. I went twelve hours, then went to sleep; when I woke up, it had been an amazing twenty hours sans food, and I decided to see how long I could last.

It was seven in the evening before I finally caved in. Almost thirty-one hours without food.

I became addicted to fasting.

It was, in many ways, the purest self-control; my body wanted to survive, I wanted to be thin. I adopted a diet of waiting as long as possible to eat - and each hour gave me a satisfaction that few meals could touch. I walked around, immaculate in my self-control, avoiding meals until I broke down and ate a bunch.

Then I waited another day.

The weight peeled off of me. Oh, the dietary readings said it was bad - and maybe it was. But the fact is that none of the other diets ever worked for me. They all involved eating less, or different foods... But the problem was that I was still captain of my ship. Dieting was hard because there were other foods there; sure, maybe you knew you were supposed to only eat the wheat wafer or the slab of bacon (and no bread) - but the Ho-Hos were still at the top of the cupboard, and you couldn't bury them deeply enough that you couldn't hear them calling.

But to starve yourself? All choice is removed. It feels white, and pure, and absolute. And there was a friendly little sting of self-hatred in there; take that, body. You've never done anything for me anyway.

I fasted, and I gained friends, and everything got better. And as it did, I lost the urge to fast - and over the past fifteen years, most of that weight has come piling incrementally back. (It came back a fuck of a lot slower than the Atkins diet, though.) But fasting made me who I am. It forged my personality, brought me strength, showed me a new way.

I'm questioning everything that I am right now. I am adrift, second-guessing my every thought, trying to figure out what's a rational, understandable thought, and what's too much to ask for. I do not know whether I am a good person or a bad person, or what I should be doing right now; I don't even know whether I should post this or not, and I'm really really sorry if I shouldn't have. My life is a shifting tide of literal insecurity; who am I? What have I become?

Fasting is my anchor. It is something I know.

A day and fifteen minutes now. In another half an hour, it will be a day and forty-five. In an hour, it will be almost twenty-three hours.

Eat.