On writing and intermittent fasting.

Writing something else today to try and keep a regular roll going. I find that my dissertation writing goes much easier if I'm writing as often as I can. I sort of describe it as needing to flex a muscle on a regular basis. A few months back, when I first sat down and started typing up the dissertation in earnest, the words "writer's block" became much more literal for me, given the fact that it felt like, as I reached into my mind for the pieces that are typically required for composing the English language through intricate patterns of finger-tapping on a keyboard, the synapses felt like they were clogged up like a drain. A part of me could feel where those things were supposed to be, where I remembered them being long ago when I wrote all the time, but it was literally like when you walk up to a door you expect to be open and find it to be locked, complete with the embarrassing "running nose-first into it because I can't stop my momentum" moment. This was particularly confounding, given that I really needed to be completing this task to finish up and get out of grad school, and yet found myself discouraged to the point of just searching for something else to do to try and loosen things up or, realistically, just to procrastinate and quit feeling like I was failing.

The big change came from a group that I started attending last year that basically consists of grad students getting together once a week to gripe about the various nuisances that plague our profession. One of the lessons learned from this was just to sit down and write 15 minutes a day about whatever comes to mind. The recommendation is that it be in some way related to the dissertation, but the main deal is simply to get back into the habit of writing and thinking critically on a regular basis. The more I did it, the less trouble it was to unlock that door and let the "writer's voice" (for lack of a less preposterous sounding term) get out the way it used to and give that muscle a good work-out. As time went on, I could then point that muscle towards the topics at hand, to the point that now, if I sit down and really get into the groove, I can bang along for a couple of hours straight without even really paying attention to the passing of time. I realize now that, at earlier times in graduate school, a silly web-based game where you essentially role-played a character who was a professional wrestler by writing their weekly vignettes and promotional videos trashing your opponents, resulting in a winner determined by subjective judging and then writing up the matches in long form by the fed runner, was probably my way of keeping it fresh back in the proverbial day without really knowing what I was doing. Now, things come a bit more naturally, which is probably a necessity given that the dissertation is maybe about 1/2 to 2/3 the way done/in draft form and, if I had needed to push through the block every day to do it, I may have gone quite mad by this point.

Assuming, of course, that I haven't already.

Today also marks the first day of my experiment with a dietary plan called "intermittent fasting." Now, this name is, in my opinion, maybe the worst example of inadvertent negative connotation I've ever seen, particularly given the prevailing wisdom of dieticians everywhere for constant, small meals rather than anything that even resembles starvation. HOWEVER. The reason I'm giving it a chance is, despite the name, the "fasting" essentially boils down to not eating a breakfast meal. That's it. And, more importantly, the idea is to get the three meals a day worth of caloric intake within the eight hour(ish) window between lunch and dinner. It's more a matter of getting your body to utilize the insulin hormone more appropriately to tap your fat reserves and get them starting to break down between meals, something that is reduced when eating the three squares or even the six to eight small meals that other diets/trainers recommend. If you think about it, it's also more akin to the way our metabolisms originally developed while hunting/gathering, where you would have longer stretches between feedings.

Now.

I am not a fool. I had my doubts about this before I started, and I still have concerns. I did my homework and background research before starting out. I'm going to keep my eyes on my physical condition. If it feels like this is doing harm, I will immediately quit. Trust me, it won't take a lot for me to say "gosh, I guess I'll go back to eating tasty breakfast foods." This is something that I'm trying out, something that seems to have some decent academic research backing it up, and it's not something I'm going to wear myself out for.

The bottom line is that I need to cut some weight down to be able to do all the things I want to do. My friend Mike went skydiving last year, and we discovered after he made the plans that I wasn't going to be able to do it because I was too heavy for the tandem dive (we later found this not to be the case, but the ego smash was there regardless.) As the previous post mentioned, I have a number of fitness goals for this coming year, all of which will require losing weight. I'm not obsessed about it, I just want it to happen and am willing to take the steps to make it happen. I'm motivated, I like getting up on the scale and watching the smaller numbers pop up, and that's all there is to it.