So it's Sunday. Ozempic day. I woke up around 8:00 a.m. after a pretty decent night sleep, made my way into the kitchen after making my bed and, of course, stopped off to pee. Brewed up my little five cup pot of coffee, pulled out my outrageously expensive dozen of eggs, cracked a couple of them into my electric skillet with an English muffin and got a little irritated that I had to pluck out a tiny piece of an eggshell from the gooey egg white before it became invisibly embedded as the egg cooked and I would have had to endure the unpleasantness of crunching into it later.
After my quick brekkie, I washed my dishes and plunked down the slab of defrosted pork meat from the fridge into the electric skillet rather than having to clean the pan of its breakfast butter figuring I'd fry it up in prep for lunch later on. As I did so, I immediately noticed these weren't pork chops. I read the package. Pork rib tips. It looked like incredibly tiny and very bony, very fatty, pork spare ribs.
I hate making pork spare ribs on the bone. And I especially know that you don't fry them in a skillet. Damn no wonder these were so cheap, this is what I call pretty much ghetto meat. I don't eat this. Rather than waste it though, I suspended its frying and threw it into my slow cooker with some dry rub seasonings and a squirt of barbecue sauce. But they had already fried up a little and I fear they probably will be tough, sinewy, and a pain in the ass to nibble off the bone.
Eating breakfast out of habit despite not really being hungry, plucking eggshells out of gooey egg whites, seeing unexpected gristle, bone, and fat hanging off of limp gray pork meat, I hadn't even taken my shot of Ozempic yet and I was already feeling nauseous. Why do I stuff my body with this crap?
I opened the fridge to take a quick assessment as I put the bottle of barbecue sauce back in there. A big pot of ziti, a package of hot dogs and several bowls of meatloaf. In the freezer, frozen pea soup, pork pot stickers, frozen pizza, frozen ravioli, and a big quart bucket of Blue Bunny mystery frozen dessert product made to simulate ice cream.
If I'm really going to sit my fat ass in some of these rides come the beginning of June, and let's face it that's my real freaking goal, I need to get a handle on this. To YouTube I go!
I didn't even need to search for it. It's like YouTube knew what I was looking for immediately. I swear, they got some chip in our brains now. Either that or Alexa can do more than listen, she's watching and Amazon is in cahoots with Google. Would it really surprise any of us in this day and age of absolute kookiness as the norm? Right there on my homepage, was this video:
So yeah I'm going to do it. 36-hour fast. Why not? Of course this video doesn't mention diabetes at all, in fact, it instructs the viewer as to what insulin is in a very basic way as if the viewer may never have heard of it. Something that would not be needed for any diabetic since we all very well know what insulin is, natural or artificial. There are other videos and tons of websites available to offer instruction for safe fasting for diabetics. But I'm just going to dive in. I mean come on, it isn't rocket science people. Drink water, and that's it. No food. Will I be hungry? Fuck yeah! But that'll pass, eventually, so they say. I do remember doing this back in BINT. Of course that was some 33 years ago now wasn't it. I also remember this stupid fad idea back near the start of this blog.
Join me on this little journey. I'll be posting here intermittently throughout this 36-hour period.
SUNDAY 10:30 a.m. Weight check: 295. Blood sugar: 116 despite the fact that a couple hours before I had just finished eating an English muffin with a tablespoon of butter, mayonnaise, and two eggs. That's the effect of all my oral drugs which I did take around 8:30 a.m. and my Ozempic which I shot up around 10 o'clock.
Dude in the video said it was okay to have coffee. I assume he means black coffee, no sugar, which is exactly what I drink anyway so that's what I'm having. But I'm also finishing up the last of my lemonade Crystal Light which I doubt he would allow since even though it's sugar free, it has the much-hated aspartame all health-people like to piss on. No matter. It's about 16 oz, then it'll be just regular tap water from here on out. I filled the jug with water, put it in the fridge, so it'll be nice and cool for multiple large glasses which I'm sure I will need a lot of to get me through what I figure will be some gnarly hunger pangs.
SUNDAY 11:38 a.m. Poopy time. Normal-ish. Not too solid, not too loose. Usual volume. Finished the Crystal Light, still have half a cup of coffee. No hunger, still full from breakfast. Slight headache but I've been getting them kinda regularly lately which is another reason I want to do this...too many unusual aches and pains everyday.
SUNDAY 11:54 a.m. I can really smell the ribblets in the crock pot now but it's not making me hungry. I'll continue slow cooking them 'till done, should be another four hours or so, then I'll let them cool and pack 'em up and shove 'em in the fridge for after the fast...after 9pm tomorrow...is that right? Yikes!
SUNDAY 1:29 p.m. Took my mid-day gabbies with the last of my five cups of black coffee. Yes, coffee was room temp after taking so many hours to drink it but that's what's nice about black coffee...not gross at different temperatures at all. BBQ smell wafting through the house, still no appetite tho.
SUNDAY 2:05 p.m. Ok, it's hilarious watching videos of people testifying their experiences of their fasting "journeys." So many are super "jazzed" like they've snorted a gram of coke or something before filming. Some of them getting into the whole sciency mumbo jumbo, others talking about how the process "tricks" the body into making it think you're in famine (dude, it's only a day...you're gonna survive...and your body "knows" that), one chick is talking how she, of course, sipped bone broth throughout....um, hate to tell you bitch, but that's not fasting. Also, I loved when she explained how she normally fasts 16 hours a day everyday anyways (she thinks having a dinner at 6pm, no snack, going to bed at 11pm, waking at 7am, having breakfast at 10am is a 16-hour fast, LOL!) These people be crazy!
SUNDAY 2:40 p.m. I checked on the rib tips and they looked done and so to be sure, I tasted the smallest fingertip sized sliver of meat. It was tender and cooked through, falling off the bone. I transferred them to a glass bowl, covered with foil and will let cool, then I'll stick in the fridge for tomorrow. They do taste good, I'm sure I'll enjoy them then. I do NOT consider this tiny taste a break of my fast. Be real.
SUNDAY 3:20 p.m. Getting a little hungry now. But it's okay. Got my water. Keeping up with that. I think I'll get a cup or two of herbal tea in a bit. I got this. <Looks at clock.> Yeah.
SUNDAY 5 p.m. Big hunger wave but after another 20 oz glass of water it passes. Also, persistent headache solved by taking two Tylenol which quickly dispatches it.
SUNDAY 7:34 p.m. Blood sugar: 74, BP: 131/75. Hunger not too bad. Hanging in there. Thinking of taking a nap though. I may skip glimepiride at 8pm since sugar is kinda low. I'll check on advice for diabetics fasting.
SUNDAY 8:57 p.m. Watching the movie "Fasting: The Healer Within" and though I get a lot of its positive and healthy message about the power of fasting and the science behind it, it really gets into some really weird areas like one scene where a follower of this fasting "guru" named Tyler talks about how she pulled worms out of her vagina and put them in a jar, in another scene, one of the brothers who are the featured fasters the documentary follows is getting a colonic and we see the poop being sucked through a plastic tube out his butt (yuck!) and now they're getting a therapy session where they're laying on the ground crying because after several days of fasting their emotions are so raw. This movie is kooky!
SUNDAY 9:30 p.m. I forgot to chart the exact time I ate breakfast but I figure I finished around 9:30 a.m. so now I figure I'm about at the 12-hour mark. Woo hoo! 24 hours to go! Oh lordy! I think I'll head off to bed.
MONDAY 7:01 a.m. BS: 101 BP: 116/73 Weight: 290 I woke up around 6:15 but finally got around to getting out of bed at 6:30 and assessed my situation. I feel fine. I had a good night's sleep: lots of dreams, very active and kind of weird dreams if I remember correctly, of course as usual, it's pretty hard for me to remember the actual content of the dreams, I'm not even going to try. I did get up about 2 or 3 times during the night to go pee. Nothing unusual there. One unusual thing is that I don't always get a full eight hours like this. It's usually much shorter, more in the range of five hours of sleep a night. So that's good because only sleeping a few hours each night tends to make me drowsy throughout the day causing me to need more and more naps potentially throwing off my sleep schedule and never allowing my body to fully heal itself, etc. etc. etc. More of the reasons why I'm doing this fast, to get things regulated and under control.
Now, am I starving? Um, no. Actually I'm not very hungry at all. My stomach feels kind of full like as if I had eaten before going to bed and I think I'm more sensitive now to the effects of Ozempic. The feeling of fullness. The slight feeling of a little bit of nausea. That's what I'm feeling. But I'll tell you, I didn't hesitate making my way to the kitchen to brew up my little five cup pot of coffee. That I could use! I just took my first sip now. Ahhh. But I'm noticing a little aftertaste. It's a little bitter. It's not due to the lack of the quality of the coffee, I know that's good coffee, I think it's this heightened sense of taste due to not eating for almost a full 24 hours. Ah, what do I know, I do know that I do have a alternate craving and that is to also, hopefully after I'm completed this coffee, to brush my teeth. There's like a stale taste in my mouth. Even though I brushed my teeth pretty well before going to bed last night.
When I opened the fridge for my water, I glanced at some raw carrots and celery which have been sitting there for the better part of the past week and I thought, "Well I know I can't eat at all today but there's nothing saying I can't cook." And, since this fast will end later tonight, kind of close to bedtime, I really don't want to pig out, I want to eat something light so I thought maybe a light chicken soup. So that's what I'm making in the Crock-Pot today. Its scent will be wafting through the house before noon. You know I have an essential oils mister, I could just load it up with some tea tree oil and be good with that rather than filling the air of my home with food smells but no I got to tempt fate. I got to dangle the almost literal carrot in front of me. I'll be fine. I think we're going to do this.