Food intake/ past 10 days

One of the people I met at homeless encampment seems particularly fascinated by the whole concept of “starving for attention”, as she puts it.

I observe Lent every year for the past 25 years so that gives the ability to say to my body what to do in terms of consumption.   I also know the importance of slowly tapering intake of caffeine, which I am usually a heavy consumer of.

Daily, I have three cups of black tea, with milk and sugar.  If I feel a painful hunger, I eat two to three saltines. I take a spoon of raw local honey (fighting bad tooth infection. Appt in Feb to see UCSF dentist).  I eat a yogurt every three or four days for same medicinal reason. I eat a small bowl (about 4 TBSP) of organic oats with milk and sugar first thing AM.   When I know I have to talk on phone, do a court appearance on Zoom, or there is someone coming to talk to me, I drink 3 ounces of milk with 1 scoop of protein powder so I have no shakiness. Three times during the past 10 days, I got hunger to point of pain, so I ate half a can of cream of mushroom soup, made with milk, and 4 to 5 saltine crackers.  One night I made a box of rice a roni and ate about a third of it.  I was the most hungry that night.

At Lent, it’s a conversation you have with God, the medium being self-denial.  In a hunger strike, I see it as the self-denial being a tool of one’s outrage.

However, given the conversation with police on #6, being on a hunger strike implies I am hurting myself.  That amount of food intake indicates I am not suicidal.