Here's where I'm coming from: I have trauma memories of a more secular type of fasting. My senior year of high school, I regularly cut weight for wresting, once, sometimes twice a week. I was around 170 lbs healthy, but regularly lost ten pounds (of water? or something?) to make the 160 lbs weight class. Here there was an varsity opening. Because quickly losing 10 lbs ruin your body, I consistently sucked. I may have sucked anyway, but that dehydration and malnutrition certainly didn't help. Still, I was better even at that cut weight then my other teammates who could have filled in at that class. So, to maximize the possibility of a win at that class was worthwhile that I cut.
Each time I cut weight, my non-wrestling friends wouldn't believe me when I told them I was down 10 lbs since yesterday. Ten pounds? No big deal. It's not fun, but I did it every time I needed to. Do you want to lose 10 lbs in a day? It's actually easy. Here's how to do it every time:
- Start the practice the day before the match. Don't drink anything during water breaks. Instead, splash your head, ears, neck, and wrists in cold water in the bathroom sink. Before you leave, swish a few mouthfuls around, also - but be sure not to swallow! You'll feel as good as if you drank water.
- Weight yourself after practice - down a few pounds, you're getting there! Alternatively, you have more weight to lose, fat boy.
- Eat little or nothing for dinner that night. A Fresh Samantha protein smoothie sounds about right. Promise yourself you'll only drink half. Uncontrollably drink it all as soon touches your lips. Hate your weakness.
- In a sulky 17 year-old manner, give your mother attitude for filling the house with delicious dinner smells. Hate your family for eating in front of you without respect or consideration for your suffering.
- Cut arm and head holes in a large trash bag. Put it over your naked torso followed by double layers of sweats. Turn up your bedroom's heat all the way up, and plug in multiple space heaters. Jog in place for an hour while listening to Top 40 radio (the Stars on 54 version of "If You Could Read My Mind" specifically brings me back to these sessions). Blow a power circuit at least once.
- That night, as you first lie down in bed, stare at the clock. Wish tomorrow never comes. Grip your bed and never want to let go. Enumerate the problems in your teenage life: the fights at home, the crushes that ignore you, the courses you're bombing, the money you don't have, the uncertainty of life after graduation. Think in addition to all those how you're hungry and thirsty and there's nothing you can do about it. Want to cry.
- In the morning, don't eat breakfast.
- Allow lethargy to pull you into sleep during class. Act grumpy to all your friends. Your stomach will growl so much that people will hear it.
- Don't eat lunch. Hate everyone you see eating lunch.
- Worry all afternoon that you still won't make weight and all this torture was for nothing
- Head to the match. Weigh-in successfully, every time, but only barely. Gulp that you have no margin of error for the next time.
- Immediately eat multiple peanut butter & jelly sandwiches you brought from home. Fruit if you have it. Chug a gallon of Gatorade.
- Feel incredibly tired. Wonder if you can sleep before the match. Feel the Gatorade re-hydrating your bowels. Worry that you'll literally crap your singlet during your match.
- Wrestle, feebly. Suck wind for six minutes due to unnatural dehydration, if you last that long.
- Go home and binge on dinner as if you'll never eat again. Remember that the next match is only four days away. Or three. Or two.
- Tomorrow, weight-in before wrestling practice. Hope you've not gained it all back so that in a couple days you won't have to fully repeat. See that in fact you have gained it back entirely. Want to cry.
You could not pay me enough to have do that again. I doubt I even could - at the gym these days I get dizzy if I'm not hydrating between each weight set. So why did I ever do it a first time? Unquestionably, out of a sense of loyalty to the wresting team of which I was part. Self-sacrifice to, in my mind, a greater good. Incidentally, this is why kids at that age make the best soldiers: they're stupid in this regard.
The following couple years, at college, our cafeteria was "all-you-can-eat" and believe me, I ate all I could. I also roomed with two Catholics who always made a show of not eating meat on Fridays during Lent. We'd typically go to Subway those nights and they'd get the veggie sub. I got a meatball grinder. Or chicken club.
Truthfully, when I attended regular mass myself a few years later I also abstained from meat during Fridays a couple Lenten seasons; however, it wasn't really "fasting", because I just ate huge pasta or pizza dinners. Around that time, I kept Passover with Becca the first year of our relationship out of good-boyfriend-solidarity But again, easily, I just ate steak, potatoes, and Breyer's ice cream for a week straight.
I once thought that if I ever became a POW, I could be broken in two-day's time by just a gruel diet. While I don't anticipate that scenario ever occurring I will never, ever, deny myself calories again so long as I can help it. Just one wrestling season, probably only three months of my life, and writing this almost fifteen years later my heart still pounds to recall that time in my life. I think it was one of my most miserable periods. For certain, however, this small period of suffering gave me greater perspective and appreciation for what I have in life - I know how worse it could be. And, when I have my own teenage boys, I'll always remember that when they're acting cranky, they're probably just a little hungry.
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