Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

the high pressure of silence

Around day twenty of this 40 day fast, something changed in a way that I wasn’t prepared to handle. The noise that had been screaming since day one went quiet, and I was left with something far more unsettling than hunger. I was left with silence. This wasn’t the peaceful kind of silence where you feel calm and rested, but rather the heavy and pressurized silence of a submarine operating at a depth it was never designed to reach. It was the kind of quiet that made me realize I had been using noise to avoid looking at myself for over three decades, and it was a silence that made the very hull of my identity groan under the weight of it all.

It’s the kind of environment that strips away every distraction and leaves you standing in a dark room with no choice but to turn the lights on and face what’s actually there.

when it became mechanical

The process had become mechanical by this point in the 40 day fast. I woke up and ran through my daily diagnostic like a technician. I took my vitals, drank my salt water, loaded up on all my required vitamins and minerals and logged the numbers with the cold and detached precision of a forensic auditor. My glucose stayed in the fifties and sixties, and my temperature sat in the ninety-sevens. At the same time, my blood pressure was low enough that I had to move with the pressurized deliberation of that submarine just to avoid a total brownout. I was no longer fighting the urge to eat, and I wasn’t dreaming about food or negotiating with myself every hour because the Dragon had finally gone quiet. When I say quiet, I mean no thought of food whatsoever; just a great big hole where food used to live.

starving the dragon

The Dragon is the pet name I gave to the relentless and emotional pull toward food that has governed my life since I was a small child. It was my shadow and my primary coping mechanism, and it was always my first and last line of defense against the world. When I was happy, I fed the Dragon to celebrate, and when I was sad, I fed it to survive, and when I was bored, the Dragon was the only thing that made the time pass. Over the years, I became a professional at helping other people identify and name their own monsters, and I could explain the psychology of the beast with clinical accuracy to anyone who would listen.

However, the dark irony was that I never knew how to actually kill my own. I could describe the heat and the arc of the fire, but I could not stop the burn. That internal war is the entire reason this 40 day fast started in the first place, because I finally realized that being an expert on the problem was not the same as being free from it. I didn’t go into the desert to find a diet, but rather I went there to starve that fu***** asshole.

the lonely phase

The loneliness during this phase was crushing. I was trapped in this strange and self-imposed bubble where I was alone with my own thoughts and had no food or even my closest friends to quiet them down. I spent hours just sitting there, praying or crying for reasons I could not always name. Old hurts started surfacing, and things I thought I had dealt with years ago suddenly demanded to be worked through again. I found anger I didn’t know I was still carrying and grief I had shoved down and refused to touch. The fast wasn’t just starving a metabolic pathway, but it was excavating a graveyard I had spent three decades trying to pave over.

William Shakespeare wrote that we know what we are, but know not what we may be. (I pause and smile here, recalling a certain Latin phrase…) I had gone into this experience believing I had already dared to know myself; that I had dissected my own mind as far as it could go and thought I knew exactly what I was, which was the girl who uses food to cope and the girl who has spent a decade doing the hard work and still could not seem to fix this one broken thing.

the wisdom of limits

I’ve had to come to terms with a difficult but necessary truth: CrossFit is perhaps the most effective tool in the world for building physical capacity, but it was never meant to be a silver bullet for every internal conflict. For a long time, I quietly expected the high-intensity prescription to solve a problem rooted in thirty years of biological and emotional triggers. I believed that if I just followed the program the “Dragon” would eventually retreat. I thought if I just worked harder, the internal struggle would fade and I would be “cured”. Maybe I hurt because I kept waiting for that to happen.

But I realize now that was an unfair burden to place on the methodology. Some things simply cannot be resolved at the whiteboard, regardless of the intensity you bring. This wasn’t a failure of the program; it was a limitation of the tool. CrossFit is an incredible mechanism for building the “hardware” of a human being; the strength, the durability, the grit, but it is not the operating system itself. It gave me the physical capacity to survive a difficult process, but it couldn’t perform the internal diagnostic required to identify a fundamental glitch in my own chemistry.

honoring the foundation

I want to lay my heart and soul at the feet of this methodology, because CrossFit gave me the discipline to endure this 40-day fast. It provided the mental toughness to step into the silence, but the fast was the only thing that could actually rewrite the code. I am not discounting the methodology; I honor it with everything I am. I am simply acknowledging that even the best tools have a graceful limit.

Some victories are won in the gym, but this particular healing required a level of internal forensic work that metabolic conditioning wasn’t designed to reach. What CrossFit truly did for me was reveal a capacity for discomfort that made my previous limits look like a light warm-up. It brought me face-to-face with the voices in my head that had been telling me I wasn’t enough and while that discovery was terrifying, CrossFit had already given me the strength to stand my ground and finally look for the answers where they actually were. In me… not the methodology. Myself… Athena.

the false accusation

Day twenty-three broke me in a way I didn’t expect but I was also so proud for the first time. I had a doctor’s appointment that morning with a new physician since my previous one had moved. I walked in feeling amazing; twenty-three days deep with stable blood pressure and a clear head. She walked in, took one look at me, and skipped the pleasantries to ask if I had ever had my A1C checked. That was literally the first thing she asked me. She didn’t even introduce herself. The assumption was as immediate as it was insulting.

Because I was in a larger body, she skipped the science and went straight to the stereotype. I told her I was fasting for spiritual reasons, but apparently, that is medical shorthand for “unstable.” She asked if I wanted a referral to psychiatry or if I wanted to visit their weight management clinic to discuss eating disorders. I sat there, having spent three weeks managing my own biology with more care than she likely gives to any of her patients, and she treated my discipline like a mental illness.

the woman I really am

I left that office and cried so hard I could barely see the road. It didn’t matter that I had just spent weeks learning to manage my electrolytes with the precision of a chemist or that I was tracking my vitals fifteen times a day. To the system, I was just a diagnosis waiting to happen.

Operating on pure, decades-old autopilot, I immediately drove myself to my favorite coffee stand. The impulse hit me exactly on schedule: the overwhelming urge to drown my humiliation and sadness in a piece of lemon loaf. But then, the system update kicked in. The urge didn’t last. In fact, it only survived for a few seconds before it vanished completely, dissolving as quickly as it had arrived. Sitting there in my car, I realized it was the very first time I could physically feel the neural pathways changing. Retraining the hardware wasn’t just a theory anymore; it was actively happening.

The A1C results came back later that night at five point one. That is not just normal; it is optimal. I wanted to call that doctor and ask if she still thought I needed a psychiatric referral, or if she finally wanted to look at the data I had been collecting while she was making assumptions. I sat there and cried again, realizing that even when the undeniable evidence is on your side, it won’t always change how the world looks at you.

And… that’s just it. I don’t want the world to see a stereotype, a diagnosis, or a project. I just want them to see Athena. The woman I actually am.

biological sabotage

By the time I hit the fasting refeed, I thought the hard part was over, and the verdict was in. I thought the Dragon was sleeping and that I just had to be careful not to wake it, but I was wrong. One evening I was cooking parsnips after slowly introducing vegetables like mashed zucchini, and then asparagus and carrots. I grabbed the tiniest piece of boiled parsnip and took a bite just to see if it was cooked through, and within a matter of a minute, my heart was at 93 beats per minute. It would eventually get to 122.

This was not a panic attack, but rather a biological ambush. The starch density hit my system, and the resulting insulin spike pulled potassium out of my blood so quickly I had to dose NoSalt immediately just to stay upright. That is when I realized that a parsnip is not just a vegetable, but to my body, it is a chemical trigger that can wake the Dragon in seconds. And it did.

the fasting refeed phase

On day sixteen, I decided to test quinoa because I had read the expert blogs saying it was safe. I finished the bowl and felt okay, but ten minutes later, I found myself in the kitchen on total autopilot. I grabbed the spoon I had used to portion the quinoa and started digging into the container like my life depended on it. It wasn’t hunger and I didn’t even want it, but my brain was screaming for the hit. I put the spoon down, walked away, and cried before throwing the rest of the quinoa in the trash.

There was no sadness felt because I couldn’t eat it, but I was furious that I had been blind to these biological happenings for so many years. I had spent my life thinking emotional eating was a lot of things, but in reality, it was partly (at least for me) a physical chemical reaction I was never equipped to fight until I had the data to see it.

Will I still need to be cognizant of the Dragon when it comes to boredom and stress? Yes. Like I said, it’s not one thing. It’s a fine mixture.

the discovery

The glycemic spike is the ignition, the habit is the superhighway, and the trauma is the reason the highway was built in the first place. Together, they create a system I couldn’t fight with willpower alone. When I ate the parsnip, and my heart rate spiked, that was a purely biological event and a spark that led to a fire. What does the fire mean? It means the body demands more right away. Sadly, I was always trying to fix the road while the ignition kept firing, but the 40 Day fast was the master key because it shut off the ignition and kept me off the road long enough for both systems to reset.

system administrator manifesto

I don’t feel like a patient anymore, but I am the system administrator of my own life. I also discovered that I have a threshold for how much biological noise my neural wires can handle before they catch fire, and I have now established a new security protocol. Low-glycemic foods keep the biology quiet, while high-glycemic foods push me over the edge and make the old habit wires start to glow.

This is not about being strong enough; it’s about understanding that for my body, hardware and software are permanently linked. On day eighteen of the fasting refeed, I decided to permanently revoke access to certain triggers. High glycemic foods like most kinds of bread, even potatoes, white rice, brown rice, grains (oatmeal, quinoa) are no longer on the regular menu, and while I thought about the things I used to love, I realized that eating in a way that supports my brain is the only trade worth making.

diet? not exactly

The word diet makes me want to roll my eyes and walk out of the room but this is a survival strategy and a refusal to return to a broken system. People ask if I feel deprived, and the answer is a resounding no, because I have felt my heart race and my hands shake and my brain scream for more, and I have no interest in returning to that prison. I would rather eat zucchini and fish for the rest of my life than live with the Dragon awake. This experience did not fix me, but it gave me the telemetry (in a way) and the forensic evidence to repair myself. I mean good grief, it changed me at a cellular level. One of these days I will talk to you all about the palate changes and curly hair ((laughing)).

oh… hamlet

I know what I was, which was a girl in a war she didn’t know how to win, and while I don’t know what I may be yet, I know I’m not that girl anymore.

I saw it through, and that changes everything.