Last year my BP was elevated. Nothing terrible but this was my first real medical issue. I was slightly overweight so I attacked the problem by reading about fasting. During the spring, we changed how we eat. We had dinner/dominoes on Tues night, dinner on Friday night with our family, and dinner/dominoes on Sat night. Sunday is a flex day in that if we have grandson soccer games we have dinner with them afterwards. That is all we it. We fasted in between. Essentially it was two 3 day fasts in a week. We did not find it hard. I dropped 15 pounds.
We keep our grandkids over the summer and they eat constantly so we quit fasting. I can’t cook and then not eat.
This week we had a soccer games on Sunday and ate with our family. But we also had a soccer game on Tues so there was no dinner/dominoes with our neighbors. We decided to fast for 5 days. Our last food was Sunday. We will eat again Friday night. I am surprised how well I feel. Still volunteering for 4 hours in the Y pool everyday. Still playing golf. Not starving. Actually, not that hungry.
I’m also fascinated that my body should have converted damaged cells into fuel and eliminated them and that by now it should be pumping stem cells into my blood stream.
Anyone else fast? Any feedback from those that do?
I did a bunch of 48hr and a few 72hr fasts a few years ago to process some grief and I did experience profound health benefits in reducing a chronic lymph node inflammation issue I experience. I quickly discovered supplementing with adequate salt was key to staying comfortable in the fast, I used Celtic SS and Himalayan PS in my waters and teas. But that was before I was a triathlete and I’m not sure I could manage it currently with my training. I think my running and swimming would be ok, but my bike legs would dissolve.
One of my son’s coaches did this too and also dropped a bunch of weight. Good for you (if the weight needed to be dropped).
I get hangry and headachy if I don’t eat, so doubt it would work for me. And I figure my blood sugar is dropping to low levels. In fact, I’m finding I need to always eat something before a workout, so fasting seems like a no go in my case.
If I were Muslim, Ramadan would be a very difficult month.
I thought the exact same thing. Also, by coincidence my neighbour across the street gets dominos delivered twice a week, every week. I wondered for a moment if I had been living across the road from OP all this time…
That’s funny. I was thinking that I wanted to keep an open mind about the OP’s 5-day fasting with Dominoes pizza twice per week. I was like, “well, I suppose that’s one way to do things…”
Personally, I think dominoes are fun. I like the tactile quality, the sorting/ organization of pieces, and socializing of the game. I have a mini suitcase of dominoes about 2’ to my left in our game shelf that hasn’t been opened in over 2 years. I think I’m going to invite my girlfriends over for dominoes! Wow— this is a big idea
I have done numerous water only fasts, which I started as blood sugar levels slowly creeping up. I started with 42 hours and often do that weekly, eating dinner Sunday night with my next meal Tuesday lunch. The best I ever feel is on Tuesday mornings. I am doing another next week. It is not easy missing dinner on Monday but the reward is how you feel Monday.
The trick on those is to watch eating after, just go back to healthy eating starting Tuesday at lunch. My goal is to do a 42-hour fast each week until mid-December.
The real challenge is longer fasts and I have done a dozen 5-day water only. Last year, for the first time I did a 7-day water only and will do that annually with my next one in November.
The real benefit for that is you get your BS down low after about 3-4 days and then have another 3-4 days where your body burns ketones for energy. In the one I did last year, it was very difficult but the changes are incredible. The clarity of mind (lack of brain fog) and energy levels were out of this world, I never felt so good. After about day 5 it gets hard and I started just missing the act of eating but I can’t tell you how good I felt and from all I have read, is enormously healthy.
the key part is intermittent fasting.and I think the general idea is no more than a day in a fasted state or low calorie intake… it is not multiple days of fasting in a row.
That is very interesting to me. Day 4 and I have loads of energy, which I did not expect. Today I lifted weights for an hour, spent 4 hours in the pool teaching water safety and then a neighbor asked me to help underlimb his trees so I climbed 30’ up 5 of his trees. So I am not out of energy.
I tried intermittent fasting and it didn’t work for me. I have a voracious appetite and I found myself just watching the clock until the fast broke, then I’d eat an absurd amount of food, easily 1/2 of my daily caloric needs, in one go. I just could NOT stop eating.
I found a few, smaller meals every few hours worked better for me.
That being said I’d be interested in trying a longer water only fast.
I read that at 24 hours the body starts culling damaged cells, which increases as you get to 36 hours. At 72 hours the body produces new stem cells and sends them throughout the body.
You would think that after millions of years of evolution, humans have some specific adaptations to enduring periods without food; a few days with minimal food must’ve surely been a stress affecting our reproductive fitness.
The question is whether those putative adaptations are beneficial to lifespan, or only beneficial to reproductive fitness.
I don’t know the answer; all I know is that when I’ve run out of food on wilderness trips I’ve been deeply unhappy. And on an occasion when I had nothing but high-fat foods to eat for two days my energy levels were low, low, low.
So for those of you fasting, can you point me to any scientific studies on the effects thereof?
