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this picture has food in it, but relaxing in nature with tea could be helpful while fasting |
I mentioned that fasting may have improved my health in relation to aging aspects in a Reddit thread, and in a second comment covered basics on how to fast. It all works as a great summary of the topic.
Let's start with the first part, what seemed to improve as a result of fasting practice:
I'm really also pursuing health instead of avoiding aspects related to aging, or longevity related "biohacking." But I tried out fasting awhile back (maybe 2 1/2 years ago), and it seemed to make a difference. Now I try to fast for 5 days at a time 4 times per year.
It's hard pushing that to the next level for description, listing out likely benefits. I think I'm a little mentally clearer, and my energy level seems more stable, especially when running. That second part is a reference to metabolic flexibility; people are said to be able to use fat energy better when they routinely experience ketosis.
It's possible that it is offsetting other aging effects, but not in a way I can clearly link and justify. The few grey hairs I had mostly returned to being colored. That could've been for some other reason though; I exercised more around the same time, adjusted diet, and added a bit of supplementation to help with exercise recovery. My health checkup blood markers have all improved somewhat, but I'd expect exercise to be related to that.
Then someone asked about the details, in the form of these questions:
Curious about your fasting. Water only? For how long? How do you transition back to food?
My answer ran a bit long, since it seemed I could cover a few other basics, beyond those three questions:
Past 3 days you really need to supplement electrolytes, but that's it, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. People who fast often tend to drink things with no calories, and I drink tea or herb teas / tisanes, and sometimes a diet soda, but not often. I've never heard of anyone trying to eat something solid with no calories; that's not typical fasting. People avoid eating a single calorie, even though eating 10 to 20 might not re-trigger digestion response.
I try to fast 4 times a year for 5 days at a time. There's no clear reason for why 5 days at once or 20 days per year would be optimum; people sort out what they think will work on their own. Autophagy, a recycling process for inactive cells or damaged cellular material, is said to peak at or after 48 hours, but autophagy routinely happens to some extent, and that kind of hearsay input is only so reliable.
Transitioning back to food is a lot more difficult when you fast for 2 or 3 weeks, instead of 5 to 7 days. You can still get it wrong fasting for 5 days, but that has only happened to me once. I would normally eat a burger and fries to resume eating, but a natural version of it, using quality meat (pork; I live in Thailand and we don't eat much beef here), decent bread, home-made fries, often from sweet potatoes, and vegetables, spinach and tomato.
I once quit early for some reason and ate McDonald's food instead, thinking it would also work, but it didn't, and it took a couple of days to get past severe diarrhea. Beyond that, not eating fast food or junk, which is kind of common sense, people advise to avoid sugar. Probably moderating fiber right away would be as well, although you can eat a normal amount of it.
One benefit of fasting that may not be so intuitive is that it changes your relationship with food. The habitual eating, or "food noise," drops out. Not on the first couple of fasts, but eventually it does. You can reset to a better diet. You can only make so much change at one time, or it won't stick, but over the course of a few fasts you could completely reset what you eat and your related eating habits, and it wouldn't seem nearly as difficult as making extreme changes while still eating.
One potential negative, depending on how people see it, is that I think my metabolism might have slowed slightly, that I eat a little less and maintain the same body weight. I've gained weight in the last 2 1/2 years, but I've been exercising a lot, and I think it's mostly muscle weight. People discuss a risk of losing muscle mass during fasts but I'm certain that I don't. 5 days isn't that long a time period, and my body would have access to protein in my digestive system the first day.
To make it easier people recommend switching to a very low carbohydrate diet for a couple of days prior to the fast. Not necessarily to enter ketosis, but that is the general idea. An extreme version of that would be to not eat any carbs at all for 4 to 5 days, and you might enter ketosis then. If you are already using only fat and protein for energy, and mostly fat, it should be easier to switch to using body fat, in theory.
Later on you really do seem to take on greater "metabolic flexibility," an ability to use different energy sources, or at least it seems to me that I never feel any energy issues when I run, which I attribute to this. I'll run for 12 km for routine outings (3 times every 8 or 9 days) and energy level is never an issue, even though I'm 57, and everything works a little less effectively at this age.
And that's most of it. I could add a little about what tea I tend to drink, given this is a tea blog, but that doesn't run long, because most types seem not to work well. I can drink shou / shu pu'er, and sometimes go with aged white tea. I would guess that some forms of hei cha would also be fine, and I've had positive results experimenting with that, but it would depend on the type. Harsher Liu Bao wouldn't work at all, and milder Fu zhuan would probably be fine.
I think herb teas / tisanes are even more flexible, that few of those would upset your stomach. I experience great results from drinking those, but I think it might be mostly because I'll brew a couple of rounds of a large mug of one, and drinking an extra liter of water is probably helpful. You really should drink at least 3 liters a day while fasting, more than it feels natural to drink, and a full gallon (around 4 liters) is more the optimum people recommend. Your body is said to use a lot of water by processing energy through ketosis.
Again all of this is hearsay, which can only be confirmed so effectively through experimentation. But I can notice that if I don't drink a lot of water I suffer negative effects, and that it takes a lot of electrolyte input to seem to balance that factor. It's on the order of 2 grams per day of both sodium and potassium; an awful lot. You don't need that much magnesium; maybe 400 mg. All of this isn't dosing recommendations, and I suspect what works best for people would vary by a lot of factors, like body size, local climate (if they're sweating), rate of metabolism, energy use, and so on.
Some people probably become very inactive while fasting, even though it works well for me to walk a good bit while not eating. It's relaxing, and it takes my mind off not eating. My thinking is that light activity helps over the first couple of days to switch over to full ketosis, so I'm not going through that adjustment period for three days, which seems to be the normal time-frame. I've experimented with running while fasting, and that's fine, I can, but I suspect recovery is impacted, taking in no protein for days. So I've never really pushed it, never running too far. Maybe only 2+ miles / 4 km to test it out?
From there other factors seem vague. People might try to do more meditation, to lean into a more spiritual side of the experience, or at least to offset anxiety that might come from the mild underlying stress of not eating. I first fasted based on someone telling me that they fast for spiritual purposes, to replicate what yogis and Jesus experienced. Maybe there's something to all of that. It's a profound feeling experience. I can't do it justice by description, and it takes a few fasting trials for the early stress to settle out, and for hunger experience to subside, so that you get on to experiencing different dimensions of it.
Then people might discuss how to deal with that stress and the "intrusive thoughts" part better, food noise. All of that just varies by person, and largely drops out with more exposure, again after a few fasts. Hunger experience really is extreme and novel the first 2 or 3 times. I don't mean the psychological expectation either; your body is unfamiliar with the process, and doesn't know to drop the hunger trigger in the same way. Put another way, in physiological terms, you seem to produce a lot more ghrelin in those early trials, and your digestion response doesn't slow down at all, instead increasing, but later on it's the opposite, and you don't think of food much, or hear your stomach growl, and experience gas, and so on.
I guess one last part I didn't cover is that I recommend people start with no more than 24 hours duration. Of course I didn't; I tried to start with 5 days, and then failed after three, when I noticed that you experience severe symptoms from not supplementing electrolytes, like trouble sleeping, muscle cramps, and what seem to be heart palpitations, an irregular heartbeat. But it would probably be so much easier to do a couple of 24 hour fasts, then a couple of 48 hour versions, then 3 days, then 4, and so on. I've never made it much past 5; a different form of acclimation seems to apply to go beyond that. I'm sure with a few trials it would be fine, but for me 5 days covers what I'm pursuing, hopefully triggering an autophagy / health maintenance response.
Two more tangents
I could probably keep considering extra tangents at length. I've participated in discussions of fasting practice and experience in a Reddit sub for a few years now (where there is a good electrolytes wiki reference), r/fasting, so parts keep coming up. I'll stop at two last points, the first related to the input of artificial sweeteners. Are those ok?
People are in two different camps related to that. One group thinks that those could potentially trigger an insulin release, which would be a bad thing, and that at a minimum their purpose in fasting is to avoid chemical inputs. As an example, some people think taking a multivitamin makes a lot of sense, since you are skipping ingesting all nutrition, and others see it as a sort of cleanse function to keep intake of everything to an absolute minimum.
No one really knows if there is a negative effect from drinking a diet soda, or sweetening tea with stevia or aspartame. I mean related to fasting, but I guess there is also a broader concern about these things. I've drank nearly a dozen artificially sweetened drinks over the last 2 1/2 years while fasting and notice no negative effects. That's not much of a sample size, and the opposite of a well-controlled review process.
The other subject is perhaps the trickiest part of fasting, getting electrolytes sorted out (beyond not eating when you are hungry). This problem comes in a few parts:
-how much sodium, potassium and magnesium do you need?
-does it matter which compounds provide those, and which are optimum?
-what is the best intake form (eg. in a drink solution, should that be flavored, what can you take in a pill form, or what won't work in that form)?
-how frequently should you ingest it, or put another way, what dose can you tolerate at one time?
1. (amount of electrolytes): The wiki reference in the r/fasting sub provides input on this, but the high end of the suggested range there is awfully high (many grams of both sodium and potassium). People need to experiment and sort out what works for them. I've already mentioned a general range, about 2 grams each of sodium and potassium, and about 400 mg of magnesium per day. That's not advice, not even offered as a starting point, just mention of the general range. It's a lot.
One thing to keep in mind is that you are trying to ingest a certain dosage of sodium (for example), not necessarily sodium chloride. The chloride part may work out to be essential, for all I know, but it's necessary to keep straight that calculating input of sodium, and the others, requires some way to account for the other part of the salt compound, what that contributes to weight (dose). That wiki reference helps with that.
2. (which compounds to take): for sodium it's down to sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). I don't like the taste of baking soda in a salt solution, so I only use table salt. For potassium the main form you run across is potassium chloride, so that's what I use, but it's not the only form. You can buy it as a table salt replacement in grocery stores; I've bought it in Wal-Mart in the US and Tops in Thailand. It costs almost nothing, and works well as a supplement to balance out your electrolyte input when you aren't fasting.
Then magnesium is where things get complicated. I use magnesium oxide, because it's the cheapest, but people recommend different versions, or recommend avoiding different versions. Over and over people say one compound has a strong laxative effect and another is relatively optimum, it just might not match which they prefer. It would work to look up discussions in that group (sub) to use as input, maybe as a sort of voting process, going with what people tend to say the most. Using a search function in any social media group is an extreme step, but it would work.
3. (best intake form): you can just take magnesium as a pill; that dose is so low that it wouldn't be a problem. It might be nice if you could take it in the morning and then a couple of hours before bed, because it's said to support sleep.
The other two, sodium and potassium, are harder. The standard approach is to make up a solution of quite a bit of water and those salts and drink that throughout the day. It seems to work well for me to treat that as a meal, to drink some at breakfast, lunch, and dinner time, and some in the evening. Too much at one time causes a strong laxative effect, but breaking it into four parts offsets that.
People tend to not mention other tricks or approaches very much. Since you don't eat anything there's no way to couple it with food, and it would make limited sense to drink a very salty version of coffee or tea. I've mixed it with tisanes before, and that's promising, but it's too much extra work. If you use a base flavor tisane and dried citrus rind, and a little sweetener (stevia, some chemical form, whatever) it is a bit like gatorade. You need to keep drinking a lot of water to help process it, and support energy use from fat through ketosis. Experimenting with what works for you seems critical.
4. (maximum electrolyte dose at one time): Again you'd need to experiment to sort this out. I'm sure that ingesting a gram each of sodium and potassium at one time would go badly, for almost anyone, so you need to break it up into at least 3 different intakes, and 4 might work better, or others might prefer a half dozen.
You might think a laxative effect wouldn't be possible, after 3 or 4 days without eating, but you would be wrong. Apparently your body continues to release a limited amount of digestive fluid, which may drop with acclimation, so you can experience multiple very odd, liquid bowel movements over a 5 day period. Ingesting a lot of salt / electrolyte at one time triggers that. Not just magnesium either; the other two can have that effect.
In general my stomach feels better than one would expect; I have few problems or issues. If I were to drink green tea or black coffee maybe that wouldn't be true. I've had no problems with any tisanes, so it doesn't work to recommend which work best.
Conclusions
All of this went a little light on the benefits part, but I think that would vary by person, and my input would seem like claims that I really can't support. Did it offset aging effects? It seems so, but who knows. Do I experience more metabolic flexibility, more energy while running due to more efficient fat use? The same. And mental clarity is the same; maybe that improved, but it's hard to identify, and impossible to be clear on causes.
I also skipped over lots of negative effects that occur in those first few trials. Beyond being desperately hungry I experienced energy level fluctuations, sleepiness, dizziness, trouble focusing, and boredom. I would go with my wife to a market or restaurant and that really heightened the desire to eat. By the 4th or 5th fast all of that was moderate, and by the 10th or 12th I wouldn't be reminded that I was even fasting many times in a day.
There are periods of mental clarity and productivity that happen, after some exposure, that are also hard to describe. At times I can get 6 hours worth of creative work done in an hour. It's hard to focus or channel that; it happens when it happens. It's possible to stay busier than normal, over the entire fast, but past a certain stress level it all seems to crash. It adds some underlying stress, so you have to be careful. You don't need to moderate the demands on your time and productivity, but you can't push it too far either.
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