Long term waterfast
Has anyone long -term water fasted? How long and how did you cope with not eating ?Always wanted to do it. 100+ days of lockdown definitely given me some fat for once to cannibalise. Inspired by this man
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495…
His weight loss results alone are remarkable-
During the 382 days of the fast, the patient's weightdecreasedfrom456to180lb.Fiveyearsafter undertaking the fast, his weight remained around 196 lb.So not even any weight gain once eating resumed or damage to metabolism and does not include the health benefits.... thoughts, advice, opinions?
I've fasted for 24ish hours before. It's much easier to do when sitting at home versus being in an office and having to fight through the fog you get from not eating.
Idk if it is particularly useful for anything other than reducing your weekly caloric intake though.
There are countless benefits to intermittent fasting.
No there are not
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=benefits+to+intermittent+fasting+pubmed
literally any benefit you think you’re getting from intermittent fasting can be obtained with a better regulated diet. it isn’t the fact that you’re starving yourself for 20 hours that makes you feel great, it’s that you’re not consistently stuffing yourself with your high fructose syrup cola or heavy cream wet dream Frappuccinos
You're wrong - click on the link.
IF specifically helps gut microbiota. Read the facts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6924599/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7092480/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6460288/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6861737/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5988561/
know what also helps your gut? not eating like shit and not loading yourself with antibiotics. again, you’re conflating correlation with causation
there is a reason you have a minority of people practicing this stuff and preaching amazing results whilst sounding like absolute quacks (ie this bloke
who talks like he’s a fucking oracle doing omad)
meanwhile the majority and fittest amongst us eat well-balanced diets throughout the day. grab an athlete and get them to do IF and watch their performance tank.
I'm not conflating shit. You're just wrong.
I too can go on google and type INTERMITTENT FASTING BAD and send you a bunch of the very same pubmed links showing how it either is nothing more than placebo, achieves the same results as a normal caloric reduction or causes cortisol levels to rocket through the point of severe stress and mental anguish but what’s the point. you’ve made your mind up, so keep on keeping on I guess
I am close friends with someone who wrote their thesis on Intermittent Fasting at Columbia University in her masters program of nutritional science. She taught me a lot on the subject and I am well familiar with it and have used it successfully.
You're obviously not educated in this arena.
I think you're getting a bit touchy so I'll leave it here. I could tell you about my background and the people I know too but it's the internet so we're all technically Olympic athletes right
You’re an accountant so your opinion on anything does not count
I did 3 targeted 5K workouts on the treadmill last week after intermittent fasting on each day. My times were 18:02, 17:54 (5:46/mi), 17:50 (5:45/mi).
Do you even workout bro?
calorie restriction is not the same as fasting. When you fast ie abstain from food and even water (dry fast) your body undergoes autophagy ie cell cannibalism which is different to ketosis ie fat burning. see below https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990190/ coupled with Isaiah’s links
I am surprised that you say that. there has historically been some form of fasting in every culture, for good reason.
IF is legit, please stop with your nonsense
High insulin levels can destroy your body. And the gut does especially well when you eat a lot of fiber and resistant starch, not just when you “avoid shit”.
Try reading actual journal articles and studies (like the ones conveniently provided for you) before mouthing off.
isaiah, I trust your workout knowledge, I'm dubious that IF has benefits that are unique to the fast itself. isn't the principal benefit of IF is the autophagy it induces? if so, autophagy can also be induced by strenuous exercise. my question has always been this - does fasting have unique benefits? or, does it just have good benefits, but benefits you can get elsewhere?
Pretty easy once you get used to it. Kind of fun as well.
Just do 16:8 Intermittent fasting or 20:4. Break the fast with veggies or bone broth.
I did a 30 day water only fast, two 15 day water only fasts, and more 5 day water fasts than I can count. I also intermittent fasting regularly as I eat only one or two meals per day around brunch and lunch (omad-one meal a day) now. Before I was on 18:6 IF schedule. What would you like to know? I kept meticulous excel notes on my stats throughout the process and did pre and post bloodwork. Dr Alan Goldhamer has a lot of resources and talks on the subject as well. YouTube it.
Wow that is discipline & willpower! How do you control hunger pangs, if indeed you get them? Were you lethargic or could you continue with life as normal? Anything you wish you knew before you started? Seeing that you have incorporated fasting in your lifestyle I take it you felt better for it? I just can’t get over the mindset of not eating for 15 days straight but I still want to do it for the fat loss and health benefits - I have 3kgs of pure fat to lose so I definitely have 10-15 days worth of sustenance on me to do it. Thanks!
Surprised to see the question on WSO btw. I didn’t know there were my-kind-of-crazy people here.
TLDR: long-term water fasting (LTWOF) is NOT a solution for weight loss, and I no longer do them. I have had my best sustainable weight loss on OMAD / IF. I find the 16:8 / 18:6 to be too wide an eating window for weight loss. I also make sure I’m not eating too close to dinner time – so better you keep an early eating window. I know a lot of folks in the IF crowd skip breakfasts for convenience sake, and I often do this as well, but truth be told it’s dinner one ought to skip for weight loss. An early / mid-day OMAD or 2meals/day work better than an IF eating window.
Resources to Google/Youtube: Dr. Jason Fung (wrote a good book on fasting), Dr. Michael Greger (wrote a good book called How Not to Diet, and also has some good YT talks about timing of eating to maximize weight loss), Dr. Alan Goldhamer of True North Center (big fasting advocate, runs a center in CA for the purpose).
The problem with LT water fasting (>3 days) is that your body drops its metabolic rate after a few days to prevent weight loss. Ironies abound. Dr. Jason Fung, whom I am sure you’ve also looked into, also talks/writes about this. Also from a safety standpoint you really shouldn’t be doing more than 5 to 7 days of water fasts without medical supervision, depending on your fat reserves. Thirdly, from a productivity standpoint I also really struggled because I find it very difficult to work during a fast.
So let me tell you what happens from a physiological standpoint. I did body scans and bloodwork on all my fasts so I can pass you the stats. You absolutely do not lose any muscle during a fast. In fact, fasting forces your body to boost HGH so you actually gain muscle (albeit lean and ungycated muscle) during a fast. There are actors (like Hugh Jackman when training for Wolverine) who went on crazy weightlifting regimes + LTWOF in order to boost HGH and get a pumped up for the role. Your body is engineered to preserve muscle and burn fat during a fast, so it has multiple mechanisms to retain muscle and during full fast-induced ketosis, and HGH boosting is just one of the mechanisms.
What happens during a fast is:
My personal experience:
15-30 days is out of this world. What was it like?
Everyone has a different experience. Many people report feeling light, energetic, they felt they were able to cleanse and de-pollute themselves. Your body goes through a journey on a long-term fast, so each week is different. My experience was generally that it made me tired and lethargic, difficulty concentrating, headaches from low minerals, and suppressed mood.
At the beginning I found it meditative and peaceful, albeit with suppressed energy. Towards the latter parts of the fast the energy level was ramped way up, like I was light, ready and able to chase down prey if I needed to.
by the way, I write this as I sit in the waiting room to see the doctor. I'm hoping he will write me a prescription for metaformin so that I can try to reverse my aging. This is unrelated to weight loss, but since you seem to be hacking your body I thought I'd mention it. Dr. David Sinclair talks about his own self-prescribing metaformin, and supplementing with NMN, NAD and Resveratrol.
EDIT: Doc refused to prescribe Metaformin. He gave me nothing. Said my stats are excellent. Looks like I'm going to have to find a rogue physician.
I will check it out. thanks v much
Metformin is still a thing to do among the longevity guys, but I think it’s gone from hard consensus to soft consensus. The rub is that some study came out recently showing Metformin makes it really hard to add muscle after a workout. So one leading voice (Peter Attia) responded by not taking it on hard workout days, and then he cut it out completely.
My doc said no too, and I was ready to fight him on it but then that happened. Will keep monitoring.
Great insight DRD! I only wish you were a real doctor, because I could use a prescription. I'm not expecting medical consensus, but I do want to reverse aging (who doesn't am I right?) and I'm perfectly happy to run an N=1 medical trial on myself. I want to be on metaformin, NAD, NMN and resveritrol and see what happens. I don't understand why more of medical science and the self-hacker community isn't laser-focused on this issue. If reversing/slowing aging is possible, shouldn't we all be on this 24/7?
You can also take berberine if you don’t get the script
keep in mind sinclair doesn't exercise. well, he says he does. one workout on sundays, 3 hours. 1 hour of stretching, 1 hour of treadmill, 1 hour of lifting (though looking at him, this looks more like a Bally fitness lift than starting strength)
What’s long term? I’ve done 72 hrs and I attempted a 2nd one but gave up at 48 because I had a big deadline and the fast was screwing with my focus.
I’ve studied it quite a bit, the health benefits are well established. I plan to do a lot more of it.
For me the only limitation is that I can’t concentrate on higher level things with food on my mind. So I fast when I anticipate mindless days (ie lots of meetings, errands, or other times when I wouldn’t be thinking hard anyways).
ive done 12 days water once and 7-days maybe 20 times. was doing OMAD for 5 years-ish. now im about the deadlift and kefir life. you should do some squats instead imo
I agree with Goldie on this. My biggest weight-loss was via compound lifts and IF. Going big, heavy and frequent with the 'big-7' compound lifts really helped. Kettlebells have been great too.
The diet part is less clear for me.
I dropped a ton of weight using a combination of heavy lifting 3x a week (compound lifts, kettle bells, and the occasional machine for certain accessory muscles), Cardio to round it out, and using IF and a Ketogenci diet to keep the caloric intake under control. Even with OMAD days, I was able to keep my macros in line and still maintain a caloric deficit. Heavy lifting is essential because Muscle weighs more than fat and requires more energy. It also burns more calories when resting versus fat, etc. resulting in higher resting metabolism. More Muscle means more metabolic activity to keep the body running. Weight lifting also comes with the added benefit of causing a longer response in the body than cardio does - so you end up with an elevated metabolism for longer than you would after doing cardio. On the cardio side, it's about endurance and cardiovascular health benefits you don't get from weight lifting.
Diet - that's just finding something that works. Personally, I like clean Keto (cutting out all thep rocessed shit and focusing on clean carbs for the small amount I eat in a day, as well as clean protein asd fat) because of the effects that Keto has. I've found it easier to manage macros, eat healthy, and keep myself going on Keto versus a mediteranian diet or a more traditional American diet.
regularly do 20-4 with a 48 hr fast once a month. load up on pedialyte or something with sodium that is under 50 cals if you want to do longer than 24 and not feel moody/lethargic
For me, the whole diet thing is less clear. I'm now on a whole-food-plant-based (vegan) diet, with no oil and minimal salt+sugar, but my weight-loss has stalled. There were many other benefits of going plant-based (gout went away, blood pressure dropped, etc). But from a I had good weight-loss standpoint I had better results on a meat-eating keto diet, but keto/meat caused gout and other problems. Hence I'm now playing with OMAD.
What I'm solving for is longevity not aesthetics, and research shows that a WFPB diet is the best way to maximize lifespan and later-life health, keeping serious diseases at bay.
If you want to have any amount of muscle mass you should be eating some animal fats and proteins. You will tank your test levels otherwise.
Strongly oppose this diet. The body needs a base amount of nutrition. If you use this method you'll have absolutely no muscle and look/feel horrible during the process.
Figure out your BMR, and eat around there + workout hard. Cut out carbs as much as possible. Done. This is a healthy and simple way of losing calories and feeling great.
I would take a more nuanced take. Cut out processed and simple carbs But whole plant-based carbs and starches are the foundation the human diet for millennia. Eat beans, whole rice, potatoes. Do NOT eat sugars or processed foods. Drink water or tea.
So I'll take a risk and put my stats out there. I do NOT recommend LTWOF because the body will decrease its metabolic rate to try to preserve fat, so fasting has NOT helped me lose weight. The body will also boost HGH though so it will preserve muscle as well. I have some body scans (the simple gym ones not dexa) that I did during my fasts. I've only got only data from late 2015, since I don't do LTWOF anymore, so these figures no longer apply to my current weight or state. But here you go.
This includes a 9-day fast and a 17-day fast in here, as well as an interim recovery period. You can see the way the body preserved muscle during the fast, and even regrew muscle post-fast (the affect of HGH). The deep ketosis cut into the fat for fuel during the fast. However eventually the fat came back and reseted at the set-point.
I was reading this thread thinking you are some super disciplined alpha male and then I see 30% body fat? wtf dude you're just a slob. Am I missing something here? How are you so into this and so fat? Doesn't seem like something I want to follow.
1) This is 2015, before I dropped a bunch of weight. When I started in 2015 I was 255lbs. I'm now at 205. Still got a way to go.
2) pretty sure I said transparently that I found LTWOF not to work for weight loss and that I had better success on IF and more recently OMAD. I also said weightloss broadly was a challenge for me, and I'm exchanging notes here specifically to learn from others
3) I never claimed to be anything one way or the next. Whatever you dreamt up is your business. I'm here to exchange notes and learn from others and I def don't care what you think.
whatever gold spinner. I think you should go on a shittyness fast
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