Day 2 of 21 Days without Food.

Despite my best efforts leading up to this fast, I’m still unable to feel hungry!

Today’s video and post will introduce the Qigong standing posture, share my routine for the day, shed light on what I’m experiencing and what you might expect when fasting for 2 days.

I was inspired to do this case study by numerous blogs and videos that covered what you’d experience in the various stages of fasting. My favorite was Matthew Henkler’s blog post where he attempted to water fast for 14 days. 

When I first started fasting I wanted to know what to expect. I found Matt’s blog post to be a pretty accurate description of what I was experiencing. My favorite quote from his post was when he talks about his day 3 experience “By the time I get home I’m feeling strange. Like I’ve just ingested happy pills and am sliding down rainbows. I’m extremely euphoric.”

That’s a normal experience for somewhere between days 3 and 4. Towards the end of today I started to have this feeling. When I first began experimenting with fasting this happened near the end of day 3 or the beginning of day 4. 

This time I've been working harder than normal. I’m hitting this phase sooner than normal.

The first phase of fasting typically lasts 1-3 days. Your body operates on instincts leftover from when we were hunter-gatherers. Initially your body tries to “trick” you to eat by giving you a headache, feeling tired, anxiousness, and possibly some hunger pangs. 

After a few days your body will realize that this strategy isn’t working and it changes it’s approach…

Your body realizes that in order to get food it needs to be more resilient. You need more creativity, energy and to feel good so you can go out and hopefully find some food. 

During this phase of the fast you get an actual fasting high. I LOVE Matthew’s analogy of taking happy pills and sliding down rainbows! That’s the perfect description of how it feels. The feeling is similar to marijuana or a few glasses of wine, only mellower and nicer. I honestly prefer the feeling over any drug, although I don’t have anything morally against pot or alcohol when taken responsibly. 

Once you make it to this phase you’re over about 80% of the challenge. At this point hunger has vanished, energy levels are up and you have the feeling you could keep going for a long time. You can easily go several more days at this point. 

The only thing in your way now is your belief about how long you can fast. If you’ve fasted for 48 hours for the first time and have this feeling, you believe you can go longer. But around day 4 or 5 you may start to worry that you’ve gone too long, so you break the fast. 

That’s ok, you should do what you feel is right. 

But now you’ve expanded your ability from never fasting, to fasting for 4 or 5 days. In the future you’ll try a longer fast…

You can continue experimenting with longer fasts until you:

Once you get to the point where you’ve fasted for over 10 days, something happens within you that breaks your appetite. This is fantastic if you want to control your weight!

There’s also a weird catch to this. You’ll never be hungry again. You’ll also never feel fully satisfied by food again. Food won’t do it for you. You’ll want more Qi. 

Food will still taste good. You’ll probably still want to eat for the enjoyment of it. You’ll be free from having to eat if you don’t want to. 

I know,

This sounds unbelievable. 

But I’ve done it. I don’t have an appetite anymore and I feel much better while fasting. 

I eat because I enjoy the taste. I don’t have to eat because I get plenty of energy from Qigong. This gives me a nice flexibility to lose weight when I choose to and I actually feel so much better when I’m fasting than when I’m eating any food at all. If I do eat, One Meal A Day (OMAD) is the best plan to feel pretty good. 

Anything more than one meal a day starts to lower my overall energy levels. 

What most people don’t understand is that it takes a lot of energy to digest food. If you overeat, it makes you tired because your body has a hard time dealing with too much food. You feel lousy and end up making yourself sick.

Once you get to the point where you’ve fasted for over 10 days, something happens within you that breaks your appetite. This is fantastic if you want to control your weight!

There’s also a weird catch to this. You’ll never be hungry again. You’ll also never feel fully satisfied by food again. Food won’t do it for you. You’ll want more Qi. 

Food will still taste good. You’ll probably still want to eat for the enjoyment of it. You’ll be free from having to eat if you don’t want to. 

I know,

This sounds unbelievable. 

But I’ve done it. I don’t have an appetite anymore and I feel much better while fasting. 

I eat because I enjoy the taste. I don’t have to eat because I get plenty of energy from Qigong. This gives me a nice flexibility to lose weight when I choose to and I actually feel so much better when I’m fasting than when I’m eating any food at all. If I do eat, One Meal A Day (OMAD) is the best plan to feel pretty good. 

Anything more than one meal a day starts to lower my overall energy levels. 

What most people don’t understand is that it takes a lot of energy to digest food. If you overeat, it makes you tired because your body has a hard time dealing with too much food. You feel lousy and end up making yourself sick.

In today’s video I talk about the standing Qigong posture.

The standing posture is a fundamental posture in Qigong. Many Qigong exercises and forms will be done from this posture. It’s the starting and ending point of a lot of Qigong. 

Just standing in this posture and doing nothing else is a simple form of Qigong. You can practice standing in this posture for 5-10 minutes at a time. Try it a few times a day and you’ll start to experience more Qi flow. 

The posture consists of:

• Standing with legs shoulder width apart. As you feel more comfortable, bring your feet together over time.
• Straightening your spine as much as possible. Experiment with standing against a wall with all of your back touching the wall to feel what a straight spine feels like.
  
• Tucking your stomach and your lower back in towards your spine while keeping the spine straight. Use one hand to push the stomach in and the other hand to push your lower back in towards your spine.
• Tuck your chin into your neck and raise the crown of your head up in a way that straightens your spine.
  
• Stand with your arms naturally bent slightly at your sides with your armpits open as if an orange were in each armpit.

At first this posture may seem unusual or even uncomfortable. The practice is to learn to relax in this position. After some practice, you will start to feel really good to stand this way!

The reason for this posture is to open up the energy flow in your body. The spine is your body’s energy highway. Energy flows better through a straight spine than through a bent spine. 

When doing Qigong in any posture, you will always want to straighten your spine as much as possible unless you are bending your spine as part of the movement. When standing or sitting you will always want to keep your spine straight so Qi flows more freely.

At the end of your session of standing in this posture, you can draw the energy that you’ve generated into your tan tien by lining the center of your palms up with the tan tien as I explained in yesterday’s post and demonstrated in today’s video. 

It’s important to practice in order to generate a lot of Qi. 

If you actually do this you will start to notice a difference. With some more practice you’ll have a ton of energy to get lots of stuff done without the need for much food. 

Look at what I did today without eating anything:

Day 2 happened on March 24th, 2020. I didn't eat any food and was busy working on building this website and recording videos throughout the day with only a few Qigong breaks

Here’s what I did during day 2:

It was a fantastic day! I practiced Qigong for 95 minutes. I was fairly busy and would have liked to do more Qigong, but I had plenty of energy doing my typical low end amount of Qigong. In my experience as long as I'm doing over 90 minutes of Qigong a day I can fast as long as I like without experiencing any difficulty. 

I'm building a new website to teach this information so it's taking more time to record and publish daily. As this process becomes more systematic I'll have more time to do Qigong as it will take less time to post each day.

Stay Tuned

The value of following this 21 day case study is that you're expanding your beliefs about what's possible. By learning what I'm going through you are discovering new possibilities for yourself. Simply by following this website alone you are learning something valuable each day that will serve you.

I'm intentionally following a process to teach this to you over time. One easy small lesson every day will accumulate to big results over time!

I'm very interested to see what your experience is with this information. Are you fasting yet? Did you try the standing posture for a few minutes? Leave a comment below with your thoughts about this post.