I Can Work With

My colleague put his finger in his trousers and showed me just how much superfluous circumference he’d done away with.  “I eat whatever I want during the day.  As long as I keep the hours I eat to, to an eight-hour period and stick to only coffee and water for the other times, I activate my body to convert fat to energy.  You have to do away with milk.  I can’t have milk in my coffee in the morning.  But you get used to it.  It’s not so bad.  And otherwise, it’s all rather straight forward.  I lost twenty pounds in just one month.  It’s been remarkable.”  And I couldn’t help but notice his eyes on my own waist line as he said all this.

I mentioned earlier that is the second person who has told me about this regimen.  I was perhaps mildly intrigued the first time someone mentioned it but this time, it was all lodged rather more deeply.  Perhaps it’s just that it’s good timing.  It’s on my mind.  I’m not exactly in the mood to cutout every last bit of starch and stick to that.  Moderation is never my strong suit, but abstinence, I can work with. 

Today I decided to look up precisely what this was and discovered that there is, of course, lots of literature on what people have taken to calling Intermittent Fasting.  What my colleague had been describing is one approach, and indeed, something seems to happen in one’s body after a certain number of hours have been covered without any food intake.  There is one where you are supposed to go twenty four hours without food.  That seems a bit harder, certainly.  Harder and yet manageable, surely.

I think of Gandhi, as one does, when one considers serious fasting.  There’s someone who was willing to fast to death for a cause.  Just a bit of juice and water.  How many days did the Mahatma go for to stop Hindu-Muslim violence?  How many days did the hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 go before they appeared on TV with Li Peng?  I’m not sure I’m cut from the same cloth as all that  But skipping breakfast, and making it to a late lunch?  I should be able to manage.

Sunday, 8/26/18