Day 24
263.25 hrs
Would you look at that! With 13.5 hours of listening tracked today, I’ve shot past 250 hours. Alas, that is just a guiding number and I already know that I want to break down more. I was quite intimidated to reach even that number when I first started, given that I thought that it would be difficult to reach even 8 hours a day. However, the ultrasonic has proven unbelievably useful in allowing me to accumulate hours while doing other activities.
There are a few things here and there over the past few days that I’ve noticed that I can and will improve upon. I may be a pushover in someways. Correcting those, I will do. I am already anticipating that the Total Programming phase (ST2) is going to go on longer than originally planned—and that’s okay because:
- I truly do want to reprogram myself and change a lot. I’ve tried consciously changing some of these behaviors over the years. I have had results although I am not at my desired state yet. I say this while also aware of the fact that goalposts have been both refined and shifted as I’ve improved.
- I’m not in a rush as I originally dedicated this entire year to 1 sub, now to the four stages
- The current listening rate demonstrates that I can accumulate many hours in much less time than expected; at my current rate, I’ll reach 500 hrs of ST1 by the end of the month!
One change that I want to make right now is how I talk about fasting. You see, fasting has played a gigantic role in my life in recent history. I changed practically all my beliefs around food thanks to a combination of different kinds of fasting (especially intermittent fasting) in recent history; I don’t even perceive of hunger anymore, at least not in the way most people do. These changes led me last year to defeat the longstanding issue of obesity in my life. I have reaped many benefits from it. So sometimes I like to talk about fasting a lot. Do I need to with everyone, though? Get this:
In a discussion of the recent virus outbreak, I suggested that a solution to the problem may be to do a 3-day fast (which is known to reset the entire immune system). The coworkers next to me saw this mention coming and laughed before I mentioned the solution, and I did become aware at that moment that I do tend to bring up fasting a lot and it can be comical at times. Later that day these people did make a few jokes involving me and fasting. I recognize that it’s all in good fun, but it does make me think: do I need to continue to talk about IF, and do I need to do so with these people?
These are coworkers that I’ve known for a while, and they’ve heard about fasting from me for some time now. I’ve already shared most of my introductory/onboarding type content about fasting. Certainly, with both my visible results as well as the recent push of IF into the mainstream consciousness, I don’t feel the need to be secretive about it as I used to be. Still, I clearly know in my circle of people who is fasting-minded and who isn’t; take for contrast another friend, who lost 40 pounds after I got him to start doing OMAD. Bringing up fasting with my coworkers isn’t going to be particularly productive as I can see.
Perhaps the discussion of fasting may be moved elsewhere. There are other people I can talk with about fasting that’ll actually go somewhere—be it some closer friends or the fasting communities that I’m a part of (I even formed one that has multiplied in size since its creation, though it hasn’t been very active as of late).
Another possibility is that I could just drop it altogether, and I can just redirect my energy to other things. The practice itself is deeply ingrained which is great for me. As noted earlier, perhaps I’ve been trying to play the role of savior which could motivate some of these discussions. Or it could be that I’m just passionate about a topic that is admittedly somewhat of a niche!
What I want to do is clear: stop bringing it up at work, and be mindful of when I bring it up elsewhere (the latter part is mostly done). I already see that there are plenty of other things that I can redirect my thinking towards—Khan ST1 has given a lot to chew on. Some combination of things will have to replace fasting as a conversational point, I suppose!
. Sure, I may not know their language as much (it’s a second language, not English). However, my sibling knows as much as I do yet he can talk more and freely when it comes to these surprise phone calls. Why is that? A little bit of thinking and I quickly deduce that the answer is a combination of a few things: