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Fasting is a pretty interesting experience.
We're very used to eating fairly regularly. More or less every healthy human in the non-starving parts of the world eat solid food at least once a day. To stop doing so and instead live on liquids (fruit and vegetable juices, beef and chicken stock, things like that) triggers reactions that must be leftovers from way, way back when getting food wasn't just a question of going to the supermarket.
The first day you feel hungry a lot. The second day you feel hungry and tired. Some time during the third day, your body decides that it hasn't had any food for much too long now, and it starts pumping your brain full of chemicals that make you feel wide awake and energetic and ready to go out hunting furry things. Which you don't, of course. You keep with the liquids and do something else. Like chopping wood. Since you don't have anywhere near your usual levels of energy, your body can't keep as warm as usual, so you feel cold a lot. A roaring fire is a nice way to counter that. So lots of firewood is useful.
It's also from around this point that normal mind-messing techniques (like meditation and such) start taking hold like nobody's business. Which, in my case, was pretty much the point of the exercise.
We're very used to eating fairly regularly. More or less every healthy human in the non-starving parts of the world eat solid food at least once a day. To stop doing so and instead live on liquids (fruit and vegetable juices, beef and chicken stock, things like that) triggers reactions that must be leftovers from way, way back when getting food wasn't just a question of going to the supermarket.
The first day you feel hungry a lot. The second day you feel hungry and tired. Some time during the third day, your body decides that it hasn't had any food for much too long now, and it starts pumping your brain full of chemicals that make you feel wide awake and energetic and ready to go out hunting furry things. Which you don't, of course. You keep with the liquids and do something else. Like chopping wood. Since you don't have anywhere near your usual levels of energy, your body can't keep as warm as usual, so you feel cold a lot. A roaring fire is a nice way to counter that. So lots of firewood is useful.
It's also from around this point that normal mind-messing techniques (like meditation and such) start taking hold like nobody's business. Which, in my case, was pretty much the point of the exercise.
