Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The Arrival of the Void

You can read part 1 here. If you want to read the logs, you can do that here as well.

The first thing you notice when you fast isn’t hunger. It’s the arrival of a massive black hole that I call the “void”. You don’t realize how much of your life revolves around food until it’s gone. It’s not just the act of eating, but the constant mental labor of planning for it. You lose the hours spent thinking about breakfast, prepping dinner, and wandering through grocery stores. Food is the scaffolding that your entire existence is built upon. When you rip it away, you’re left with a staggering amount of empty space. Suddenly, you have all this time, and you don’t know what to do with it. There is just you, the quiet, and the void where food used to be. That void is where the triggers live.

People think emotional eating is always about massive amounts of food and often confuse it with b-i-n-g-e eating, although it can be both. But that is a misunderstanding of the habit. It doesn’t have to be a mountain of food. It’s not always a tub of ice cream or a bag of chips in front of the T.V. Sometimes it is just a handful of nuts, a single bite of something, or a quick taste. That is all it takes for the feeling of stress to go away. The point is that food is used to regulate your nervous system. You’re still reaching for something to quiet down a part of you that needs a tool to do it. When you can’t reach for that tool, that part of you gets loud. It gets angry ass loud as hell.

commitment in the cold: starting my 40 day fast

I started this journey the day after Christmas. I wasn’t going to wait until New Year’s because this wasn’t a resolution. The house was quiet and the holidays were over, so I simply went for it. Because of recent surgeries and a compromised immune system, my doctors had warned me from flying home to be with my family. This left me alone in the middle of a brutal Minnesota winter in a house that felt far too big. Gosh, was it lonely this year. I had fasted before, 1-5 days for spiritual reasons, but I knew this 40 day fast had to be different, and long enough and extended enough for the triggers to show up; forcing me to sit without food until something finally shifted. I just wasn’t sure what that was going to look like.

navigating the first week

The first few days were a physical and emotional freight train. Day one passed with a deceptive sense of ease, but by day two, my body was in open revolt. It was not a physical hunger so much as a desperate, ingrained habit. I would walk past the kitchen, think about making lunch, then remember that lunch no longer existed. By the afternoon, the smell of my neighbor’s grill was enough to make me cry. I felt foolish for thinking prayer and fasting might actually work. I was angry and lonely, and I knew exactly what would make me feel better.

When a trigger hit, especially in the beginning, it was an instant, heavyweight in my chest with enough force to take my breath away. The screaming was constant and obnoxious. It told me I needed a handful of nuts or a single bite of something just to survive the next ten minutes. To get through it, I had to sit in the quiet and literally talk to myself out loud. I would sit there with tears running down my face and say, “Hey Athena, you are going to be alright if you do not reach for food. You are safe. You are going to be okay.”

I spent hours in a cycle of crying and praying, offering my brain every tool I had while it rejected all of them. Each time I made it through a trigger, it felt less like a victory and more like I had just barely survived.

I know what I do

By day four of this 40 day fast, the reality of my situation was undeniable. I had just finished a stressful meeting and found myself standing in front of the open refrigerator with my hand on the handle before I even realized I had come downstairs. I stood there for ten minutes staring at condiments and bubbly water. Closing that door required an effort hard to describe to someone who has never felt that automatic pull. I knew I was an automatic eater. It’s the reason I don’t have all the weight off, and I know it. Every single time my body feels stress, it sends a pulse through my system that tells me food is how I feel safe.

the submarine phase

Everything changed on day eight when the metabolic fog finally lifted. My head felt clear for the first time in years, and the frantic food noise simply stopped. This was the moment the fast transitioned from a struggle of will into a fascinating science experiment. I had prepared for this transition; spending weeks rigorously studying the work of experts like Jason Fung and Chris Palmer (to name a few). Their research was what led me to treat my body like a lab during this 40 day fast.

I wasn’t just taking notes; my system was an exhaustive, database of my own experience. I had columns for glucose, pulse, HRV, and BP (sitting and standing), tracked the precise timing of every trigger, every spiritual nudge, and every physical symptom. There was such a strong hope to be able to find correlating information to see exactly where the biological reality met the psychological habit, not to mention a massive need to understand whether the “hunger” I felt was a drop in blood sugar or just a cortisol spike from a stressful email.

Because the temperature outside was twenty degrees below zero, I was a captive in my home. I began observing my own biology as a researcher would. My pulse slowed to the low sixties, and my body temperature dropped into the ninety-sevens. I started moving like a submarine, keeping every motion slow and calculated to avoid a drop in blood pressure. I had to learn the art of the seated shower and the slow, deliberate walk.

sensory hyper-acuity and the art of the rescue

The world grew quiet, but my senses grew incredibly sharp. On day fifteen, I was dancing in my gym and felt a surge of pure joy, only to look down and see that my hands had turned a ghostly shade of blue. My senses immediately pointed to glucose levels and found it had dropped to fifty. I had to learn the art of the rescue, placing a pea-sized drop of honey under my tongue to bring myself back to safety.

By day seventeen, the smell of dry dog kibble suddenly smelled like a gourmet roast chicken. My dogs began to treat me differently as well. They followed me from room to room and sniffed my arms as if they could smell the chemical shift in my blood before I even knew.

refuting the experts

During this time, I thought a lot about the experts I followed, like Jason Fung. I have a lot of respect for him, and I agree with his premise that overeating is often a hormonally driven behavior rather than a simple lack of willpower. But the problem with so many specialists is that they tend to be all-or-nothing. They miss the messy reality of habit and trauma. Fung talks about the hardware, but he rarely talks about the software. My logs were starting to show me that my relationship with triggers and emotional eating was driven by a decades-old habit that had nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with survival. This 40 day fast was proving that my “software” was written in an abusive home where food was withheld.

Contrary to his metaphor, Fung believes it can all be explained by just fixing the body. But he doesn’t talk about fixing the mind. This behavior did not start with a simple metabolic oopsy!!!. I grew up with food scarcity, and I latched onto food as a life raft the moment I got my hands on it. What the specialists don’t tell you is that fixing the hardware is actually the easy part. By day eight, my hormones had reset, and the metabolic fog had lifted. Biologically, the hunger was gone. But the software was still running on old, broken wires. I had proof.

Fung’s theory often collapses all desire to eat into “hormonal hunger.” But on Day 2, I wrote: “I woke up hungry. But it wasn’t physical hunger. It was the habit.” I was able to consciously distinguish between a biological need and a chronological habit. If it were purely hormonal, there would be no distinction; the drive would just be “the drive.” The fact that I could feel the “habit” as a separate pressure proves that the neural pathway of the habit can exist independently of the hormonal state. A hormone doesn’t make you walk across a room and open a door without knowing it. That is a neurological reflex arc. It is a pre-programmed habit that bypassed my endocrine system entirely. My brain wasn’t responding to a drop in blood sugar; it was responding to the stress of a meeting using a “Safety Protocol” established in childhood.

the halfway mark: becoming friends with the dragon

I reached the halfway point of this 40 day fast and felt a profound sense of peace. I was thirty pounds lighter, but that was the least interesting part of the story. Underneath it all, I was becoming a different person. The triggers were still there, but they were no longer emergencies because I was learning to sit with discomfort and found it wasn’t as intolerable as I always made myself to believe.

You can fix a chemical imbalance in a week, it takes a much more invasive “surgery” to repair the neural pathways. I reached this point of fast thinking the hardest part was behind me, but I was also learning that the urge to reach for food to calm or regulate would rise, crest, and pass like a wave. I just had to outlast the noise and honestly? It didn’t take that long.

This first half taught me that the dragon was real, but it wasn’t invincible. It could be observed, interrupted, and actually taught new tricks. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a new path was in fact being built.