Pre-fast, Day 4- Last Meal

Ok- so here I am sitting and eating my last meal- of the month (I hope). Tomorrow I'm going in for some long overdue blood work mainly to record the changes in my cholesterol before and after the fast. My meal is a raw spinach and cabbage salad, topped with a light dose of olive oil, feta, and oregano. I'm feeling a lot chippier today than the last few days, which means that I've worked all the caffeine out of my system.

I wasn't going to have any milk or bread products today, but this morning Cathy (6 yrs. old) spilled a bunch of Coco Puffs out of the box onto a woolen coverlet we had on a kitchen chair. Zoe asked me to put the cereal in a separate container. I scooped them into a bowl and had them for breakfast instead. I also compromised with the feta on my salad, but no one's perfect.

Lunch was boiled artichokes, peas, and potatoes. I had a piece- no, two pieces, of cake for dessert, which I shouldn't have, but as I said, no one's perfect.

Tomorrow we have the local "laiki-" street market where you can get cheap produce. I've learned that if you wait until 2:30, just before the market closes, you can get produce discounted by as much as 80%. I'll be getting a lot of spinach, carrots, apples, and oranges. I'll also get some beets and potatoes to boil into a broth with a little cayenne peeper and boullion to help with loss of salt.

My basic thing with fasting is that I can drink all the juice, water and broth I want- no limits. I read the journal of a guy who did a couple 40-day fasts on only one glass of juice a day and can only say, "More power to you." Even with an unlimited liquid diet I still tend to lose 1-2 pounds a day, and am flushing a lot of crud out of my system.

I want to go to bed early and get up around 6 or so and go for a brisk 30-60 minute walk every day. I found a website that enables me to download MP3 files for daily Bible listening, using the same plan that Tyndale has in their One Year Bible. I'll be listening to that as I walk. If you're interested, the site can be found here. (In case you haven't noticed, I just figured out how to do links. Hooray!)


I've promised my sister that if I start feeling really bad during this fast I'll quit. Personally, with all the reading I've done about fasts, this is a good thing for me to do for a lot of reasons, both physically and spiritually.

Cathy starts school at 8AM, so I want to get back home to spend time with Zoe in Bible study and prayer, which is our daily habit. By the way, this is a fairly recent habit. Zoe is a night person, and so is Cathy. I'm a morning person. But because Cathy has to get up early for school, that helps Zoe get up early, and we can pray for Cathy's day. The public school system in Greece is pretty chaotic, and I'll be getting into that later, no doubt.

All right, my salad bowl (actually a plastic half gallon ice cream container) sits empty on my desk. It's about 9PM Greek time. Thanks for following this blog and praying.