It's irresponsible to glamorize restrictive dieting without talking in detail about why medical supervision is necessary - not just breezily saying "you get dizzy".
http://www.canyons.edu/offices/health/nutritioncoach/concern... - list of physical/cognitive/emotional effects of restrictive dieting: "decreased resting metabolic rate, loss of lean body mass, changes in brain chemistry that increase appetite, constipation and gastrointestinal upset, sleep disturbance and weakness, feeling cold all the time, decreased sexual interest, depression and anxiety, irritability and anger", etc.
Along with causing physical problems, restrictive dieting can be a factor in developing an eating disorder.
I have been doing a lot of fasts during the years:
It rarely works for permanent weight reduction - mostly because when you are off the fast you don't have proper new eating habits ingrained.
It takes 3 days to forget about the hunger. After that you have a lot of energy for the next 2-3 days.
Your senses become extremely sharp - you see better, hear better, smell better.
The moment you have acetone in your breath is a good time to stop.
When you start eating - your digestive tract is really fast to evacuate for the first few times. Be at home. Avoid hard foods.
After the first week you may have problems with the blood pressure - stand slowly, take your time waking up - if the world becomes more colorful - lay down on the ground ASAP - you are on the way of passing out.
Sex during the fast is awesome - see the senses thing above - the orgasm is multiple times more intensive than usual.
The moment you get acetone breath is also a great moment to begin a ketogenic diet if you want to experiment with that diet as well. The acetone breath is probably a function of ketogenic metabolism, and if you've already engaged it, why not continue and see what a primarily fat-burning metabolism paradigm does for you.
Also, self control. <20g carbs a day is a whole different kind of diet based self control.
But the results from 30 days for me was fun, definitely worth a month as a body hack.
About 4 months was enough for me to drop right around 70lbs a couple of years ago.
Keto has a lot of cultists that think it's magic when it comes to weight loss. It's not; it's still fundamentally a caloric deficit diet for that purpose.
But it is a really interesting metabolic hack when you start doing some research into it. It's an absolutely fascinating testament to the adaptability of the human body and its ability to metabolize energy from other sources when the "cheap" energy it can get from carbohydrates is unavailable. There's a lot more going on than just burning fat when the body is in ketosis.
Ultimately, it's a bit too restrictive for me to stay on indefinitely, but the shift in mental state and energy level is beneficial enough for me to cycle on it a few times a year just because.
> it's still fundamentally a caloric deficit diet for that purpose
This is true. I think the misconception of magic comes from the illusion that you basically can eat until one becomes satiated. It is easier to become satiated and hunger is more infrequent.
I think a lot of it is the popularity of Gary Taubes and people not fully understanding what he means when he says that the calories in/out theory doesn't really explain obesity.
His actual argument is a bit more nuanced, but tends to get lost in the soundbite.
It's probably best to not do that, if you're looking to get more substantial benefits out of fasting.
In fact, what works really great is practicing some meditation while fasting - if you already have some experience with it. The calm, clarity and joy from both fasting and meditation amplify each other.
The association between fasting and meditation appears over and over again in many cultures, many places and historic periods, as people re-discovered the synergy between the two. But the classic recommendation is to abstain from "indulging" in sex, drugs, etc during the practice. YMMV.
I have fasted for 2 weeks. I think that for a young healthy human one week will rarely cause problems. But after the first week I was permanently cold on the inside (I am a person that never wears long sleeves or jacket even if it is -10 Celsius outside) so I said - enough for now.
Medical supervision - whatever makes you feel best - if you will be calmer with having someone check you daily go for it.
Fasting is something that is individual - I have had involuntarily fast lasting 72-96 hours while playing diablo. But I have friends that cannot get a single afternoon without food - they fainted.
A good test is 18 hour inteminent fast, then cut your teeth with 32 hour one (you eat dinner on Monday before going to bed and next meal is Wednesday breakfast) - if you feel anything than hunger and some psychological discomfort - maybe it is not for you.
> How long would you be comfortable fasting for without medical supervision?
One week if you don't have any major health issues.
Not even a day if you're suffering from some serious condition.
Plan for less physical activity than usual, but do not become a vegetable. Take some short walks, do some small work with your hands. Meditation is great during this time, but you have to be somewhat accustomed to it.
Restart eating step by step. Begin with some fruit juice or clear soup. Then graduate to very soft, almost overcooked rice or something like that. A vegetarian diet for the first few days is beneficial. The longer you're fasting, the more cautious you have to be with restarting your diet.
> The longer you're fasting, the more cautious you have to be with restarting your diet.
Do you have any experience on what happens if you don't? It certainly makes intuitive sense that you need to ease yourself back into "normalcy", but what are the potential risks that everyone is very explicit about trying to avoid?
> what are the potential risks that everyone is very explicit about trying to avoid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome (fluid disorders, neurologic, muscular and hematologic complications, gastrointestinal disturbances, can culminate in coma and cardiac arrhythmias or failure)
i'm guessing those things are heightened because your body thinks you're starving to death, so it amps the food-seeking abilities (senses) and reproduction incentives (sexual pleasure) to 11.
Fasting spikes stress hormones and lean tissue catabolism. It's clearly a very stressful thing for the body. Small doses of stress have hormetic benefits but it's easy to go too far.
Vigourous exercise is stressful, too. A bit is good for you, but a lot is clearly bad. High energy expenditure athletes prematurely age and have elevated death rates. I'm sure it's the same with fasting. I would be careful about doing "a lot" of fasts.
In science - especially health science - it is not the responsibility of the skeptic to prove that a particular theory is wrong, rather it is the responsibility of the person making such claims to substantiate them.
Sure. Where do we derive most of our knowledge as individuals? From anecdotes from others. Is that science? No, not at all, but it's where science often starts. It's a preliminary experiment to at least find out some idea of what may be possible. While not repeated, peer reviewed, or verified in any meaningful way that doesn't make this useless.
The OP walked into a room full of very curious people and called them idiots without any attempt at enlightening them on what statements or assumptions might be wrong. In what way is that helpful? HN is not a peer-reviewed journal, it's a place for discussion and he detracted from that discussion.
Instead, I was hoping he might provide something meaningful that we could consider in trying to process this anecdote.
The majority of posts in this thread are anecdotal and personal experience. But they are strikingly similar and very close to the experience of the author in the original article. It almost feels like the experience is reproducible.
98% of gall bladder removals go fine, in-and-out procedures. I got to join the 2%.
Long story to the point: I wasn't allowed to eat for two weeks. Saline drip kept me hydrated, and that's about it. Connected to the drip, I wasn't really allowed to move either. For what it was, fact is I just didn't eat for about 14 days. Didn't feel hungry, but did watch a ridiculous number of cooking shows.
Yes, that had its special case factors. But now I know I can do without food for a prolonged period. Lost 10 pounds too.
When I hear about weight loss programs or tips, I am reminded of my uncle. For the duration of my youth, he weighed around 300 pounds. Then one day in college my siblings and I visited him and noticed that he was substantially thinner, maybe weighing around 190 pounds. We asked how he lost all of the weight, and he said,
"I went to the doctor and he told me that if I didn't lose weight I would die before my 60th birthday. That scared the shit out of me so I started eating less and waking up early and walking a few miles every day. "
If adding 10-15 years to your life isn't motivation enough to lose weight, then I can't imagine anything that could be.
I have done many water only fast in my teens and 20s. I also did a weekly Thursday daily water only fast.
Here are my experienced benefits:
1) Self Discipline! Talk about learning how to control yourself. Best reason to do it.
2) strangely after 3 days the stomach stops shrinking and I swear I have the most energy and focus for 3 or 4 days. I use to stop once I started getting tired again.
Had several people I know do 40 day fast and well they got more energy again around the 2nd week.
3) Sadly You can't LOSE weight long term on fasting.
P.S. I need to try it out again it has been almost 15 years since my last big fast.
>2) strangely after 3 days the stomach stops shrinking and I swear I have the most energy and focus for 3 or 4 days. I use to stop once I started getting tired again.
>Had several people I know do 40 day fast and well they got more energy again around the 2nd week.
That's not strange so much as an indicator that the body has probably shifted into a ketogenic metabolic state at those points. It's being discussed a little bit more upthread.
I fasted for about 28 days once, when I was 18yo. Just water. Coming off it took days, with just diluted orange and apple juice. Eventually after about a week I started on solids. Quite an experience. I was perfectly healthy before it, and completely refreshed afterwards.
I've done something like this myself. A few observations from the article:
> our bodies are designed for scarcity
This is something that's been forgotten in many countries where life is now comfortable all the time. Skipping one meal is not the terrible thing that most people imagine it is.
> the Terrible, Insufferable Six-Day Water Fast
The first few days are difficult. After day 3 or so, hunger disappears.
> vicious headaches, dizziness, and a sad, hollow feeling
These are surprisingly similar to an addiction withdrawal process.
> On my final day without food, I wake up at 5 A.M. I slept in! And all of a sudden, I feel tremendous. Light, energetic, unreasonably cheerful.
Exactly.
So, the first 3 days or so are tough. After that, hunger disappears. You get a sense of amazing energy, powerful but calm. Your body is relaxed all the time. There's an amazing mental clarity. You do everything consciously and purposefully. Negative thoughts are gone or greatly diminished.
I can definitely see why fasting was used in most if not all traditions where meditation and prayer were practiced.
BTW, the longer the fast, the trickier the coming out of it. Restarting suddenly on a high-calorie solid food diet may cause problems.
> This is something that's been forgotten in many countries ...
This requires either a Biblical citation (substitute your religious text of choice) or (preferably) citations from peer-reviewed journals.
I've read Eat Stop Eat and do a 24-hour water/coffee/tea fast once a week, but I don't buy these sorts of justifications that appear rooted in a misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution.
* "Non-survival of the least fit" is a better summary than "survival of the fittest".
* Even if our bodies were incredibly well optimized for the conditions present during most of our recent evolution, that does NOT imply that those conditions are optimal for our bodies. [Affirming the consequent]
* Lots of things will make a person feel "healthy" or mild euphoria, particularly when a person has become accustomed to a low baseline for a couple of days. Subjective anecdotes aren't a substitute for quantitative measures of health.
On a side note, detoxification from unspecified toxins is often accepted as an axiom without journal citation or other justification apart from subjective mood following the fast/cleanse.
Normal tap water has a pretty low sodium content anyways (4.8 ppm in SF), so why would distilled water be that much worse? Blood is typically 3.3g/L or 3.3 ppt.
Your kidneys are pretty dam good at reabsorbing essential ions.
I'm sure an electrolyte imbalance would be an issue eventually, I'm just not sure distilled water would make that much of a difference.
Hyponatremia is usually caused by drinking so much water that it dilutes the sodium in your blood, not by losing sodium out of your blood over time. It would take a long time to lose that much sodium! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhydration
I dated a girl who did modeling and whenever a shoot would come up she would do a water/coffee fast. It only worked temporarily and she would be forced to do it before every shoot to get where she wanted to be.
There is no substitute for exercise and proper diet.
Fasting is quite common in Jainism.. There are various fasts people take on, among which is atthai - no food or water for eight days or just no food for eight days.. I've done it once.. its quite similar to how its described in this article.
I do a 10 day juice fast about every 6 months or so. Here's my experience:
- drop about 1-1.5lbs/day when I'm a couple days in, mostly water weight.
- feel great and alert despite the hunger
- skin clears up
- experience memory issues, perhaps a supplement could help with this
- usually loose about 5-10 lbs, but gain all but a few pounds back (I'm not over weight to begin with)
- every time I do it, despite the hunger it's a hugely positive experience
I never do a fast with the expectation of loosing weight. You loose weight by having a healthy lifestyle. Fasting helps detox your body.
The one thing I did that made me easily drop 25lbs in 3 months was eliminating all wheat/gluten from my diet. I basically live like I have celiac's disease. By adding higher fat foods in my diet and cutting the sugar/wheat products, I can still gorge myself with meats, nuts and veggies, but not have the negative effects similar to eating a bowl of pasta.
If you love pasta, buy corn pasta. It tastes like regular pasta and is a fraction of the cost of rice pasta, plus it's much lower on the glycemic index.
Coffee also acts as a great appetite suppressant, but I make sure to only have 2/cups day that I dilute in large iced coffees.
Interesting article, but the title is totally misleading. The fast, according to the author, seems only "difficult". And the "new man" part just seems to be that he felt better after. We are, however, not given any details on how his life was bad before the start of this.
>We are, however, not given any details on how his life was bad before the start of this.
The article is littered with details on that topic. Here's the largest and most verbose 'detail':
>One morning back in 2011, I woke to searing pain in my arms. A flamethrower directed at my arms is what it felt like. The hospital offered morphine, but one shot did nothing. A second and then a third shot only made me sob more quietly. Finally Dilaudid, at ten times morphine's strength, cooled off the pain. Several doctors and hospitals later, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease in which the nerves that branch from the neck and power the arms are bulldozed by the immune system. There's no cure, just a blitz of medicines to blanket the suffering. So I embarked on a grisly medical protocol: monster doses of steroids, antiseizure agents for nerve pain, and a lot of craft beer, ice cream, and chocolate for the larger problem of what it now felt like to be me.
I wonder if this type of fasting is only advised under doctor supervision. I'd be interested in trying it, but is there enough published of the 'unsuccessful' stories? What are the risks?
Fasting occasionally under supervision may have benefits, but it is nothing compared to maintaining a healthy balanced diet combined with exercise. If you really want to take care of yourself, do it every day - don't just save it for a fitness binge like this. Check out something like the anticancer book by the late Dr. David Servan-Schreiber or try out any diet high in veggies and low in processed foods, focussing on occasional high quality meats, eggs and fish. You will be a better hacker for it.
I will say that for me, breaking the carb addiction was key to weight loss and feeling better.
You can go keto-only or some other diet or a fast, but being able to go through a period of time with a low amount of carbs, and then realizing how crappy I felt after a typical high-carb meal, really helped me stick to a lower-carb diet.
But can I also add, "only in America" would you have a place where you pay exorbitant amounts to drink only water and you stay there.
Oh look, he took a six day holiday where it was all about him and now he feels great! Of course it was because od the ridiculous diet.
This stuff reminds me of shamanism: "Oh yes, it's a devil. You need to take all your family (to pray for and with you) on a 10 day journey to 3 different temples 100 miles away while eating only these prescribed foods." Ta-da, cures almost anything.
Maybe I'm lucky but dieting doesn't seem that difficult. I've started charting my weight based on info in The Hackers Diet. I have found that as long as I think about what I eat I don't need to count calories to maintain a weight loss rate of between 1.5 and 2 pounds a week.
Well this guy is described as particularly tall and lean. I don't know about your build, but by that logic you'd have a negative mass after a few years.
Wonderful. "Hacker" News at its finest. A post that is nothing more than an anecdote full of questionable horseshit on an important matter like health in turn generates HN comments that are merely anecdotes full of questionable horseshit. On health. Health.
You forgot to mention vague references to "toxins" and "detox" as well as anecdotal feelings of mild euphoria (edit: or subjectively elevated mood following/compared to a reduced baseline mood induced by initial hunger) given as evidence of health benefits.
I have read Eat Stop Eat, and do a 24-hour water/coffee/tea fast once a week. I had my annual medical exam recently, and I mentioned to the nutritionist that I fast once a week. Her response wasn't positive or negative, just "you can fast if you like, but no longer than 24 hours, and don't let your hunger cause you to over-eat following the fast". The health benefits of my weekly fasting are probably not as great as I think. We'll see how my blood chemistry has changed from my last physical.
This article is at least as valid as the technical blog bike shedding that is normal HN fodder--possibly more so, as an actual experiment was performed. Would you like sources that fasting is bad for you? Every clinical study I've come across suggests otherwise.
> When you eat too much salt, your blood gets saltier, so your brain tells your body it's thirsty. So you drink more water, diluting your salty blood, and with more blood pumping through your system, you get high blood pressure.
To my understanding this is false. The vast majority of people's kidneys rapidly and efficiently remove any excess salt to maintain homeostasis.
How dare you inject your "science" and "research" into this wonderful anecdote.
sigh
My first fast was 3 days of nothing but water, in the middle of the woods (by myself) when I was 15. It was part of a month long Outward Bound program. The water was coming from a lake, so I was dropping iodine tablets into it to kill the giardia.
As bad as the no food part was, the lack of human contact for 3 days was even more alien to me.
http://www.canyons.edu/offices/health/nutritioncoach/concern... - list of physical/cognitive/emotional effects of restrictive dieting: "decreased resting metabolic rate, loss of lean body mass, changes in brain chemistry that increase appetite, constipation and gastrointestinal upset, sleep disturbance and weakness, feeling cold all the time, decreased sexual interest, depression and anxiety, irritability and anger", etc.
Along with causing physical problems, restrictive dieting can be a factor in developing an eating disorder.
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/anorexia-ner... - "Bulimia is often triggered when young women attempt restrictive diets, fail, and react by binge eating" (and eating disorders are perfectly happy to grip men as well).
http://calorielab.com/news/2013/03/26/orthorexia-restrictive... - "there are many individuals who display symptoms consistent with an obsessive-compulsive restrictive eating disorder and have an unhealthy concern with healthy eating patterns."