Harpers Magazine published a much better written article that discusses this same Scotsman along with an American who achieved some slight fame for his fasting around the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, the author writes about his own fairly significant fasts.
After reading that article and doing a little bit of further research online, I tried a pair of fasts. The first was a week, followed a few months later by one of 10 days. My experience was very similar to what the author describes. That is, I felt good during the fast after the miserable 2nd day. Coming off the fast was no problem, either. Food was actually not a significant temptation during the fast and I found the discipline aspect to be much easier than the couple of standard diets I've ever tried.
I'm tall and about 50 pounds overweight (~200 lbs would be my target weight). In the 10 day fast I lost roughly a pound per day, but for me the weight came back within just a few weeks. I suspect that to have the best results I'd have to continue my fast for 5-6 weeks.
In fact, I only broke my fast because I was leaving for a road trip vacation in which I had to drive. My focus was actually fine and I was able to write software with no problems during my fast, but wasn't willing to experiment with long stretches of driving.
I'm actually looking forward to my next fast which I hope I can make last at least several weeks.
If you eat a lot and then go on a diet, remember that for the first little while a part of your weight loss is simply a reduction of gut content. If you go back to your old dietary volume, part of the weight you regain is simply the gut 'filling up' again.
Of course, it also depends on the kind of foods you eat and how slowly they move through the gut, but it's just something to keep in mind when considering weight changes around dietary boundaries.
Another effect leading to weight fluctuations upon starting / ending a diet is the body's usage of glycogen stores as an energy source. For every gram of carbs the body stores as glycogen it stores around 4g of water along with it. Thus, when you burn through all the glycogen in your liver and muscles you will lose a lot of water weight, several kilos in fact. This weight will also be regained when you start eating normally again.
>Food was actually not a significant temptation during the fast and I found the discipline aspect to be much easier than the couple of standard diets I've ever tried.
I have experienced a similar reaction. I speculate it's because the cognitive overhead of "no food" is fairly low, whereas the cognitive overhead of constantly evaluating the quality and quantity of food against your diet plan is extremely high.
No, I only drank water. A lot of water. Even on my regular diet I drink more water than most people, but when fasting, I'm sure I drank 2-3x more water than normal. I would typically have a bottle or glass of water on hand all the time.
Once I did experiment with either lemon water or weak tea (can't recall now) but that caused an unpleasant case of acid reflux, which was very unusual for me.
I would recommend (as a fellow tall guy who was once about 50 lbs. overweight) that after your next fast, when you start eating again, experiment by only eating zero to low carbohydrate foods. Lots of meat and green vegetables. I think you will fine that the fast will kick start ketosis, and the low carb diet will maintain ketosis at a more pleasant level, but the fatty acids in the meat will provide energy, supplemented by the fatty acids being released from your fat cells.
There are significant risks to such an experiment, and it's a shame that there isn't any record of what happened to him after the fact or his long term health.
There is a significant body of literature suggests that in addition to risks during starvation, there is significant harm and danger in trying to eat again [1]. The GI tract atrophies (much like when we don't use a muscle or a limb for a long time with a neurological disorder), and there are many metabolic complications in restarting to eat.
They mention "Some five years later, he had regained only 7 kilograms", so it seems they had a least one follow up and I assume if he were permanently harmed by this they would've mentioned it as a caution.
Rapid weight loss is known to cause gallstones. That's what happened to me and it was awful! It's not a minor issue. It can interrupt your day, cause you pain, and prevent you from working or sleeping for more than 10 hours if you don't eat the right foods.
I fasted entirely for lent one year (40 days) and after the first week, the hardest part was indeed that I was missing the social aspect of eating meals with friends and family. I took vitamins, and drank more water than I normally would but was quite happy.
I should also mention that I stopped running so hard during this period and took a multivitamin each day. I've fasted for shorter durations and it's amazing how even 2-3 days without food seems to sharpen the mind. You'll feel less sluggish and simply feel more alert.
I find that there are two distinct sensations that I have to call hunger. They seem to get confused.
The first is what I think people in modern society call hunger, because it's the only kind they've experienced. It's a craving for food, or even just a sensation of not being full. We call "not full" "hungry" when they aren't really necessarily the same.
The second kind comes after you've fasted for quite a while. It's difficult to describe if you haven't felt it, but it's sort of like... tightness maybe as if your body is buzzing or something.
The first one is appetite. The real hunger comes around after a few weeks of fasting - and unlike appetite, it doesn't go away when you do something interesting.
Feeling of hunger is very individual. For some people, it's no big deal. For other people, it is very annoying. I know that if I haven't eaten for a day, I start notice limping people more, and I can't stop watching small children, because I want to kill and eat them.
> Appetite is a feeling I would describe more psychological. I'm smelling something delicious and suddenly want to eat it.
It is psycho-physiological addiction. (smell is not psychology, it is physiological). It is like cigarette addiction. But it isn't a physiological need.
Actually he described it quite well. Appetite is psychological, whereas hunger is a physical sensation of pain.
I'm replying to your post because I get hungry even quicker. I had lunch (rump steak, potatoes) at 1pm and now at 4:30, I'm hungry again. My BMI Is 21, with rather low body fat.
Even with a BMI of 21, you can probably fast for 20-40 days with no irreversible damage, and that feeling you call "hunger" will not be there after the 2nd day.
You do not know what hunger is until you've felt it. I thought I knew what hunger was, until I fasted for 25 days. Then, I actually discovered what hunger is.
When I did a 3-day fast, the feeling of hunger went away after the first day. But the first day I did have to repress it. That was a bit hard. And then the second day, there were all these student clubs (university at the time) who were giving away free food. Not junk, but high quality food. And recruiting sessions. Free food again, the high quality stuff. So I realized there are 2 things to resist in a fast. One, dealing with hunger, but two, dealing with temptation to taste something succulent.
I usually try to fast at least once a week, the longest I've fasted for is 5 days.
The first few days I get hunger pangs around my usual meal times, but they go away soon enough.
Around the fourth day I get the 'real hunger' feeling where it's your whole body aches for food, but the hunger pangs go away. But that had lessened by the end of my fast.
Even if you're not religious I think it's still worth giving fasting a shot, just because it teaches you about hunger. Most people in developed countries will never understand it.
Didn't you get headache? When I don't eat for 20 hours or so I get a severe headache, feel terribly weak and fall asleep. Only when I wake up I feel strong enough to bother with getting something to eat.
The hardest part was social?! Really?! I've done a couple five day fasts and the hardest part is that after day three you have an effective IQ of 65. Your body shuts your brain down and you can't think clearly.
I wonder if this has an under-explored psycho-therapeutic value, actually. When you can't mentally ruminate at all anxieties definitely dissipate. I'd recommend fasting as a way to clear one's head for sure. You can't get any work done, though. You really need a week off alone.
Day one was mostly hard due to habit (I cut out sugar and carbohydrates four days prior, so no withdrawal to deal with) and after day 8 or 9 I started to feel a bit weaker. But in between I felt more energetic and was certainly no less sharp mentally (I mean, I was still doing quite well in my coursework and research).
What really stuck out for me was just how much time I was spending each day either planning meals or eating them. Easily four hours a day, including cooking, cleaning, eating, and planning meals with friends.
The social part was not so big a deal for me, but only because there were four of us in our fraternity trying it all together. Plus, well, living in a fraternity and being in college. I didn't need the excuse of a meal to hang out with people.
I imagine that ones metabolism factors in as well. I was sick once, couldn't eat anything for 14 days due to large wounds in my mouth. I felt fine if you factored out the pain.
Lost 8-10kg (I'm an athletic, not large person) and I could barely exit a car when I visited the doctors office. I remember being very tired, but not feverish, so I don't think that factored in.
Regained the weight extremely fast when I started eating again. I remember how that surprised me!
I used to work with a guy who would fast on Wednesdays for religious reasons. After a while, we realized that we shouldn't ask him any technical questions on those days, as he simply couldn't answer, or didn't provide good answers.
A few years later I went on a diet (lost almost 30 pounds, sadly since regained). I experienced the same effects - I was irritable, and didn't produce my best work. This was probably a contributing factor to my being selected for a layoff.
I do IF (Intermittent Fasting, 24 to 36 hours with water only once a week), and have found that too, but I have also found that as soon as I start eating again, I get quickly tired and warm (like I started a fire inside my body).
I don't eat carbs when I start eating again for the same reason. Try eating per the Atkin's diet for a few days and gradually add carbs back in. As an aside, I've used the Atkin's diet to lower my cholesterol and the "keto-strips" indicate a light ketosis after 3 days or so.
You have to have reasonable stores of vitamins & minerals (iodine, b12, niacin, iron) before starting if you want your cognitive ability to remain in top shape.
I've spent some time around people with anorexia nervosa.
In my opinion (with no science to support me) it is easy to 'give yourself anorexia' by starving yourself and making use of thinspo materials.
Although there have been campaigns to remove the worst thinspo material from popular sites it's still easily available.
As other people say, the re-feeding is also tricky and dangerous. So, while going hungry is probably okay for most people please be careful and get help early if you think it's becoming a problem.
When adjusted for other factors anorexia has the highest mortality rate of the mental illnesses, killing something like 20% of sufferers. (Although that number is a bit old now.)
There was a documentary on the BBC a while back about the liberation of Auschwitz, and the doctor that had to find a method of re-feeding the survivors safely. IIRC quite a few died when being put back on "normal" food.
I've been eating once a day since May last year, I eat only at dinner time and eat what I want and quite a lot. I don't get hungry until about 4pm, but then I go and do exercise. It's helped a lot with alertness, thinking is much clearer during the day, and I've always done a lot of sport and been quite slim, but I've really cut up since doing this (I'm 40 now, no fat around my middle). It's had no negative effect on my exercise or energy levels, so I'm just going to continue. I'm not completely strict with it, if someone asks me for breakfast or lunch then I'll go, but otherwise I've been pretty consistent with it.
I also often eat only one meal per day, have never been overweight, have always (until recently) been extremely active, and as I near my 50th year I am still not carrying around a lot of extra fat.
Once in awhile, maybe every month or two, I'll go three or four days with absolutely no food but plenty of water.
I've been in better physical condition, but my doctors are happy with my current BMI.
That said, I've always felt better when I ate less food more often.
Another thing is I get to save $$ by not buying lunch and breakfast. Plus I've not been sick (cold or flu or anything really) since starting this and I kind of wonder if my body has more chance to fight infections because it's not constantly processing food. Just a thought as I used to get colds/flu at least 3 times a year.
Everybody is different, "you are an experiment of one"...
A lot of material about fasting says that if you skip meals, you "cannot" eat back the calories you missed. This might be true in some individuals, but not for me. I have always been able to eat large quantities in one sitting ; I have been kicked out of all-you-can-eat buffets in my early 20s.
When I tried to eat once every 24 hours, I ended up eating huge meals and put on weight.
"A very small part of your energy comes from breaking down your muscles — but you can avoid this by doing some resistance training, otherwise known as pumping iron. The majority of your energy comes from breaking down fat."
I thought fasting would always cause your muscles to weaken. But this makes more sense for evolution. If your muscles are being used, the body takes energy from all other sources first. The preserved muscle could make all the difference between eating and not eating.
You will definitively feel weaker and be unable to work out as hard. Even a days worth of poorly timed meals and/or too little protein can mess my weight lifting up for the following day, and fasting quickly forces my lifting volume down substantially (though amino acids from your protein intake can stay in your blood stream for a few days, so if you've kept protein intake high, you can keep things normal through a couple of days of fasting).
But the main predictor of how quickly you'll recover your strength afterwards will be whether or not you keep up resistance exercise. After a weak of lazing about during vacation, it can take me 2-3 weeks of hard exercise to be back at my peak. After eating too little or fasting for a short while, it's mostly just a matter of getting well fed enough again. I don't have experience with longer fasts, so I can't say how much they'd affect me, but it does take time to trigger substantial muscle breakdown, and even if you do lose muscle, getting back up to the same strength is much quicker.
Shit is brown because red-blood cells are constantly recycled and replaced and they come out in your poo. He had to shit out his old dead blood at some point.
To be fair, a new born baby has a full digestive tract. They have been 'eating' and 'defecating' during the last leg of the pregnancy while in the womb. That stuff has to empties out of their system when they are born.
Been fasting everyday for 20-24 hours since June 1. Once you get used to it theres nothing to it. I like that I can feast everyday and on top of that its much easier to eat healthy and make a good decision about the foods for your feast. The benefits to my focus while fasting is significant. There are streaks almost daily where I feel like I am on adderall just pumped with adrenaline. Also, you get a muscle pump during a fast. I don't know, not for everyone, but it works for me.
It sounds like he's doing Intermittent Fasting (IF), where you only eat for specific periods each day-- the precise amounts vary, from 16 hours fasting / 8 hours eating (basically 2 big meals) to 20/4 "Warrior Diet" (1 huge meal).
Do you workout in fasted state (before the feast)? If yes, how well does that go? Martin from leangains recommends taking large quanitites of BCAA before fasted workouts, but I don't want to live off isolated proteins.
I usually work out in a fasted state. I dont really mess around with supplements. Full Disclosure: I was fat, and now I am skinny. My bf is at 14%, so I am not ripped like hollywood, but I have made some good gains with this protocol and also feel better than ever. I am not a bodybuilder, just a dude trying to be relatively fit.
I eat all my food in a 4 hour window, 6-10 at night. Usually I workout from 3-4. I like lean gains, but I mainly follow the Warrior Diet put out by Ori Hoffmekler. He is waaaay ahead of his time.
In my opinion there is no 'right' diet for everyone, but definitely worth trying different things to see what works for you.
"Potassium is essential for the proper working of the heart, and when his potassium levels got a little low around the 100-day mark, he was given potassium tablets for about 70 days. "
This is why fasting is out of the question unless you have constant medical supervision. You need a prescription to get potassium supplements that actually meet the daily requirement.
"You need a prescription to get potassium supplements that actually meet the daily requirement."
Where do you live?
Google or Amazon for sodium free table salt. Find a potassium chloride based one. Don't pay more than a buck or two per ounce. Don't take more than a half/quarter teaspoon and drink lots of water. If you can taste it, you didn't add it to enough water. It tastes awful in high concentration. Chlorides are like that.
I get leg cramps if I work my legs too hard in hot sweaty weather and don't get enough potassium. A banana or two prevents that and is a great paleo-type breakfast. Sometimes it would be inconvenient so I eat a little sodium free salt. The "official" RDA for potassium is around a half to quarter teaspoon so eat that much sodium free pure KCl table salt. Use your brain a bit... you wouldn't dump a quarter cup of that stuff on a fried egg, so don't consume a quarter cup of that stuff. But millions of people daily dump a fraction of a teaspoon of it on their meals, so a fraction of a teaspoon a day probably is similarly likely to be OK.
The stuff in K pills is laughably small almost homeopathic dosage level. Like 99 mg in a pill. What you eat 20 of those per day? Just use the sodium free salt.
"constant medical supervision."
This is true, not just K level issues. Many people walking around with some level of blood sugar "issue" and suddenly stopping intake is asking for trouble. Of course, suddenly doing much of anything is usually a bad idea.
This is one of those things like drunk driving where the odds of anything bad happening are extremely low, but when something actually happens, its really super awful and best avoided.
This whole fasting topic is a poster child for moderation. Consuming precisely half your normal intake would result in the same exact benefits, at half speed, but probably only a hundredth the medical issues. So the average goofball goes all in, of course, like health is best modeled as an extreme sport.. Dumb idea.
Something is suspicious here. He lost 125kg of which roughly a third might be fat and two thirds water. A gram of fat burns into 9 kcal. He fasted 382 days.
This means that he burned about 980 kcal per day which sounds very low even for someone that is not doing any exercise
You'd be amazed at how much your metabolism can slow down when you fast. When in college I saw a presentation at the medical school where they showed the effect of low calorie diets.
It's not unusual for people on low calorie diets to see a 30-40% drop in their basal metabolic rates. And those are diet where the person is getting some food.
I agree that 980 kcal/day is pretty low, especially for someone of his size, but it's not completely out of the question.
It will apparently also go the other direction, speeding up to consume excess calories in order to maintain your "normal" weight - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHQshbJATVQ - skip to about 49 minutes. One of the guys in this experiment, where they doubled their caloric intake for about 6 weeks, had his metabolic rate go up 30% to compensate.
Happens to me. Distraction is the first cure, I fall asleep all the time with the tv on. A good book or something else to take your mind off it will help.
The second is melatonin. Help yourself sleep. It'll replace that feeling of full and satiation you normally have. After a few days, you'll be used to it.
This is why I eat only at night. I sleep better with some food in me and cant sleep while hungry. Try fasting during the day if the night time fast doesnt work for you.
I've had good experiences with fasting and I'd recommend it to anyone. My longest fast so far was 7 days. No food, just water. I lost about 20 pounds.
I worked from a book by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and have since undertaken a few more fasts, with phone guidance from another doctor at Dr. Fuhrman's office.
When I fast, I rest the whole time. The first few days of my 7-day fast, I hung out with a friend, did a bunch of reading, and watched some TV, but by the end of the fast, my energy level was so low that even trying to watch TV was too demanding for me.
Caveats: I am not a doctor, but the book I was working from placed a "safe fasting" limit of around 40 days, with 30-35 being the real practical limit in nearly all cases, iirc. The book also recommends medical supervision for anything more than a 7-day fast. My doctor said the same thing.
Why do you fast for so long if it's such a bad experience? If you'd do a 16h fast every day you'd be fit all year round and still have plenty of energy (for me, more energy than without fasting). Check out leangains.
Its auspicious that this post came up towards the end of Ramadan, when Muslims fast for thirty days or so. That being said, they break their fast each night so its not a continual solid fast. They do go without food and water though, interesting.
In theory your red blood cells continue to get recycle correct? I always thought a sizeable amount of your feces was from this. Yet, he pooped every 40-50 days? Wonder what that looked like.
I have an ongoing theory that diet matters extremely little aside from various extreme scenarios. Things like this help me to confirm my confirmation bias.
Depends on which archeologist or anthropologist you talk to.
What and how we eat since McDonalds was invented a couple generations ago does not have much relationship to what and how we ate for millions/hundreds of thousands of years.
There are some hints in how we're unable to store vitamin C, so obviously we evolved to rely on a relatively stable source of citrus. On the other hand the gallbladder seems optimized to digest large amounts of fatty meat every couple days at most, rather than none ever or small amounts every meal. Our long term iodine storage is somewhat lacking indicating a bit of coastal living / seafood would be a good idea. Given that ethanol is a systemic poison, our livers seem well evolved to get rid of it compared to other systemic poisons, indicating a modest consumption is probably reasonable, although not drinking is probably wiser. Our unimpressive long term iron storage, at least for women, indicates a reasonable source of iron (meat?) be hunted down and consumed at absolute minimum every month or so.
Now you can use modern high tech living to hack what your body was evolved to do, for moral or ethical or profitable reasons. We've got a ridiculously complicated world wide food production infrastructure, and a pharma infrastructure, and lots of scientific knowledge, so why not hack the system and go vegetarian even if its un-natural. Or occasional weird processed stuff. But the modern ability to hack it, doesn't mean the body doesn't have an inherent set of design constraints WRT nutrition. And occasional fasting does seem biologically part of the design. Otherwise we'd simply keel over and die once the initial blood sugar dropped too low, because it would be evolutionarily simpler to insta-pee out as ketones any fat or excess carbs consumed at the time of consumption... Aside from the obvious evolutionary positives of being lighter and faster. So we're built to pig out for a month and starve for a month.
Starving people die from lack of protein, not low body fat. Not having read all the details, I I don't buy the story that the guy didn't eat for a year. You can't survive without eating protein for an extended period.
You die of starvation when your body runs out of amino acids to renew cardiac tissue. Calories and stored fat have little to do with it. A fat person will die of starvation before a muscular person.
That qualifier should be included more prominently - this wasn't a strict fast, because he was still taking on nutrients. It's still a surprising feat, but it solves the questions of 'how did his muscles survive?' and similar.
>Starving people die from lack of protein, not low body fat. [...] Calories and stored fat have little to do with it. A fat person will die of starvation before a muscular person.
Don't be ridiculous. If you use up your glycogen reserves, and then your fat reserves, you are dead. You need energy to live, and it has to come from somewhere. You can die of protein deficiency, but it's definitely not the sole cause of death by starvation, and I doubt it's even the leading cause of death by starvation.
I remember reading somewhere how easily victims of prolonged starvation die from relatively non-serious trauma. It related to the loss of fat from around organs such as the heart. Quite low impact accidents were killing people. This was based on holocaust survivors I believe.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/95722979/Starving-Your-Way-to-Vigo...
After reading that article and doing a little bit of further research online, I tried a pair of fasts. The first was a week, followed a few months later by one of 10 days. My experience was very similar to what the author describes. That is, I felt good during the fast after the miserable 2nd day. Coming off the fast was no problem, either. Food was actually not a significant temptation during the fast and I found the discipline aspect to be much easier than the couple of standard diets I've ever tried.
I'm tall and about 50 pounds overweight (~200 lbs would be my target weight). In the 10 day fast I lost roughly a pound per day, but for me the weight came back within just a few weeks. I suspect that to have the best results I'd have to continue my fast for 5-6 weeks.
In fact, I only broke my fast because I was leaving for a road trip vacation in which I had to drive. My focus was actually fine and I was able to write software with no problems during my fast, but wasn't willing to experiment with long stretches of driving.
I'm actually looking forward to my next fast which I hope I can make last at least several weeks.