This week's theme is fasting, about not eating. I'll write the first part of this in the middle of the third day, after two full days of ingesting nothing but a bit of salt water and three vitamin tablets (which it turns out was not really an appropriate electrolyte supplement protocol, at far too low dosage, well below RDA amounts). Today on-site at work I also brewed a dried orange slice and four chrysanthemum flowers, checking if that wasn't enough to trigger a renewed higher level of hunger (and it was fine, no issues).
There are a few moving parts to this: why I'm doing it at all, what the side-effects and expected benefits are, how being hungry goes, and how energy level and mental clarity work out. I'll say a little about all of it, then add what seemed to come of it later on.
Why? I fasted once in awhile when I was younger, but that was only juice fasts, skipping eating food for however long, but drinking juice during that time. It was to experiment with how that kind of thing went, with a sub-culture theme about it being good for you. That was a bit before the more recent widespread emphasis on "detoxing," but I guess it overlapped with that.
To broaden that, while ordained as a monk for over two months we could only eat at 7 AM and 11 AM, before 12, so I guess that was intermittent fasting, before most people had heard that term (starting 15 years ago this month). I didn't think much of it, or notice any effects. There I could drink a soy milk in the afternoon, since the restrictions only applied to food, not drinks, so I guess the narrower sense I wasn't really intermittent fasting.
At about 10 years old I had the idea I would try water fasting, and at the very end of the first day the hunger got to me, and I ate some cake. My parents were pretty understanding about those quirks, in retrospect, since they had essentially never heard much about fasting. I don't remember where I got the idea. I only remember being hungry from that, I suppose worse than I experienced this time.
I recently met a guy at a Thai temple in Hawaii who discussed Buddhism and Christianity, and he said that he practiced fasting, and that he saw it as spiritual training. Cool, right, if possibly a little iffy? In my past that was kind of an intended theme, for those juice fasts, not just purifying my body of whatever a break from food would result in, but some sort of other indirect and indescribable positive effect. It's hard to say for sure that it ever worked. My impression is that it did, but interpretation bias could come into play in that.
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he had some really interesting ideas about the overlap between Christianity and Buddhism too |
The main goal is to see what the experience is like, which works regardless of any other benefit, in spite of positive or negative indirect effects.
Side-effects, hunger: I was really hungry for the first two days, but today, the third day, is better. Of course if I smell food eating that sounds good. I'm hazy today, and over the last two; my normal energy level is disrupted. That's about it. I'm not really having any stomach problems. I read in a Reddit fasting sub-forum that you should ingest some electrolytes, salt, potassium, and magnesium, and that makes sense. I didn't prepare ahead but drank salt water and took a couple of vitamin tablets last night. Apparently taking too much of those electrolytes at one time gives you diarrhea, which wasn't so awful, just a few extra trips to the bathroom.
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that first evening I went with Eye to a local market, which wasn't as bad as it sounds |
About being hazy I took what looked to be an IQ test for a job application today (back on day three when I wrote this initial draft), a time-based version of one, combining IQ testing and GRE exam scopes. I probably did much worse than I would have otherwise, probably not related to incorrect answers but as far as how much I completed of it. Otherwise I can still work, and have enough energy to water to garden and such, or sweep the leaves in the driveway.
Expected benefits: oddly I'm not clear on that part. I have to set spiritual training benefits aside, but maybe a lot could be about that. I don't think I will "detox," dropping out some sort of internal impurities, or lose significant weight. So I'm mostly only curious if there is a benefit that I'll notice. I've been eating a much lower quality diet over the past two months, while living in the US, but I could've switched back to a very moderate and healthy diet without skipping eating. Maybe my cholesterol did spike a bit, and this will correct for that. But if so I'll never know.
It's interesting considering that I must have entered ketosis, the internal energy production from only consuming fat, that from my own body, versus a ketogenic diet practitioner eating it. Or maybe I'm losing a bit of muscle tissue too.
Concerns over electrolytes: reading in that Reddit sub brought up the subject of adding electrolytes, and I initially added some salt to water, and ate a couple of multivitamins, and thought that would be good enough. My wife expressed some concerns about that, muscle and heart issues, and I woke up in the middle of the night after the third day and felt like my heartrate was fast. I checked it and it wasn't; around 65 beats per minute, normal for me related to running lowering it to that rate, when it had always been 70 or just over. Then I was concerned that it might be palpitations, so I read up a bit more on recommended doses, sorting out that I had taken nowhere near that much, and started checking the electrolyte products Eye has at the house. They contain some sugar, so I didn't want to use them, but ingesting 45 calories started to sound ok. It turned out that magnesium isn't in either version she had, and that and potassium are at pretty low dosages in the multivitamins I took, 15 to 17% of RDA.
In the middle of the night I started reading up on electrolytes more, and searched the house for what might include them, joint health supplements and such (which did; I ended up taking those). Some laxatives or stomach medicines are based on magnesium compounds, but I found no examples in the house. I downed another vitamin tablet, the joint health pills (a few small ones), and that electrolyte mix, so in a limited sense breaking the fast (45 calories worth). I wasn't worried so much about bragging rights; it seemed like ingesting even a little sugar could trigger hunger again. It didn't, so I felt better soon and slept.
Maybe it was all in my head. I was getting electrolytes intake wrong, for sure, so maybe there was some health risk, and that potentially could've been significant. I don't have heart condition issues, but I did when I was younger, an irregular beat issue that kids generally grow out of, so it might've been that nutrient imbalance was triggering something.
Ending the fast: in the morning I didn't even feel hungry, starting day 4, but I was still concerned about that nutrient and heart issue. It was hard to tell if it was fully resolved, since focusing on your heart beating would automatically bring up an unusual degree of awareness of it. I was going to either go further with dosing myself with electrolytes or else let the fast go, and I decided that was enough. I had oatmeal with raisins for breakfast, with OJ with protein powder, then went out to the nearby 7/11 and bought whatever was on the list for magnesium source foods, pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds, and yogurt. And I had another electrolyte drink, vitamin tablet, and a few more small joint health tablets (they didn't list the dosage, but as a secondary ingredient it probably wasn't much).
I wasn't so sad about stopping a day short of my goal, either 4 or 5 days, at 3 1/2 days in. It was a shame to let the experience go right at the point that hunger had finally dropped out, but I had been feeling that plus mental haze, low energy level, and mild headaches for 3 days. It was a bit much, even though not as bad as I thought. I felt mentally better that fourth day too, and had more energy, maybe related to restoring more of a normal mineral balance, but concern over real risk tipped the judgement.
I suppose it's worth noting that caffeine withdrawal was probably part of the impact over the first two days. I skipped caffeine, except for one cup of tea, for about 2 1/2 days traveling back from Hawaii two weeks ago, but I had been back to one very full gaiwan's worth for over a week since.
Lessons learned: I'm not sure how to peg the "gains" in terms of digestion system health, since I never had any problems with that, or related to weight loss, or spiritual gains. I didn't weigh myself once; I suppose I must have lost a little, but probably not much. I don't think there is a scale in our house. At least it was an interesting experience.
Related to how to fast exactly what they suggest in that Reddit sub would probably work better, starting at a day in duration, then adding a second day a second time, then maybe bumping to 4, then a week. Getting electrolytes on hand that you can mix into a water based solution and ingest gradually through the day would be easiest and best (salt, potassium, and magnesium). Both would add confidence that the process was on track. At a guess I wasn't really ever at significant risk, and bumping electrolyte intake that third day, and sticking with that, probably would've enabled completing a 5 day fast. Maybe if I had a better supplement source of magnesium in the house I would've did that; the joint health pills weren't clear on dose included, so it all seemed a bit uncertain.
Maybe referencing other input could at least expand on the range of what is out there for hearsay, since I'm not really feeling much different 8 hours into resuming eating.
Hearsay input: I'll cite a Quora answer that covers a lot of the standard list of understood benefits. To be clear I don't think that a lot of people repeating the same ideas necessarily implies that those are true. Once a set of ideas gains traction online they tend to take on a life of their own, and it's easy to find countless cases of where people are taking nonsense as gospel truth by being swept along through confirmation bias, seeing what they are looking for. That the earth if flat is a good example; over time sources making this absurd claim would congregate around a short list of agreed-upon evidence that "proves" this.
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interesting that under 1000 people follow "water fasting" while 169k are into intermittent fasting |
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-health-benefits-of-fasting
A Quora answer to that question, but as partial framing the author's credential is "Best-Selling Author, Content Creator, Coach, Biohacker." I take those last two to be warning flags instead of supporting roles or attributes. Even the best-selling author part is suspicious; maybe that's true, or maybe not.
...But here’s a list of the benefits.
Cellular repair via autophagy. - Your body will self-digest itself, leading to the recycling of old waste proteins and through detoxification.
Increased fat oxidation. - Better use of your own body fat for fuel.
Hastened metabolism. - Your metabolism actually speeds up by 3–14%.
Improved biomarkers. - Reduced cholesterol, lower blood sugar, better insulin sensitivity and no insulin resistance.
Boosted Growth Hormone. - The Holy Grail of longevity and muscle building. It maintain lean muscle mass and burns fat.
Increased life-span. - Fasting increases free radicals that trigger protective pathways.
Protection against cancer and tumors. - Autophagy purges precancerous cells and lowers risk of tumor growth.
Bolstered brain power. - Protection against neurodegenerative disease thanks to increased BDNF.
I really don't know about any of that, and I'm not of a mind to go and read a half dozen research papers to try to sort that out. Then it would help a lot to try to find another half dozen papers expressing the alternate conclusions to help place those, or discussions or input by people who are solid references, who aren't trying to accept this same conclusion.
I suspect that some of this is accurate, I just have no idea which parts, and that's based on nothing at all, a random guess. Other input (Quora answers) suggest that your body organs will be able to reset and self-repair while you take a break from non-stop eating, sort of along similar lines of the detox theme, but who knows about that too. I'll skip guessing more about this list, or referencing other answers there, because I just don't have much to say about any of it. Hopefully parts are accurate, or even it all.
Fasting mimicking diet: of course intermittent fasting is the fad that people took up in significant numbers, which I also won't say more about, but I ran across an interesting alternative that's not that in looking around, a fasting mimicking diet. The idea is to eat only very low calorie input foods for a number of days, just vegetables, and to not stop eating, but to cease taking in much for calories from that. It's brilliant.
This section runs a bit long, on some unique ideas, methodology, and findings from a Youtuber bodybuilder source. That's not exactly the same theme as the prior first-hand experience account, and even different from the hearsay understanding.
I've been trying to think through why that might not be as effective as water fasting, about why not completely shutting down digestion would be a concern. I never got far with that. I heard about this in a Youtuber's channel, one of those bodybuilder / fitness / steroid advocate guys, "Vigorous Steve:"
Steve's EXTREME Fat Loss 5 Day Fasting-Mimicking Diet
He seemed to accept some of the main health benefits others were claiming as a premise, that it somehow improves a lot of body function, but he was mainly focused on the goal of losing weight. There's an old well-proven finding--that's actually real--that research animals who are on various forms of calorie restricted diets do live longer, which is hard to place in relation to humans, or even causes for them experiencing that. I think he might've only implied an accepted link to that. In watching some he claimed that he did bloodwork (testing of blood compounds) and could literally prove he experienced improvement in that five days; that's different, but the context of taking lots of drugs throws off easy judgment about what that means.
That evidence is here:
5 Days Of Salads & Fat Loss Pharmacology | Before & After Results | 6 Weeks Back On Cycle Update
He even claims in that first video that results are much different than just taking a week off to rest, that the fasting mimicking diet helps his body repair minor injuries.
It's kind of a tangent, but look what he says he is now on, for performance enhancing drug use:
The first two are anabolic steroids, both essentially versions of testosterone, I think, but I have no idea what the rest is. He said the Ezetimibe is a healing peptide, I think it was, so that might offset the claim that the fasting helped with healing, if another compound was intended to support that.
Then he was on three different appetite suppressant drugs; why not? And he's on multiple drugs that support burning fat:
This is a free-for-all human trial science experiment at this point. It's helpful that he's checking his bloodwork (main compounds and warning markers, eg. liver enzymes), but for taking a couple of handfuls of drugs a day he might eventually just drop dead, from getting some parts wrong.
It makes it hard to take seriously that whatever he claims blood results show really refers back to fasting, not a side effect of some, or many, of those many drugs. He lost 5 pounds in a week, starting at 217 pounds / 98 kg; there's that.
I've never done any PED's, except unless someone considers caffeine from drinking a coffee that, even though I did lift weights for a few years when I was younger, but to be clear I don't intend this as judging him. I find the subject of PED's fascinating, because every change that someone initiates by taking any of these drugs relies on normal body functions to work, mimicking or expanding on natural internal compound effects. My judgement doesn't mean much, or isn't so well informed, but this guy Steve and Derek of More Plates More Dates seem to be among the most conscientious, cautious, and reliable steroid proponents out there.
Conclusions
It might seem strange that I never referred back to what that fasting Reddit sub claimed the point of fasting was, since there is a developed reference wiki there. There is a bit on that:
That section is 600 words long, so a quick read. Maybe that's a much easier to access summary of hearsay / known benefits than any of those Quora answers. Vigorous Steve's input, the next "results" video, must be interesting, but since he was on a dozen different drugs, many related to healing support and fat loss, it's hard to know what role fasting actually played.
I kind of want to try it again. With proper electrolyte intake and my body knowing what's coming the negative effects might be greatly reduced. I still doubt that I would know what clear benefits occurred if I really made it to 5 days, although I could weigh myself before and after. I do feel great today, maybe as recovered from running training impact as I've been in years, which I'll check tomorrow. Or I could just feel great in comparison to suffering from not eating. I didn't mention the vivid dreams, or how in spite of being hazy as could be I've been as productive as I ever am. I'll check back here later if I give it another go.
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