Not long ago I wrote about fasting basics and some more detailed approach, here, but it occurs to me that there's another dimension that's harder to describe. Fasting is a unique experience. It's hard to just describe what hunger is like, once you acclimate, and the form changes.
Of course this has nothing to do with the theme of why to fast, and not all that much with how to do it, but it does overlap with that. That earlier post was on the latter, and it's hard to pin down what research says, and not as reliable to convey hearsay or first person accounts of benefits. I think I'm mentally clearer as a result of the practice, for example, but who knows how to place that. Maybe I'm not, at all. Maybe ramping up exercise or improving diet caused that, and there is no connection. Or maybe I lose my mental faculties and don't know it.
So let's run through some parts of what it's like to fast instead, which will cover before and after acclimation. I'm only having the latter experience now, because I've fasted for at least two months so far, in total.
I try to fast 4 times a year, at 5 days each, and I'm on day 5 just now, not so many hours away from wrapping it up, at 4 days and maybe 19 hours. I "call it" early because I fast from one dinner time to the one 5 days later, so for me it works better to "only" fast for 4 days and 22 hours or so, and if it works out to 20 or 21 that's fine too. Otherwise I'd have to eat that first meal not so long before sleeping, which wouldn't be ideal. I usually end up drinking milk after dinner the day before a fast, the last food to clear.
Reading back through those last ideas one might think that 5 days of fasting should really be 5 days and 6 nights, so really 5 1/2 days as clock time goes. Maybe I will try breaking a fast the next morning instead at some point. The mental pressure of fasting for "only" 5 days is already a bit to get through, though.
Fasting experience themes
Hunger: the main factor, maybe. Early on, for the first 2 or 3 trials, your body is shocked by the experience, and hunger is intense. Physical cravings are coupled with what people call "food noise," repeating thoughts of eating. Your body releases plenty of ghrelin, a hunger related hormone, so you keep producing digestive fluids, and experience stomach gas and discomfort. Or at least that's my guess for why it feels like that.
After 4 or 5 fasts the experience completely changes, and that high degree of hunger largely drops out. But you're still hungry. It just takes on a feeling of emptiness, that runs in the background, so that if you smell food you really want it, but so that you can go a few hours without thinking about having not eaten.
One might naturally consider what they could drink to lessen the hunger experience (eating doesn't apply; pretty much no one ever eats paper or some other calorie deficient input). It's normal for people to drink coffee, tea, or herb tea, and some drink diet sodas.
I've had one diet soda in the past 5 days, a diet Strawberry Cream Pepsi. It doesn't seem to change much, but I don't drink much of that. I've had tea every day, and herb tea 3 of the days. This time I started in on some pandan leaf and roselle tea I bought not so long ago, along with lemongrass tea, that I didn't get to. All of those are common types in Thailand. I don't use stevia to sweeten any of it, but I could.
Related to the tea I usually drink shou pu'er or aged white tea, because they're easy on your stomach, but I also had some hei cha (Fu zhuan) and relatively oxidized sheng pu'er. It would be nice to drink coffee but I'm not acclimated to drinking my coffee black, and that my hurt your stomach.
I think it helps most to drink a tisane that you tend to drink a lot of, perhaps mostly because it boosts hydration input. I can drink three 16 ounce mugs of chrysanthemum, and that adds well over a quart / liter to my daily fluid intake. It's best to try to drink 3 liters of water a day, if you can, but that's a lot to get down. You need to supplement quite a bit of salts (sodium, potassium, and magnesium; there's more on that in the earlier post), and I'm always struggling to get the intake amount right, and to work through salt water tasting awful, even in a diluted form.
Special hunger triggers: I need to go to grocery store every time I fast because I let my food supply run out, and need to re-up it, usually on the last day. Sometimes chance will have me visiting a market or restaurant with others I happen to be with. In one sense it's not so bad, but in another it is. Sometimes I'll cook for other people, and that is a different level of exposure. Your digestive system can seem to turn back on, even when you just smell food.
At worst that will lead you back to the earlier phase of stomach growling, that you tend to only experience early in fasting trials. I just went grocery shopping on day 4, taking my mother-in-law to a store, and it was a little like that. But even that level of exposure you acclimate to. Cooking not so much.
Stress: this is the other part of the experience of hunger. It feels like an extra underlying stress, to me not completely unlike what extreme jet lag feels like. If your normal stress baseline isn't bad it's no problem, but when other stressors enter in it can be too intense. It's not hard to be productive when you fast, and that deserves it's own section, the extra mental clarity. Even walking a lot or light exercise is fine. But getting it all to balance requires a bit of extra attention.
For me if other stressors add up too much I'll stop the fast. The last example that comes to mind is too harsh to cite here, but even if work gets unusually busy it might throw it all off.
Other side effects (dizziness, low energy level, sleepiness): this probably varies a lot by person, so what any one has to say wouldn't apply broadly. But I'll include it. In those first 3 or 4 fasts these negative factors were a lot more to deal with, especially the first two. That's why I recommend people try period eating first (20-22 hour fasts), then 24, and build up. I might feel a little dizzy a couple times a day. Getting electrolyte balance (intake) dialed in offsets a lot of it, but your body seems to also need to adjust to a new range of experience. If you fasted every other month you might stay well-adjusted to it, but if you let 3 or 4 months go between fasts you might end up adjusting again.
I don't really feel low energy level now, which is strange. I've been walking 10,000 steps a day for all of the 5 days. Typically I don't try to do much with losing weight, fasting for other reasons, but since I've climbed to 81 kg (178 pounds), up from 74 kg (163) I'd like to get that to drop again. My blood pressure has been running high, and it might help. I've been swimming a lot over the past year, and keep on adding a little extra muscle, so it's not that much fat gain, but it's some.
Lots of other potential side effects could be concerning. If my electrolyte balance runs low I'll feel mild cramping, mostly in my calves, and that's not good. That leads back into a longer and off-topic discussion about how hard it is to dial in an optimum electrolyte intake (sodium, potassium, and magnesium). It should be easy, figuring out how much you need by trial and error, mixing up a diluted batch of that with water, then drinking that over the day (and taking magnesium by pill / tablet, because you need much less). It's not so simple. Some of that is probably user error, that I make it harder than it needs to be. I'm back to just drinking some salt mix a few times a day, mixing it up without measuring it out per day, not using that more standard approach (standard within "fasting circles").
This Reddit group is what I experience of that online discussion; it all requires some interpretation, and some extreme views come up, but that's normal for social media. Note that the high end of their fasting wiki recommended electrolyte intake range is an awful lot of salt (or had been; per this following citation it's the opposite now); I have no idea how that could work out.
I take that back; in the past that wiki recommended a high end range of at least 3 grams each of sodium and potassium, and now it's a fraction of that. There was a "snake juice" recipe for that daily mix for people to drink, and they've deleted that. Lots of people had complained the high end was way too high, or maybe even the relative average, and maybe moderation staff changed on the page, and the guidance opinions they wanted to share with them.
One part that was interesting was that you can use either sodium chloride or baking soda, (sodium bicarbonate), and that food grade epsom salts can be used for magnesium input. There is endless discussion there on what is the best magnesium compound form to supplement. Maybe glycinate is recommended most, but I use magnesium oxide, because it's cheaper. The concern is laxative effect. Magnesium that is absorbed too quickly will cause that, so the compound form matters. That's what laxatives often are (like milk of magnesia).
mental clarity, positive side effects: mental clarity is about it for positive changes in the short term. Even that comes and goes. There are flashes where I can really get a lot done, and see complicated themes much clearer than I normally would. My subconscious mind is also in on it; my dreams have picked up a really novel clarity and complexity over the last 3 nights (the first night I had eating hours prior).
In one dream I dreamt I had accidentally broken the fast by eating, then woke up to realize it was a dream, but woke up in another dream where I experienced that. I had an interesting exchange about child rearing practices with a fictional character in one last night. I suppose the waking clarity is more meaningful and impactful.
I think the clarity extends to be a main positive effect from the fasting. Maybe I'm also experiencing some aging effects less, but this is where it gets hazy. My hair has returned to mostly colored since taking it up; I've lost the few grey hairs I had, except for very few around my temples, less than 10. It's strange seeing a hair that's two colors, that had been grey and returned to brown, but I've experienced that. I'm 57; I really should have greying hair now. I don't care much about the aesthetic side, since I'm married, and it just doesn't matter, but it's an interesting change.
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a visa renewal selfie from last month; you can see some grey hair |
More on the vague side, I think that I have more energy when I run now, from greater "metabolic flexibility," or ability to use fat as an energy source. Who knows; it would be easy to imagine that. Or training experience tends to change in those kinds of ways over time.
I think for many a main positive effect is a reduction of "food noise," and an ability to manage diet better. My diet was pretty good to start out with, and I never snack that much, but I've used the fasts as resets, to make minor positive adjustment. I keep going back to eating ice cream, and some chocolate, but the overall balance shifts. It's much harder in the US than in Thailand; when Ben and Jerry's is on sale what can you do?
I eat more fruit and vegetables than just about anyone now, and prefer that basis for my diet. I eat some meat, to keep up protein intake, to adjust for exercising a good bit, but I eat nuts as a snack, a good bit of eggs and dairy, and use soy or pea protein shakes as a supplement.
All that is a bit beside the point; the idea is that it's easier to improve your diet and change habits after a reset, of sorts. For me I can only make minor changes each time, and if I try to shift too much after a fast it won't work.
risk: I don't think much about this, but it's worth considering. What could go wrong? If your electrolytes get too far out of balance then lots of things could, up to and including having a heart attack. It's important to get that dialed in as fast as possible, and probably gradually acclimating to fasting makes sense, even though it's more common for people to get the idea to try 3 to 7 days from an online video, and just go for it.
The problem I do experience with dizziness could be much worse. In the past 5 days I've stood up and felt light dizziness two or three times, which is pretty moderate. It's something to keep an eye on.
The main risk is that if you ingest a lot of electrolytes at one time then you will experience diarrhea, even if you haven't eaten in days. It's that "don't trust a fart" theme. Then that carries over to "re-feeding;" if you eat low quality food to re-start eating you'll experience that for a couple of days.
I've only tested that once though, and that was my experience. I usually eat a burger and fries for a first meal, which sounds pretty low quality, but if you use good ground beef or pork (we don't eat beef much in Thailand), good bread, fresh potatoes or sweet potatoes for the fries, and some vegetables (tomato and spinach, usually), then it's not low quality food. Of course most people who fast use an even more sensible approach, and eat different things in stages.
Later editing note: I ate a burger and fries again, yesterday, and my body digested it in 4 hours or so. Maybe because I was still hungry and ate some yogurt, a little chocolate, and a bowl of cereal some hours later? Or maybe looking forward to ending the fast too much prompted more rapid digestion. What works would always vary by individual anyway. The riskier "refeeding" cases relate to much longer fasts, well over a week in duration. Then just winging it wouldn't be safe.
talking about fasting: this is a bonus tangent; that pretty much already covers fasting experience. In fasting circles people usually recommend keeping fasting experience a secret, especially during fasts. Some people react negatively, of course. In one online story an HR department told the person to start eating, not to fast. People can be judgmental. I don't talk much about it, but I don't avoid it either. If people have problems with accepting someone else not eating, or a life practice they see as absurd, and probably harmful, then that's on them.
You can never really fully explain it. People can only experiment with fasting and make of it what they do, for themselves, and that would vary by person. It wouldn't be for everyone. For some the negative side effects would be a complete deal-breaker. For others acclimation, that I've been describing, might never seem to happen, even though it's my guess that within 4 or 5 trials most people would see negative aspects reduce. And then a more primary point, for many there just wouldn't be any point to it, if they're not trying to lose weight, and see the health benefits as possible but not a given, and perhaps unlikely to occur.
I first tried out fasting, as an adult, because I met a guy who claimed he did it for spiritual reasons. That's not entirely right; in an earlier life phase we would do multi-day juice fasts as some sort of cleanse / detox. It made more sense in that life context. I fasted for the very first time at the age of 10 or 11, passing 24 hours, but not fasting to my goal, 36 hours, or one complete day and night after waking. I don't remember why I did that.
Then I "fasted" a lot cutting weight as a wrestler in high school; I would go as long without eating as I needed to in order to make a competition weight. Our team was really strong, and I didn't have the experience to be above average (I wrestled for 2 years), so I had to slot in at varsity wherever I could beat the other guys competing. Good times!
So not eating for weight loss could work, and those other reasons may or may not be appealing.
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