My main mission is to teach every single one of you how master your subconscious mind and learn to thrive despite being limerence-prone. The same genes that allow for obsessionality and limerent insanity when your needs are unmet bestow upon you a special type of intelligence that translates to immense achievement and richness of experience.
However, while the fact that you are proactively researching limerence as a behavioural habit shows me that you are ready to leave it behind, I realise that you may currently be in immense pain. You may be spending every day of your life crying, struggling to eat or overeating, desperate for anything to take the edge off the pain. For this reason, I also recommend a few quick fixes that are very effective at treating your state and rebalancing your neurotransmitters. Fasting just so happens to be a healthy and wonderful way to improve your cognition, decrease your emotional reactivity and raise your baseline mood.
To illustrate this, I’ll be referring back to how regular intermittent fasting helped me during the most horrendous limerent episode I have ever experienced..
Make Me Strong and Proud Again
This episode struck me in my early 20s, which formed a pivotal time in my academic career that I could not afford my emotions to impinge on. Feel free to read all about that situation here if you want to see how bad limerence can get.
Since I was in a systemic state of sickness, mourning an illusory relationship with someone I truly felt was my twin flame in a significant, numinous sense, I needed immediate relief. I tried a lot of supplements that did not work and psychiatric medication (which comes with a plethora of side effects and dulled me down), until I discovered N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC). I’ve written a whole article on this amazing, mood-regulating supplement that you can read here. For many limerents, it bestows significant results; I am constantly receiving emails from readers telling me how it has helped them transition back to normality.
Breakfast Is Not Necessary
NAC is best taken on an empty stomach, and I followed that advice and had great success with taking it before bed and first thing in the morning. It won’t, of course, completely dissolve your limerence, but it allowed me to function and reduced my desire to cry about my limerent object by about 50%. This was crucial as I had such long, busy days that required me to be sociable, analytical and not run away crying when a classmate told me about their date with their boyfriend during a lab practical. Anything that can make you feel less “wobbly” when limerent is priceless.
It just so happened that delaying my breakfasts a little to take my NAC introduced me to the world of intermittent fasting, a tool that I continue utilizing to this day despite being completely limerence-immune. If you had asked me to skip my oatmeal and peanut breakfast before, I would have looked at you bewildered and claimed that doing so would be impossible, that I would be shaky, have no energy and feel starving all morning if I forwent those healthy carbohydrates and fats.
Big Sugar Doesn’t Want You To Fast
However, little did past me know that the sugar industry has funded the majority of the scientific research into hypoglycaemia and has promoted pervasive myths about “having to snack” to “keep your metabolism going”. Most of us eat far too much, and even if not obese, this is a problem because our genes are predominantly suited to the eating habits of our ancestors, who would feast and then not eat for hours or days. Those same early humans would never, ever have eaten bread or refined sugar.
Intermittent fasting not only keeps you lean by regularly giving your body time to deplete its glycogen stores and tap into burning fat, but also significantly improves brain health and mental stability. Eating anything (particularly carbohydrates) triggers insulin production which promotes fat storage, which is fine and normal – we want it triggered when we need to eat, and we want some body fat on us (particularly women, who should not get too lean as this puts fertility and bone health at risk).
However, when you start the day with cereal or oats, have a coffee with milk in it an hour later, a few cookies before lunch, a sandwich for lunch and then pasta for dinner, you are looking at chronically-raised insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia). Unless you happen to be a professional athlete or an incredibly rare individual with an abnormally-fast metabolism, you will be storing a little (or a lot) of extra fat and your body and brain will be a little inflamed.
Clarity of Mind Results In Balanced Emotions
You may see this systemic inflammation manifesting itself in sore acne breakouts, psoriasis, or IBS, or you may just feel tired, brain-foggy, unstable and less motivated than you should be. Again, it’s a societal falsehood that it’s normal to need coffee to stay awake or a “sweet treat” at work in the afternoon. These cravings are the reflection of adrenal burnout, sugar and caffeine addiction and inflammation; they’re indicative of neurons that aren’t functioning as cleanly and smoothly as they should. When neurotransmitter signalling is interrupted, modulation of certain brain regions is affected and this translates to very tangible deficits in cognition and the tendency to be depressed, manic, obsesive and anxious.
I am not at all implying that your limerence has been caused by you eating regularly and not fasting, but rather wantt to open your eyes up to the power that prioritizing your neural health has in bearing the worst phases of a limerent episode.
Fasting Will Offer You A Valuable Boost in Mood and Rationality
Some people fast for a full 22-23 hours and then eat one big meal (one meal a day = OMAD), and this is what I started to do while very limerent. My body quickly grew accustomed to it and my hours in the fasted state (until 6pm) were some of my most productive to this date. However, real life gets in the way; during limerence, you do not want to socially isolate yourself further, and make it so that you have to turn down healing conversations with special friends over lunch.
For this reason, I typically recommend fasting for 16hrs or 18hrs and then eating lunch as normal. These shorter fasts still gives you a lovely mood and cognition boost in the morning that will render you more productive, in addition to an overall increased resistance to limerent lows.
Coconut Oil Is Healing Beyond Belief
I cannot talk about fasting without mentioning coconut oil. Now, fasting is much easier when you are already running on a primarily fat-based metabolism and eating minimal carbs; your body slips into burning your own fat seamlessly without spiking ghrelin and making you hungry. Do not fear saturated fats, as they are not what cause heart disease; a tablespoon of coconut oil a day used to stir-fry vegetables or cook eggs or meat is anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective, as well as having satiating effects that lower your appetite and make fasting much easier.