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Right around the time that the ‘eight focus site’ bans were first declared by Parks Victoria I was driving into the Victoria Range. I had pulled over on the side of a dirt road, just off the Henty Highway in the shadow of Red Rocks

They argue that ‘by flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness’ and that, through the (both physical and mental) scars that it leaves, suffering allows us pampered office drones to somehow ‘create the story of a fulfilled life.’ There are echoes of this all across the history of alpinism and of exploration. For Spufford these are ideas that have deep roots in our society, from the days of Edmund Burke, watching the frozen River Liffey overflow into Dublin and beginning to ‘define the feelings it evoked as the Sublime: the terrible but inspiring otherness of nature out of control, the voice of this otherness calling to the soul and making men pit themselves against an inhuman landscape.’ Perhaps. In his Outside article on why rich people love endurance sports, Brad Stulberg suggests that it is about the fact that lots of modern middle-class jobs don’t have clear, measurable goals with any obvious link to the work that goes into achieving them. ‘ In trying to come up with a definition of pleasure that satisfies both science and philosophy, the neuroscientist Kent Berridge makes a distinction between what he calls ‘liking’, the kind of pleasure we get from consuming things

You leave the ‘rest’ with your right hand, moving to a small slot that wants to be crimped but won’t let you as there’s too much cliff in the way for your knuckles to get much elevation. The hold you throw for is about 1.5m away and it’s a good letterbox ‘jug’ when used in opposition with the left-hand pod. Once you hold the swing and have somewhat stabilised yourself, you need to pull up into a front lever, stab your left foot out at full extension to a rampy foot, right foot flags out right to balance yourself and you now dive with your left hand across yourself to a thin, letterbox slot. The fall left a good rope burn on my right bicep and took a rather deep chunk of skin off on my right-hand pinky finger.

Finally, when we look at weight loss, researchers have compared the different types of fasting diets with your standard long-term energy-restriction diet and have found that both approaches will reduce weight in the short term. But based on what we have learned so far, if you are trying to lose a little weight over a longer period of time and want to minimise loss of muscle mass and strength, the diminution of performance and protect against hormone changes, then following a well-crafted version of the intermittent energy restriction diet would be worth considering. For weight loss, the two-weeks-on two-weeks-off, intermittent energy restriction diet looks promising, hopefully reducing weight and the negative hormone changes, while offering an easy to stick to energy restriction diet. If you are a healthy weight, and health and longevity are your drivers for wanting to fast, then based on the current evidence, I believe there are other diet-related interventions such as Mediterranean-style eating and eating to maximise gut health that are better for you and more effective than the 5:2 or alternate day fasting diets.