I hope that you’ve been following along. I’ve been writing about the top ten changes I’ve made in my life that have contributed to my incredible transformation.
My first, “How to Change Your Life,” was about water.
My second was titled “Be a sexy, smelly animal” and was about personal care.
This post, the third instalment in the series, is about a controversial topic. I’m going to share my journey with fasting.
But first, a tiny bit of context. Fasting simply means choosing to willingly go for periods without consuming food.
Several very popular methods of fasting exist today. One is the 16:8, whereby people fast for at least 16 hours a day and only eat during an 8-hour window.
Another is the 5:2. On the 5:2, people consume very few calories for two days of the week and eat normally the other 5.
Finally, water fasting is gaining popularity. Simply put, this means going for several days without any food at all.
This isn’t going to be an email about the science and health benefits of fasting.
Instead, I will tell you my fasting story and give you some ‘food for thought’ regarding this practice.
Let’s go back a few years to where this story began. It was 2017. I was living my absolute best life. My career was flying. I was Australia’s First Professional Instagrammer, and emails flooded my inbox daily with life-changing opportunities.
A fully paid trip to Bhutan? Yes, please. A chance to work with the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation as its first influencer partnership. A dream come true. I was being featured everywhere in the media, the money was pouring in, and my follower count continued to climb. (Almost to the half-a-million mark at one stage.)
Hiking in Bhutan with Melissa Findley, 2017.
Unfortunately, not every single part of my life was as successful as my career. And one part in particular was almost as bad as it had ever been – my health.
I was doing no exercise whatsoever, practising zero mindfulness, and my approach to diet was, “Say yes to all the things before this crazy ride stops.” It was not uncommon to sit down to a two-hour post-sunrise breakfast accompanied by pastries and two cappuccinos, followed by a two-to-three-course lunch and a three-course dinner with wine. And I’m talking about the best cafes, restaurants, and eateries, too.
My clients paid for all. (Not forgetting the little treats left on my pillow in every five-star hotel I stayed in, welcome cheese plates, business class meals when I flew and all the extras I ordered for the “photographs”.)
Just a few chocolates for the “photograph”, Red Cacao 2016.
This complete lack of regard for my health was taking a toll physically. I looked swollen and uncomfortable. I couldn’t do many of the physical activities in my itineraries without struggling, and I felt lethargic and slow. My weight continued to climb.
And then, one day, out of the blue, I received a random email that changed my life. It was from the assistant of a popular Australian entrepreneur – Kerwin Rae. The email was light on details, but it was a podcast invitation I would need to fly to Sydney for at my own expense.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have ever entertained something like that. My clients paid for me and paid me. But my intuition kicked in. My gut said, do it. During a quick research on Google, I stumbled across a dreadful advertorial article that Kerwin had done for Australian online publication Mamma Mia.
As much as the piece was dreadful, my attention was captured by what he shared about intermittent fasting. He said that after abstaining from food for the appropriate window, he broke his fast daily like a “king”. I’m curious if my memory has that right. I remember the phrase quite clearly because it spoke to me. (Alas, it is no longer on their site). I wanted to lose weight and have more energy, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE food. Was there a way I could still eat like a “king” and be healthy?
At any rate, I didn’t have much to lose by that point, and I began practising intermittent fasting that very week, downloading an app to track my successful fasts.
It worked! The weight began to fall off me. So much so that I had already lost weight before I got to the podcast recording a few months later.
Recording for Kerwin’s podcast, 2018.
Eventually, I stabilised at an effortless size 12. Not only that, but I seriously ate whatever I wanted in my eating window. I took the words “eat like a king” to heart.
Stabilising at a size 12, December 2018.
I regularly discussed it on my social media and dismissed anyone who told me that fasting didn’t work for them. It clearly worked, and it was easy!
I fasted for a minimum of 16 hours a day for three years straight. My fasting app had me on a streak of over 900 consecutive fasts. I religiously updated it – stopping and starting my fasts daily. Some days, I would sit and watch it tick over to the 16-hour mark, my meal already in front of me because I was so ravenously hungry.
On other days, I would absentmindedly realise I’d been fasting for 20 hours and still wasn’t hungry.
I fasted across extreme time zone changes. I fasted throughout my entire pregnancy with Makia despite suffering terrible morning sickness in the first trimester (when a piece of toast in my stomach would have gone a long way.)
I fasted WHILE I GAVE BIRTH – depriving my body of the energy it needed to bring a human being into the world. There were no grey areas in the world of fasting for me. I fasted for a minimum of 16 hours a day. Every. Single. Day.
In hindsight, this might have been avoided if I had any fuel in my body, giving birth to Makia in 2020.
Until I woke up one day and realised that it might be possible that I had a little bit of anxiety around food.
Fasting had become just another way to disconnect from my body and unconsciously punish myself.
I decided to see a psychologist for the sole purpose of working on my issues around food, eating, dieting, and body dysmorphia once and for all. During our first session, he asked that I stop fasting while we worked together to get myself back to a place where I could understand my hunger cues and eat for the right reasons. I stopped fasting that very day.
He was great to work with. We covered a lot of ground in our time together. It wasn’t long, ten sessions over less than six months. It was right around the time that Phhnix was taking off, and I was feeling the pressure to have all my shit figured out.
I was juggling a toddler, a seven-figure business, and the idea that successful people were thin, healthy, mindful, and powerful—think Tony Robbins, but a woman. That was my benchmark. That’s who I thought I needed to be. No pressure.
I started to work on my emotions, and I vividly remember complaining to him that I was a forty-year-old woman who didn’t know what emotions were. I began to understand why I ate so much (to regulate my nervous system), why I ate so fast (food scarcity stories) and why I didn’t have a clue how to enjoy my food (not a lot of self-love going on.) He even asked me to stop looking at myself in the mirror for a spell because the commentary/ self-talk was always negative.
Learning about food and emotions on a whiteboard. The shame I felt was terrible. January 2022.
I paid attention to my eating habits during this time. I noticed that I started eating early in the morning just because I was preparing food for Makia, not because I was hungry.
I inevitably started to gain weight again, nothing like before, but still something. I observed how many food ‘rules’ I still had – if I ate X, I wouldn’t be able to eat Y later. It was confronting and confusing, and I didn’t reach any major resolution that year.
However, I did nourish myself much better during my pregnancy with William and into birth and postpartum. That felt good.
Life carried on, and intuitive eating continued to feel elusive. I put quite a bit of weight on after having William, and I ate mindlessly most of the time. Most of what I did was mindless during that time. As if postpartum isn’t confronting enough without simultaneously wrapping up a business amongst unprecedented amounts of stress and threat. I honestly spent most of 2022 and 2023 in fight or flight, wondering if I’d ever feel good again.
A stressful time. 2023.
And then one day, exactly one year ago today, in fact, I dragged my sorry ass to the beach with an aim to change my life. Two weeks later, I created and started my Awareness Journal Practice. And then I did The Spiral. Bit by bit, I overhauled my life and set about creating the habits of the person I wanted to be.
My beach journey begins. This is on the top ten list, don’t you worry. 2023.
I looked inward and asked myself if fasting was for me, and ultimately, I decided to give it another chance. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I’ve never been someone who wakes up hungry. It takes some time in the morning for my appetite to ramp up, and nine times out of ten, I eat breakfast only because everyone else is.
Similarly, if I eat a satisfying late lunch, I never feel hungry for dinner, but I still often sit down to a full meal just because everyone else is. I decided the time was right to let my body guide me for a change.
I started practising 16:8 again in January this year. I regularly fast for 16-hour windows, but once a week, I might feel hungry earlier and eat.
I notice how hungry I can get around the full moon, and I indulge my appetite with longer eating windows and a higher calorie count. Not that I count calories – something I’ll talk about in more detail during this series. (Not today.)
My hunger has changed significantly. Before, my hunger could come on fast and furious and demand to be fed. I’d get anything I could inside of me and not even remember the eating process once it was over.
Nowadays, my hunger comes on slowly and pleasurably. It’s not a sharp craving, more like a gentle reminder that it’s time to do that thing I love. I have enough space to ask – what would deeply nourish me at this time, and enough time to indulge that desire even if it requires a trip to the shops.
Intuitive eating feels divine.
Well, nine times out of ten. Now and again, I slip back into old habits. I’ll find myself stretching a fast for too long because of some arbitrary on-the-spot food ‘rule – I ate chocolate last night, so I need to fast for longer.
Or I’ll find myself out and about without food and buy something crap at the shops that makes me hungrier rather than satisfied. Just this past weekend I got so hungry that Dreamboat dropped everything to whip me up some scrambled eggs – cooking them a second time for himself because he was rushing to feed the monster that used to be his wife.
But mostly, I practice fasting with grace and love for myself and my body because fasting feels good. It gives my body an all-important break from the work of digestion. It increases my mental clarity. It allows me to access my intuition in larger ways because I now intuitively eat. I am safe in my body. I have created safety through my work on myself and my beautiful daily practices.
Fasting is now a reward to myself.
I eat food that is deeply, deeply nourishing. I feel like a goddam alchemist as I stand at my cupboards and reach for the hemp seeds to sprinkle over my rice or the vanilla pods I keep for special recipes. I even sit down and savour my food these days. I feel so blessed and abundant to have access to such a bounty of food and ingredients.
You name it, I’ve got it. 2024.
There is a wealth of research and information being done on fasting, and the consensus seems to be that it is safe, it is anti-aging, and it can help with a plethora of health complaints—insulin resistance, inflammation, cancer … basically everything.
It’s not appropriate to advise you to start fasting.
However, I hope my story has given you many ideas about your approach to eating. Whether you decide to fast or not, learning the difference between psychological hunger (fast-acting, emotional, intense) and physiological hunger (develops over time, more satisfying, feeling satiated for longer) is a wonderful rabbit hole to explore.
Once I dealt with my stress levels, heightened emotional states (anxiety, mostly) and nervous system dysregulation, I found myself returning to physiological hunger for the first time in my life. And it does feel damn good.
I’m looking forward to testing my limits with fasting once my baby-making and breastfeeding years are behind me. I feel safe enough in my self and my inner knowing to go there now. And for that I am grateful.
Oh, and not that it matters at all to me, but I’m a size 8 for the first time since I was a teenager, and I still eat:
Bread
Chocolate
Pasta
Pizza,
And anything else I damn please.
Loving myself, 2024.
I love myself. And I love you.
Lauren X
**Originally published to my email database on the 26th of September, 2024**
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