A Message From Babette

I have been once again delighted to the point of being overwhelmed by your reactions, words of encouragement, feedback on me following my intuition and remaining in charge of my own health, offers/ideas of meditation groups, cards, ideas of recipes, and that is without counting the flowers and other tokens of your thinking about me. There were also a number of questions which I will attempt to address now, especially as I have only managed to answer/acknowledge about half of all the emails I've received so far. Questions about why fasting, who said it was good, what do “the doctors” say and why 40 days. 

Starting backwards, the 40 days was advice from the French naturopath with whom I started my first long fast 2 years ago (I did 19 days then). I will start another one fairly soon after Christmas, with the aim of also doing a 3rd one before the end of 2021. My very first knowledge of fasting and it's benefits came in the form of a French Documentary in 2012, (sorry it is in French), Le jeûne : une nouvelle thérapie ? (Il digiuno: una nuova terapia? [sottotitoli in italiano]) which talked, amongst other things, about the findings of Dr Valter Longo and his findings on Fasting for Longevity and fasting to help with cancer.

I did my 1st fast, 2 days, before a chemo, 2 and ½ years ago, and thought I “could never do it”. I was in tears in the car with Andrew and Jeanne the day before fasting, and I was so sure I would fail that Andrew said he would fast with me to encourage me, and then Jeanne said “me too”. That has helped me start, and also the permission to self of not doing anything, not achieving anything, and just playing scrabble online for 48 hours.

I have since found out that the most difficult part of fasting is fear. Fear to skip breakfast, fear that we are going to flag, fear that we are endangering our health, to name just a few. But in nature, not only does it happen often, but some species fast when they mate, as they then have more strength, not less. My compatriots are quite strong on fasting and there's a plethora of 1 or 2 weeks sessions of “Jeune et Randonnees” (Fast and walk) all over France, or simply Fasting retreats with nutrition advice and support.

There is also a clinic in Germany, which has been doing medically supervised fasting for a 100 years, and they advocate 4 weeks for “heavy pathologies” BUCHINGER WILHELMI - Therapeutic fasting & integrative medicine (buchinger-wilhelmi.com). This last one I am very tempted to go to, but it costs an arm and a leg, and above all, Covid is a deterrent as for the 1st week I would have to be isolating in my room, hence I might choose to do my next one solo again.

I shared last week how I was sent to a very vulnerable place some 2 weeks ago, but my experience of fasting is generally not only not too difficult but even easy often. My understanding of this is that when we are fasting, our bodies are not starved, they just get the food somewhere inside, and so the hunger disappears. What happened to me this time round was compounded by medicine I was taking to begin with (for pains that actually disappeared after 6 or so days of fasting), and 2 scans on the same day on day 10, each with a huge amount of chemical intake on an empty stomach… won’t be doing that again ;)

What was very difficult, and actually, I only did it for 2 days, was to eat just 1 meal a day! Wow, my body appeared to go straight into “IT’S SPRING, FEED ME” after my first salad and I was starving and ended up definitely overeating in the evenings. I could see this didn’t work for me, remembered that the reason for the 1 meal a day was to avoid putting all the weight back on, whilst my aim today is not to lose weight, but is to starve the cancer. So, I remembered the SMART objectives we often talk about in business where A stands for Achievable and concentrated on eating the right food. I am pleased to say that I feel I have found a way, and basically, I eat very Low GI food, so I do not generate hunger much… I had shed well over 2 stone, but have put 7lbs back on, and remember reading somewhere that most of us carry 4 to 6lb of stuff in our digestive system at any one point. So, I am very happy with feeling satisfied both in my energy levels and in eating really yummy food and to have “only” put on 3 lbs after 2 days of binge eating.

Re Meditation, I always knew it was good for you, but the penny dropped 2 days ago as to why. I went to have a craniotherapy session and the lady doing it said “Healing happens when we are still” … of course, we need our Sympathetic system (fight or flight) to be still, so that the Parasympathetic can restore calm and that is when the body repairs itself. In a society where we never stop, always have our phones on (I’m working on my dependency to my phone) then our restorative system never has a chance to do its healing job.

Onwards and upwards.

Babette