I'm on day 4 of a 5 day water fast now, four full days without eating, counting that I started on Sunday evening and it's Thursday evening now. For some people that's not that long a duration; they can extend it into multiple weeks. 5 or 7 days is pretty common for significant length water fasts though.
I'll get into what I consider to be a water fast, but I'll start with the point here. Fasting requires an interesting mental approach, and it's interesting how your mental state plays out over 5 days, or more or less time. Maybe it's what one would expect; it would depend on what you would expect.
Back to the definition of water fasting; there are a few, but the way I'm using it I will drink tea or herb tea, or diet soda, but nothing with any calorie content. Of course some people limit it to water; that is implied in the term I'm using for it. Some people drink coffee, but I drink mine with milk and sugar, and don't want to try to switch over on a very empty stomach.
I don't drink a lot of diet soda when fasting, but I might have one or two. I drank one so far; that will be it. A local Thai producer, Singh, makes a nice diet lemon or orange soda that's a pleasant break from tasting nothing but tea for days. I usually only drink herb tea a couple of times, but not because I see it as a negative input. Related to tea I've found that I can only drink shou pu'er, some hei cha, and aged white tea, because those are easy on your stomach. Shou is best. Not because I like that type, because it's definitely not a favorite, but it works best.
Not to go too far into the how-to scope here, or probably at all into why to fast, but for the most part the only other thing I ingest is sodium, potassium, and magnesium electrolytes, or salts. I use the chloride compound version of all of those, because they are readily accessible and the cheapest. I don't eat much for vitamins; I did just take a multi-vitamin, but hadn't up until then. The magnesium I take as a tablet (gel coated capsule, I guess that was), and the other two I mix into water and drink. What dosage to take is pretty complicated; I'll skip that here. I will say that it takes forever to get a decent input range sorted out, and it probably varies by person, and by what that person is experiencing.
Mental state
Someone on Reddit mentioned that the added mental tension or stress from not eating is part of the reason you benefit from it, which I found very interesting. Their idea was that if you feel a constant tension for several days, and could resolve it completely just by eating, but don't, then the rest of your life feels that much less tense or stressful, because you conditioned to experience temporary but sustained stress. I can't say for sure if that works, but maybe, or probably.
I really wanted to pass on more subjective experience description here, not theory on how it plays out, to say what it's like. It changes as you gain exposure to fasting, so the first three times it's very different than after a number of fasts.
This might be about 12 for me; I'm not keeping track (maybe just over a dozen, thinking it through more, or it could be 15, since I fasted a lot that first year). I try to fast for 5 days 4 times a year, but this year I've only done it once earlier this year, so far, about seven months ago. I spent about six months with my kids, in Honolulu and then in Bangkok, the two places where we live, and I limit activities like that while I'm around them. It's nice eating with them, and cooking for them, so I just skip the practice, until later. I'm living with Keoni now but not my daughter; he just graduated high school, so he's back in Bangkok, not returning to Honolulu for now.
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a full sized child, kitten, and tea; these are important parts of my life now |
In the beginning it's very stressful, and you experience more severe hunger and energy level disruption. You think about food a lot more, and it causes more stress. After a half dozen fasts you don't think about food very often, but an emptiness persists, and some degree of stress.
That's already pretty much the short version. Somehow it seemed deeper than that, more complicated. The form of the stress is unique. People into fasting claim that you experience an unusual mental clarity, and I agree with that. I can get way more work done if I'm on days 3, 4, or 5 of a fast than normal. But I'm a little edgy too, prone to being short with people, so it comes at a cost.
I guess in general the starting points seem more important, and valid. Why fast? If it's just to experience stress then there would be lots of ways to add that to your life. There is a list of conventionally accepted benefits, but those are impossible to verify, both by personal experience and through research. They center around autophagy, a body process that clears out damaged cell material to use as resources, which is triggered by exercise, but all the more so by fasting. All of this is conventional understanding; it's not easy to verify. Supposedly it reduces risk of cancer and diabetes, and who knows what else.
There's not much that personal experience completely supports. I feel a little mentally clearer since taking up fasting. I seem to experience more energy when I run. That would relate to metabolic flexibility, another benefit, related to your body adapting to use fat energy better. I'm in ketosis right now; fat or muscle tissue is all the energy there is to keep my metabolism going. Reserve glycogen seems to run out on day three, but again that's just another guess.
One very odd positive result occurred, that I can't fully connect: around when I started fasting the grey hair I had then mostly returned to being colored again. It seems a stretch, doesn't it? And could even relate to improving general health, making limited changes to diet and exercise, or getting a bit more sleep. There's no way to track the cause and effect.
So I may be fasting for nothing; the supposed benefits may not be real. For plenty of others it's easy to accept what random web sources contribute, but for me it's not. There's research on autophagy, but not so much on fasting effects. It would be all but impossible to separate cause and effect in studies too.
Taking up another tangent, people might wonder if there aren't clear signs that the stress on your body is negative. Wouldn't someone get sick more often, while not eating? Kind of. I get a minor sore throat sometimes, and sometimes taking some vitamin C clears that up, and at least once I've quit a fast because that seems to be a sign to. In general not though.
You feel stress, and hunger, and get a bit grumpy. Energy level can vary some, but not at all like the crazy shifts for the first two to three fasts. It would be better to start gradually, to minimize all of that, but of course I didn't. I tried to fast for 5 days the first time, and figured out that not supplementing electrolytes wouldn't work. I experienced common side effects, like problems sleeping, muscle cramping, and even perceived irregular heartbeat.
Of course I quit that first fast when all of that came up. I think that's an important part of it; striking a balance between being really committed to the fast and also being ok with giving it up if you feel sick, or if stress level goes too high. I've been busy at work before and stopped a fast early; you have to keep track of how much stress still makes sense.
Now I can sleep fairly well, not so different than normally. That is a bit odd, that not eating for days doesn't affect my sleep, at all.
Of course it makes you wonder if you aren't as sharp mentally, and might make some sort of mistake, driving, in work duties, or whatever else. I minimize work impact by fasting on Wednesdays, normally, so the end of the fast is on the weekend. I just said that the first half is worse, earlier on, but the first day is fine, and really only the second relates to more hunger. Day three energy level varies, which isn't ideal, but starting a fast on Saturday would cause that on a Monday, which also wouldn't be great. This week I'm fasting Monday to Friday, because my son stays with me, so I want to eat when he does on the weekend.
Update after the fast; how it went
It's Friday evening now, when I was scheduled to end the fast. I'll often pull the plug two hours early, related to the time I took the last bite five days ago, going from dinner to dinner over those days. It often works out that I ended eating at 7:30 or 8 to start, and it makes no sense to wait until 8 to eat to really fulfill that 120 hours (5x24). Plenty of people approach it that way though, which is fine.
Today I ate at lunch; it might have only been 112, so hardly over 4 1/2 days. Work has been really intense this week, involving a lot of productivity, meetings, and need to think a lot, and I wanted to be a little sharper for Friday afternoon. I already knew that within the first hour or two after eating your body is kind of focused on digestion, with blood sugar from that only becoming available as it gets processed, so you don't snap right back to normal. But it sort of worked; I could do work that last half of the day without counting down to when I would eat.
This fast seemed a little harsher than usual. Taking 7 months off seemed to leave me less acclimated. Or so I'm guessing; the busy work-week probably didn't help. I was in a car accident the day before I started the fast, which was minor, so not a concern, but the stress level from that didn't make for a great start, going into it less relaxed.
I walked a lot less than I usually do. Often I'll see a fast as a great time to get lots of steps in, because any energy used comes out of fat, and I'm not mainly doing it to lose weight, but I could use to lose a few pounds. I'm up close to 80 kg or 180 pounds now, maybe a bit under both, and at 1.7 m / 5' 7" that's not so heavy, but it's more than I weighed in my 40s and earlier 50s. I run, and less body weight is better, less stress on everything.
I'm not running now, for the last two weeks, because my right foot isn't ok, experiencing what seems to be an early start on bone spurs. I've been running on it for three months anyway, just cutting back, but for pretty much every running injury I get that pattern plays out, that I cut distance and intensity back, and then only heal when I take a break for a few weeks, or a month. So I'm not walking that much now either, but some.
What lessons did I learn? Even after dozens of days of fasting, maybe 60 to 80?, the experience can still vary. It's great if you can experience very little stress, and some unproductive time. Ordinary life is harder during fasting. I think it helps a lot with my mental clarity the rest of the time, and general health, so it's probably still a positive trade off, across lots of dimensions of my life.
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