Standard disclaimer for topics like this: I'm not a doctor; this isn't medical advice.  Please don't act on anything you read here as if I know anything.  Please also consult with your doctor appropriately before altering your diet significantly to ensure your health while doing so.

My Interest in Fasting

First a quick definition I'll elaborate on below: when I say "fast", I mean no eating.  no calories.  Just water and no-calories drinking, as well as some supplementation.  More to come on that...

I am always looking for the next paradigm that needs breaking.  We grow up with a pile of mindsets that are wrong or incomplete or deleterious.  We get them from our friends, TV, our parents, high school, fashion magazines, etc.  I am hungry to find and break such paradigms I didn't realize I ended up stuck with.  Not eating for numerous consecutives days was completely mind-bending to me, so I decided needed some of my attention.

I have played with diet for many years and gotten tons of juice out of the idea of altering the *mindset* around eating, namely learning to differentiate the idea of eating because I'm physically hungry vs eating because I'm bored.  With these clearly distinct, one stops eating excess calories.  What better way to gain tons of clarity on this point than just not eat?...

As I read the book that got me considering this seriously, I was completely fascinated by the admittedly mundane angle of the budgetary and time savings of just not eating all week.  Think how much you spend on eating in a week.  How much money do you spend?  How much prep time as well as simply time eating?  What if you got *all* of that back?  For better or worse, that thought captivated me.

Let's Catch You Up to the Present

I just completed a 5 day fast (basically just water and a daily multi-vitamin), and I'm about to do another one.  I figured I'd share my experience so others could see that this is working and be encouraged to try this themselves.  Personally, I wouldn't have trusted the process if it weren't for my sister, who had already been fasting and who agreed to fast with me.

I began by reading The Complete Guide to Fasting, which I still haven't finished, on recommendation from my sister.  I've now completed 3 fasts, that I will detail below.  Then I'll share some thoughts, calculations, guesses, results, and future plans (another fast this coming week).

Fast #1 -- 2 Meals

I started off simply skipping breakfast and lunch one day.  I found this relatively easy.  I felt relatively little hunger most of the day and was happy to eat dinner.  I simply kept my mind focused on my work, and sipped coffee or tea throughout the day.

Fast #2 -- 2 Days

Next, I did a 2 day fast.  The first half of both days was pretty easy (as with my first fast), but the latter part of the second day was a bit rough.  I felt pretty hungry and resorted to complaining out loud--to my house, at large--how hungry I was... the dog was not impressed.  But I knew that (at least intellectually) that fasts never killed anyone, so I was determined to just be hungry.  I knew I could make it to the third day.  The only concern I really had about being hungry was trying to sleep while hungry.  Surprisingly enough to me, this was never a problem.

The second fast, however, while not completely comfortable was an extraordinary experience for me.  See, as I read the book on fasting, it started to dawn on me that it was completely possible to not eat all day.  This is a *very* unusual thought in American culture.  We're told to eat 3 to 6 meals a day, never skip a meal, etc.  So to just not eat for an entire day at a time and feel generally fine was shocking to me.  So while that second day was not my favorite, I was *very* excited to try a longer fast.  Many people I've heard from about fasting say that the third day can be rough, but that after Day 3, things get much easier and you can spend long periods of time with no hunger.  That idea blew my mind, and I really wanted to see for myself.

Fast #3 -- 5 days

As I said, I had the benefit of my sister fasting with me for Round 3.  We agreed to fast Monday through Friday, and we agreed to eat dinner Friday to celebrate.  Just so we're clear exactly what I mean, let's take a moment to get specific about the nature of the fast.

What I Mean by "Fast"

I drank no-calorie drinks (water, tea, black coffee), kombucha in limited quantity, which was chosen to be only a couple calories per glass.  On average, I had 1-2 cups a day, for a total of no more than maybe 12 grams of sugar per day, and there were days when I had none.  I took a multi-vitamin every morning.  And I have a specific dietary need for beets; something in them addresses a deficiency I easily develop.  So every morning, I had an otherwise no-calories smoothy of 1 or 2 beet pieces (small chunks), hemp fiber, and kelp powder (predominantly for minerals).  It certainly didn't taste great, but it ensured I was getting the nutrients that keep my body happy and contributed a very small number of calories.

I ate nothing at all: no meals, no snacks.  If I was *really* jonesing for something, I would eat a dietary fiber gummy that I happened to have around the house, which was like 10 calories.  In retrospect, this could easily have been replaced with some kind of sugar free gum or something.  However, the more I got into the diet, the more it sunk in that the less I ate, I think the less my body craved.

How Things Went

Day 1

The first 2 days were pretty similar to my first 2 experiments, except that the hunger kicked in kind of hard for parts of Day 1.

Day 2

Day 2 I had some hunger but nothing terrible.

Day 3

Day 3, as promised, was *rough*.  I woke up early and was nauseous, very uncomfortable, too hot, then too cold, sometimes at the same time.  I also had a head experience that wasn't pain (like a headache) or dizziness, but just a mild lack of clarity, maybe describable as a *very* mild dizziness.  My legs were a bit weak, and I eventually decided it felt like a mild flu.  I don't believe it was any kind of actual flu, but it did have me spend until about lunch in bed and feeling terrible.  I ended up taking the day off from work.

The feeling mellowed out just after noon.  The intense negative symptoms went away, and I spent the entire rest of the day with mildly weak legs and that mild head experience I described earlier.  That night, I woke up in the middle of the night and had trouble going back to sleep, so I worked for a couple hours before going back to sleep.  I kind of feel like my body and mind were so happy to be back to feeling human that I couldn't waste the feeling sleeping...  Regardless, Day 3 was not my favorite.

Day 4 and 5

Day 4 and 5 were pretty easy.  I felt really good physically.  I worked out both days.  The only thing I started to change these last 2 days was that I added fiber.  The book and people I've spoken with had said pretty consistently that I'd continue to go to the bathroom despite not eating anything.  That was *not* happening at all.  So I started taking psyllium husk in water.  Normally a single serving plus an hour or so works reliable for me, but in this case, I took 3 servings over the course of about 12 hours and that still hadn't produced anything.  So it's definitely on my list for the next fast to be taking in 2 to 3 servings of fiber every day from the start.

Overall Experience of Fast #3

I loved the fast.  The hunger was never bad enough to hurt or really take all my attention.  When it was there, it was just a nagging feeling, kinda like a *really* dull headache, where it doesn't interfere with life, it just gnaws at you after hours.  When that gnawing got worst, I spent some of that time designing the meals I would eat on the weekend after I started eating again.  I got *really* excited about some of that, and that was a great distraction from the hunger.

Getting Bored Without the Activity Called Eating

Generally I'm a pretty busy guy.  I don't watch TV.  I don't get bored.  I've got a lot of things I can't wait to do, and so I had plenty of things to focus my brain on instead of the hunger.  One evening, however, I had nothing planned and nothing on a task list that I was jonesing to get to.  I walked down from my room and thought, "Well, I've finished my work for the day, and I'm not eating... now what?!"  In that moment, my brain short-circuited, and I felt as if working and eating were the only 2 activities I could come up with!  After laughing at myself and walking the dog, I picked a project I had been wanting to work on and started working on it.  I found that the fast was a phenomenal way to get me über clear about what I'm up to in life because any free moment that wasn't already accounted for led to me running into the two default activities: working and eating.  Obviously work as a default activity leads to burnout, and eating as a default activity was part of what I wanted to gain much more facility with.  This challenge also forced me to get clear on what I wanted to do for *leisure* and ensure I had a plan to do those things.

The Weekend After

Friday night, I went out to a restaurant I had dreamed of ever since mid-day on Day 3 and ate a phenomenal meal.  I ate slowly and paused numerous times to ensure I didn't get sick, given I didn't know what to expect from my body.  Afterall, I hadn't eaten anything in a week!  I even set a timer at one point to ensure I was allowing enough time to pass before eating more.  Generally, I was *much* more conscious of eating and wanted to eat much less.  The rest of the weekend, I ate a few other things I had really wanted to eat, but I found I quickly felt over-full nearly every time I ate, and it started to have me look forward to my next fast, because of all the feelings I had on the fast, that lethargic, over-full discomfort is a feeling I had most and never felt during the fast.

The Physical Results (not scientifically assessed)

I didn't measure weight at the beginning of the diet, so take this with a grain of salt, but the last day, I weighed in at 161 lbs, which I haven't weighed in a *long* time.  I've been "trapped" between 165 and 168 lbs for many many years.  I also definitely looked a bit thinner.

My guess at what's happening during the fast, and some interesting math

If you're not familiar with ketogenic diets, I'll leave that to you to read about.  I'll refer to it here, assuming you know or can go find out... When you don't eat anything, my understanding is that you'll first use glycogen, of which you have about a 48 hour supply.  Once that's used up, you'll start burning fat instead of carbohydrates as a source of energy.  Once you're burning fat, you can now burn your own body's fat as a source of energy (this is how you can go for days not eating anything and still have energy).

Now, let's do some math.  Remember, I'm no doctor.  I've experimented a *lot* with diet and nutrition in my life, but that doesn't make me an expert or even well educated about anything I'm about to say, but I have studied a lot, and the following is pretty basic: First, to burn a pound of fat, it takes burning 1600 calories, which--if you've ever used a treadmill that shows you number of calories burned--you realize takes a *lot* of working out to burn.

Second, if you don't work out at all, there will be some minimum number of calories you need just to get through a day, even if you're sitting most of the day.  Most people probably require at least 2000 calories a day.  So let's say conservatively (and to make the math trivial) that you need 1600 calories per day to get by.  That would mean--once your body is burning fat--that you're burning (at least) a pound of body fat a day, which roughly correlates with my single weight measurement... about 5 lbs in 5 days.

So my view after this experience, is that I'd rather deal with a week of mild, nagging discomfort to drop 5 pounds in a week rather than spending weeks of sustained dieting with meal planning and measuring and prepping and eating.  Even with all that, I haven't been able to get below 165 lb.  So hitting 161 lb in 5 days--without that even being a stated goal--is *really* exciting to me.

The Next Fast

I've decided to dive right in with another 5-day fast.  Here is my design for this next fast, based on my experience and understanding of what's going on here.

Fast #2 will look a lot like Fast #1, except for a couple very minor changes.

Change #1

Given my understanding of the keto/fat-burning aspect of this kind of fast, I will eat a *tiny* amount of food if the hunger lasts for more than 2 hours, just to kill the nagging nature of the hunger.  What do I mean by tiny amount?  A chicken wing.  Or a bite of meat.  Or a spoonful of something.  Nothing that could remotely be considered a meal or any significant source of calories, just something that is keto and *something* to kill the nagging hunger feeling.  If I don't feel hunger, I don't eat.  If I don't feel hunger for more than 2 hours, I don't eat.  If I feel hunger, eat something tiny, and continue to be hungry, I don't eat more.

Change #2

I will have 1 serving of fiber 2 to 3 times per day every day of this fast.  Food, particularly meat, needs to move through you.  It's no good to have it sitting in your intestines for extended periods.  So I will aim to consume fiber until I'm regularly visiting the bathroom, the way I would when not fasting.  I'm guessing this will take 2 to 3 servings a day.  I will increase that dosage Day 2 if needed, and I'll space these out throughout the day.

Change #3

I will measure my weight every morning so I have some legitimate data.

Wish me luck!