Last meal I had was Monday at around 6pm. Haven’t eaten since. Only drink water and electrolytes. I’m pretty hyped. I haven’t done an extended day fast in almost a year cause I have just been super stressed with work and life. Finally had a moment where I was gonna be alone for about a week and so with no one else cooking and eating around me it was the perfect opportunity.
I’ve done several of these extended day fast over the past few years. My longest was 162 hours or just shy of 7 full days. I am tempted to go for a 7 day this time but not sure if I want to get that close to the Thanksgiving holiday. Refeeding properly takes 2-3 days minimum. The longer the fast the longer you should spend refeeding. By “refeeding” I mean, eating small portions steadily over a few days increasing size and amount as you go till you are having normal sized meals again.
For anyone that is going to go one some “fasting isn’t good for you” rant, do some actual research please. https://youtu.be/7nJgHBbEgsE There has been a lot of good research done into therapeutic fasting. It is a perfectly safe and normal thing to do if you don’t have some medical condition and are intaking the proper electrolytes. The human body evolved to be able to go long periods without food.
Only in the past hundred years or so have humans abandoned fasting at large and I feel a large part of this is the promotion of excessive consumption by capitalism. Almost ever culture on earth has had some fasting tradition in it’s history and many still do. It really is an empowering thing to do. Until I started intermittent daily fasting, and later extended day fasting I didn’t understand how much food ruled my life.
Congratulations! Yeesh, I feel withered just thinking about it though. Do you exercise while you’re fasting? Do you lose a lot of weight?
I stay active but I don’t do a lot of intense exercise. You don’t want to lift heavy or tear your muscles. Cardio is fine though. I did do daily 1 mile walks on my treadmill and one day I did a 4.5 mile walk. Other than sore feet (common when I walk a lot on it) I didn’t feel too bad. Weight loss is steady and you can only really judge your weight before the fast and a few days after because you will loose a lot of water weight from depleting your glycogen stores and also poo weight as you empty the colon out after a few days. lol. My first 7 day fast I maybe lost around 4lbs of actual fat that stayed off for an extended period. The main benefit was to how I ate afterwards and other benefits to my body and mental state. It’s like a spring cleaning for your body really. Causing your cells to recycle damaged parts and build new healthy cells from old damaged one. Cells will also recycle and eliminate stuff like broken viruses and bacteria and other “junk” they have laying around. After 3 days you immune system goes into overdrive in rebuilding and replacing old and damaged cells. This is where they have done research on fasting having an anticancer effect. As newer, healthier, properly operating, immune cells are created and the older ones recycled the newer cells are more effective at locating and noticing cancer cells. Also as the body is more actively looking for damaged cells to recycle a cancer cells is more likely to be noticed. This is all part of the theory behind it. There’s some good studies done on the effects of fasting on cancer but the mechanism for why isn’t full understood. But we know that a dysfunctional immune system is definitely a major factor and we also know fasting helps rejuvenate the immune system. Most effectively after 72 hours.