At the baseball game

I spent a lovely afternoon today watching my Seattle Mariners get slaughtered by the Chicago White Sox. It's always fun just to spend some time out at the ballpark and chat with my Baseball Buddy Tamara. (A brief side note: like all people, I tend to make up rules and then become peeved when others don't follow them, even though they don't know what they are and have no idea these rules even exist. The tables were turned on me when a woman in the row in front of us was obviously annoyed that we were chatting all through the game. We were clearly violating one of her rules. But not chatting would have violated one of mine, so I just sent her buckets of lovingkindness and kept on talking).

I have been trying to experiment with disassociating certain events from food and eating; today I decided not to eat from after breakfast until I got home from the game. Eating has always been such an integral part of the experience of going to baseball games (and not just for me, of course), that I thought it would be an interesting experience to try not having anything. Not that there is anything wrong with eating at a baseball game, of course. It was more like a thought experiment to see what would happen.

This was a pretty spontaneous decision, so I didn't think about the fact that this meant going without any food from about 9 AM to nearly 5 PM; that was a bit of a shock to the system. Toward the end of the game I felt just a touch lightheaded (though that may have been faintness due to the lousy play of my team). Of course, I could have gotten any number of different things to eat from the concession stands, but I really enjoy playing with my hungers and seeing where the state of my body meets my state of mind and how each influences the other. By vowing not to eat until I got home, I had the opportunity to see that, contrary to the propaganda my mind likes to put out, I do not suffer any serious consequences from a little bit of deprivation, a short period of being a touch hypoglycemic. I did get to feeling a bit sad at one point. I had to remind myself that this was entirely a function of my body chemistry and had no basis in my psychological reality (though the 13 White Sox hits can't have helped any).

The other advantage to this approach is that I have all sorts of calories to play with this evening, not having used them up earlier in the day (as I did yesterday, by the way, to my chagrin and disappointment). I fully intend to use 80 of those calories on a pineapple juice bar; I love these things, and they don't often have them in stock at my store; I always buy several boxes when I see them. Yum. So tasty, and with big chunks of actual pineapple in them. Love it.

I intend to continue with these sorts of experiments and in particular want to look into fasting, perhaps choosing a day a month to completely abstain from food. This would not be in an effort to lose weight (I believe fasting is a terrible way to do this and can be self-abusive if carried to an extreme) but to clarify my relationship to my body and to food. Because my discipline is awareness, anything that puts me in touch with these relationships is worth doing. As I look into it further, I will continue to post on the concept of fasting and how I will approach it. Should be interesting.