Water fasting, a seven-day experiment

Water fasting is a type of fasting where nothing but water is consumed over a specific time. The reasons why people might go through a period of fasting are many, but they usually span the health/spiritual spectra.

I'm planning a seven-day water fast between the morning of the 27th of December and the morning of the 3rd of January. It's an experiment.

These are some of my reasons for doing this:

• On the eve of the 26th, I will be coming home from visiting my family in Sweden. I will have generally been consuming too much food and I will probably feel bloated and over-stimulated. This happens every time I'm visiting my family and is mostly due to me not saying no when being offered hospitality. It would be good to balance myself, to properly "detox", from all that, both mentally and physically. I realize this is not a good way of starting a fast, but I will none the less give it a go.
• I'd like to see what happens to my meditation practice and my state of mind in general during an extended fasting period. I've done half-hearted two-day fasts before on a couple of occasions and I've generally found them to be beneficial in terms of calming and centring my state of being.
• I'd like to observe my body's reaction to the fasting and it will be interesting to have to deal with physical craving.
• Although I'm at home, I'm on holiday, and I will be on my own for this period, which makes it a perfect week for trying an experiment like this. It's also, I think, a good way of starting a new year.
• Notice the absence of a weight-loosing reason. I cycle to work to stay fit (32 km/day) and we don't even own a bathroom scale.

I aim at having a daily schedule that might look something like this:

• Rise at 05:50 for meditation at 06:00 for about one hour or slightly more (this is my usual routine during any working day in any case). This is the only thing that I need to do every day, apart from drinking water.
• At 08:00, or whenever I've had a shower, I will take a walk for about one hour. There's a nice walk by the river Cam into town and back that I'm thinking about doing every day. At this time of day, at this time of the year, I'm not expecting too many people to be out and about (but we'll see). The walk is for exercise and it will enable me to monitor my energy levels.
• Most of the rest of the day will be free time, but I will probably have a nap at some point in the afternoon and I might meditate if that's what feels right.
• At 21:00 or whenever I decide it's getting late, I'll sit in meditation for another hour.
• I'll aim at being in bed at 22:00, but I'm happy if I get an average of eight hours of sleep a night.

I'll try to drink about four litres of water each day.

Oh, and since I'm not planning on turning this into a fasting blog, I will probably not report on daily progress.

Sleep well.


[First photo by sriram on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sriram/ / CC BY-NC 2.0]
[Second photo by scribe on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scribe/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]