Water Fasting – Healing Journey Day 3

Journal:
Well, after being so tired yesterday, I expected to be as tired today. I didn’t go to sleep until after midnight, so I set four alarms to  make sure I got up this morning. Sadly to say, for whatever reason, I woke up wide awake at 4:00 a.m. Of all the things that could happen, I wake up at 4:00. I didn’t wake up starving nor dying of thirst, but completely was wide awake. It makes no sense to me.

So what did I do at 4:00 in the morning? I decided it was time to consume some water. Sadly, it didn’t come with the fireworks I was expecting. It was good, but I honestly think of could have done dry fasting for another day. However, since I work with students, I don’t want to take the risk of being completely active all day long and not have my body running on anything. So breaking into my water fast is the process I’ve begun.

So what did it actually feel like to drink water again? It puts me in a hesitant state. I’m not sure my body is fully accepting it to be honest. I feel like there is a possibility of running to the washroom at some point and also a possibility of vomiting the water back up. It’s unsettling for sure. My energy is not where I want it to be; it’s not as good as last night, but not as bad as yesterday morning so I began praying early to survive the day.

Thankfully, I did survive the day with only one person commenting on how tired I looked. I also was yawning a lot when she said it, so that was a clue.

I couldn’t drink very much in the morning. In fact, though I had imagined I would be guzzling water throughout the day, I really don’t think my body was ready for too much water. It almost “hurt” my stomach without actually being painful. But around midday, water began to go down easier (6 hours past the initial sip). The feeling in my stomach is gone for the most part though food does sound good. It was a test to go through two snack times and a lunch period sitting with my students while all of them are eating. The smells are what got to me the most. But somehow, I still found it fairly easy to bypass the food they were eating and the emergency stash I have by my desk.

Following school, I had a meeting with a parent. It was a positive meeting and the mother was so wonderful, she even brought me a bag of tomatoes from her garden. Oh, how I would LOVE to eat those tomatoes. But since it will be quite awhile until I will be eating tomatoes, I am looking at options of either buying a dehydrator to dehydrate them or perhaps finding a method of canning. I am sticking with this journey 100% and not willing to skip stages. I’m holding out well.

Once the meeting was over, I came home and took a nap. It felt so good to take a nap though I freaked out when I woke up thinking it was 7:30 in the morning and I was going to be late for work. It took a few minutes to sink in that it was only 7:30 at night and that everything was going to be ok.

It took awhile for me to get up because I was very cold. I am finding that my body is reacting more extremely to temperatures. For example, when my heater is on, even on the lowest setting, I am pretty warm, almost too warm for blankets. But when the heater is off and the basement gets the cool feeling again, I start freezing so much I cannot even fathom getting out from the blankets. I’m having a hard time finding a happy medium at the moment and I’m hoping this will sort itself out.

I did go to the gym today though I was heavily debating whether I should or not, especially after feeling so tired all day. However, I’ve been working out for years, so I figured that I cannot completely stop now. Aside from cardiovascular benefits, I considered the fact that exercise might actually help me feel warm again after feeling cold for awhile. It worked, and I actually was stronger than I though I would by cycling on a stationary bike. My pace was much slower than normal, but I wasn’t about to make this an all-out sweating session, but rather just a health activity.

So now it is the end of the day and I’m in bed, about to go to sleep. I am so looking forward to only two more days of water fasting and finally getting to drink fruit juice on Thursday. I’m hoping that the lemon slices I’ll be adding to my water on Wednesday will give my body a little energy kick with the most minimal of calories but still something compared to nothing.

Review of symptoms:
This morning, my face actually had a sign of improvement: there were no new pimples! Almost every morning I’ve had at least one new one if not several. Perhaps my body has had enough time cycling everything on the inside without having outside substances to deal with that it is able to concentrate on healing my acne. This is good news for me! My energy is lacking; not horribly like yesterday morning, but not as awesome as last night. I was also shaky again this morning and though it is certainly not as bad as yesterday, it is definitely noticeable. Though I wasn’t able to drink much in the morning, it picked up throughout the day. In total, I think I drank about 1.25-1.5L of water today. Much less than expected, but not bad for my body to adjust to. My body is reacting to temperatures in extreme ways and I’m really hoping this will sort itself out. Something I didn’t expect but totally noticed today was that my teeth are whiter! I haven’t done anything special. In fact, I’ve just been using my clay toothpaste. But the yellow tinge they had before starting my fasting is almost completely gone and they are looking pretty white. This is an exciting side effect!

Weight at the end of the day: 185.4 (down .2 lbs from yesterday, a total of 3.6 pounds lost in 48 hours)

Total Calories = 0

I Prayed for 10 Years, and God Answered

Sometimes in life, there are things we don’t know how to approach. There are people we want to say things to to, but for some reason can’t find the right words. Sometimes, they can be missed opportunities that are missed out of fear. Sometimes, they are missed because we keep waiting for something or someone else to bring up the topic so that we have an opportunity to put in our heartfelt words that we need to say. Some people unfortunately underestimate the amount of time that is available for some things to be said.

For years I have been trying to get enough courage or find the right moment to talk to my father about God; about my views on God and trying to find out exactly where he’s at. My father believes in God, absolutely. But after learning about how awesome it is to be a child of God, that you can openly talk to God as a friend and call him Father, Papa, or even Daddy if you’d like, it left me in a state of uneasiness seeing my dad only ever refer to Him as things like “The Man Upstairs”. I didn’t get a sense of owning God, of realizing that God loved Him. But how do I bring up such a sensitive topic with my own father? I know, I know. Some of you would say that I should love my father enough to bring it up regardless, but just pause for a moment. This is my father. I care about him more than the average person I would meet and talk about God with. I don’t want to mess it up. I don’t want him to ask questions I don’t know the answer to. If I want to talk about it, I want to do it right, and there were not enough rehearsals to ever make me feel prepared.

But God changed that this summer.

Now, I think part of the reason is I had to tell my family I had turned vegan. They were used to me being vegetarian before, so in reality, vegan wasn’t much more of a step. They took the news a lot better this time than they did originally when I turned vegetarian, so I’m assuming I had them “warmed-up” for the big change.

Because I had to tell my family I was vegan, Dad asked me why I made the switch this time. I loved this question! I had the opportunity to tell my dad about the health benefits of being vegan and how much better it is. I didn’t go into incredible details of the effects on animals because my dad wasn’t there yet. But what did surprise me was one of the responses he did give me, which was simply this: “I could probably live without meat. But I guess my thing is I don’t want to. I love my steak.”

Now I know, there are definitely some people in the vegan community who would start criticizing my dad right away. I have heard and seen all the criticisms that could be used against his statement. But just hold on a second, after all, I know my dad better than you.

His statement was honest. He didn’t lie about it, he didn’t make excuses, he told the truth. He even admitted (for the first time ever) that he could probably live without meat! How big of a reality is that! This, coming from a man who literally grew up on the vegetables his mother grew in the garden, and the meat his father hunted in the woods. Even to this day, the family gets together to share moose meat if someone wins their moose license. It’s a way for them to save money and stock up the food supplies for the winter. Remember, New Brunswick’s economy is not huge by any means. And, if you think of it that way, he didn’t even go off listing a whole bunch of meats he couldn’t live without, he said one – steak. Now, I don’t support the killing of animals, I really don’t. But if he could even stop eating all other meats and only have steak once in awhile, that still saves lives! There is room for progress! So anyways, you can feel my excitement and hopefully understand it over that reply.

So I don’t know if it was because he was already asking me why I eat the way I eat or what, but he then asked me a question I have been waiting YEARS to answer, and that was about my faith. Now he didn’t ask an open-ended question such as what I believe, but he kind of asked in a weird way how my beliefs were compared to Catholicism. Now I can’t claim that he was questioning Catholicism, but I can say that he NEVER would have asked me this before. In fact, when I was baptized Seventh-day Adventist, my grandparents (his parents) told me I was playing with religions and that you should stick to the one you were born into. They are very set in following traditions which is also what the Catholic church holds onto, so I always saw my father having the same mindset.

Regardless, he opened up.

I asked him to clarify a little, and he basically asked if my beliefs had Saints like the Catholic church does, or if we pray to Mary, or those kinds of things. Now, imagine my heart bursting wide open at this point. Again, he may not be questioning things about the Catholic church that I don’t believe in, but it almost sounds like he is! So I just say no, and explain that everything we believe comes straight out of the Bible, and that we did have a “prophet” within the last century who passed all the tests as provided by the Bible as to how to recognize a true prophet or not, and though we don’t worship her or praise her, we do use her inspired teachings/writings as a deeper way to understand some of the confusing things in the Bible. After all, the Bible was written by God-inspired people. So it does make sense that somebody could have been chosen to be inspired by God again, which is why they conducted the Bible’s prophet tests on her to make sure she was truly being led by God. And I continued to explain to him that of course the Bible comes first, that we always pray to God, and that we do also believe in the Trinity: God (Father), Jesus (Son), and the Holy Spirit. But I told him (to emphasize the point) that everything we (or at least I) try to believe has to be based in the Bible, as tricky as that can be sometimes.

I’m not sure how my dad took all of that. It definitely wasn’t everything I wanted to say, but it was enough for the situation we were in. I wish I could say my dad said we’d continue the conversation later, but he didn’t. Mind you, we were in a busy situation, but I’m holding onto the fact that I’m praying God used that moment to plant seeds in my dad’s heart and mind. I’m praying that my dad will realize the greater relationship he could have with God than I think he does. I want that so bad for my dad, but as many of us know, if you push things, the person will usually retract. So for now, I’m being thankful God gave me that opportunity after so many years and will continue to pray that maybe Dad will ask me about things again so I can dive a little more into the personal relationship side of things. I’m still in awe that God did this for me, even though it has taken 10 or so years. God does answer prayer, that’s a fact.

So to end on a little extra happy note, my step mother and I have never talked about religion. I don’t really know her religious background… it’s just not usually a subject that is brought up. But even when I was driving around with her doing errands, she brought it up. And our conversation focussed more on whether the school I taught at accepted students of all walks of life, or if they could only be of our religion. We talked about how students from all walks of life do come to my school, but we don’t bend our beliefs based on theirs because they are choosing to pay and come to our school for some reason. She was curious how I taught my Bible classes, and I told her that I do respect the feelings and beliefs of all of my students, but that I’m not going to tell them to be sheep. I don’t just want them to believe things because I tell them to, because at one point, we all question what we believe. I want them to know why they believe what they believe with evidence, straight out of the Bible in black and white. I also told her that if they end up asking me a question about something I don’t know, I don’t ignore it. I either search out the answer myself, or we study it together as a class.

For example, this year my students were not into studying the life of Christ, something they’ve more or less covered since attending church as infants, but they wanted to know about the end times, about the dragon of Revelation, about what to expect. So you know what I did? Tossed my plans, and we started studying Revelation together. It was the most rewarding decision I could have made. Yes, there is some scary stuff in that book, but my students came from that book knowing so much better what to expect, what is going on in our lives, and how God is fighting for them every step of the way, wanting to protect them from every evil that is here and will come. They knew that things might get difficult for them, but that they shouldn’t fear as long as they put God first because ultimately, God is victorious and he is holding them in His hands the whole time.

I mentioned this in another blog, but it still blows my mind that two of my students who do not attend a church and do not come from religious families wrote to me at the end of the study, one saying that he had listened more than he ever thought he would, taking notes more than he ever had before, and the other saying how he’s not baptized (with a sad face) but knowing that he can do anything through the power of Christ and knowing that he can have a personal relationship with God was such good news to him. I mean, how much more powerful does it get than that! The students had questions, and God provided me the opportunity to learn and study with them. What an awesome way to be used by God!

So anyways, I guess if I can sum this up I would say, don’t be impatient. God’s timing is so much better than ours could ever be. And don’t give up. I mean, 10 years was a long time to wait for my opportunity to talk with my dad, but it came from his curiosity and not me preaching at him – 10 years, and God answered my prayer. So know that God does answer prayers. It may not be in the time you want, it may not be quite the answer you want, but God is always listening, and He will answer you.

Teaching: What They Say Is True

Teaching is the only job (and I’ve been reminded of it a lot lately) where it can take more work to call in sick than to actually go to work.

It was a long weekend, so I had time to prepare for Tuesday, not that it was an easy task, but it got done. Wednesday morning, I felt mildly better, but knew I should probably still call in sick. But, I couldn’t wrap my mind around getting sub plans done and hence, decided to toughen up and go to work. What a mistake!

Besides the fact I was coughing all day, slowly losing my voice (albeit very slowly), and sweating as well as feeling miserable, I somehow managed to survive the day. The only thing was, I had a funny feeling I was sabotaging my recovery by pushing myself throughout the day. So I did the smart thing, and prepared sub plans throughout the day and finished them after school before coming home.

I really wasn’t sure if I had made myself worse or not, so I simply laid out the sub plans, wrote a few letters to some students that I had to ask questions to and didn’t get the chance, and instructed a student to make sure a couple things got done incase the sub forgot. Everything was in place, just incase. I did not ask for a sub yet, just incase.

Of course, this morning I wake up so tired. I had awoken several times throughout the night coughing up a storm. My throat felt like it had gravel stuck in it and dry as a desert at the same time. At times, I was coughing so hard, tears were running down my face. There was absolutely no way I was going to work and I definitely did damage going to work yesterday.

But the good news was, I didn’t have to worry about sub plans again because they were already done, so I couldn’t talk myself out of going: the looming task was done! And now I’m at home, taking medicines, both natural and over-the-counter, trying to recover and finally kick whatever it is that I have. After waking up this morning (from coughing again) and messaged my VP that I needed a sub, I managed to fall back asleep (fell asleep before saying good-bye to my husband because I was so exhausted) and slept for a few solid hours. I’m tired again already, but I at least don’t have to worry about anything except getting better. Sometimes you just need time to rest and recover.

Week 11 Day 1: Double Time!

The good news? My husband woke up feeling much better! The bad news? I didn’t sleep well. I tried sleeping on the couch downstairs so that I wasn’t face-to-face with whatever my husband had. But between this one housefly that would not leave my ear alone, and the dogs whining, I ended up dragging myself upstairs around 3 a.m. and getting “ok” sleep from then on. Sometimes it would be so much easier if dogs could just talk in a language we could understand. Ugh.

So today, I spent quite a bit of time doing laundry and house cleaning again. However, since I had missed the gym so much already, it was my goal to get to the gym twice today. Somehow, I succeeded.

My husband was in no shape to go to the gym today, especially since he was still recovering from yesterday. So he simply dropped me off at the gym after we ate some Booster Juice together. There is a Booster Juice in my gym, so it was all done in one stop.

My first workout was a legs workout. And oh man, did I raise the weight on almost everything. I pushed hard! And I was loving it. I remember a time when I used to DREAD leg workouts with every ounce of my being, and more and more, I’m noticing how much I actually enjoy them! It’s funny how things change!

After my leg workout, my husband came and picked me up. We went to a Japanese restaurant that was recommended by his journeyman. I was so excited, did not order sushi but instead had a bento box with vegetable tempura, rice, steamed sprouts and teriyaki chicken. I couldn’t finish it. It was so SALTY! I’m not sure if this is typical of Japanese food or not, but seriously, I left with a salty headache, craving sugar or anything that would cut that salty feeling.

After we ate, I had my husband dropped me off at the gym again. I felt fairly good after we ate, so I figured I might as well go and get it done.

The second workout was much harder. It was a chest workout and I could tell my energy was draining much faster. I also did a second round of 25 minutes of steady state cardio afterwards (first time was after my leg workout) and by the end, I knew I needed food, fast. My husband unfortunately forgot to bring the food I asked him to bring when he picked me up, so we made a pitstop on the way home and I loaded up on a huge chicken wrap (protein and minimal fat), a doughnut ( quick carb-loading!), and a nice iced coffee to add back some energy. This actually backfired on me because I think the caffeine kept me awake. I went from barely being able to stay awake to not being able to fall asleep. Oops.

It was a good day, and although two workouts was a lot for one day, I feel accomplished and my mind is happy. That’s a good way to end the day.