Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (1973)

Libido-wise, I couldn't tell you. My sex-drive has been abnormally low for my entire life. Your wife's suspicion would seem to make sense. 'The Science of Fasting' - a movie available on Amazon Prime - goes into some detail about the metabolic changes a body undergoes during the process. It would make sense that reproductive urges would diminish during a time when one's body was focused on conservation.

There is almost no research available on the subject in the west, and there likely won't be - studies of this sort require funding, and Pfizer or whomever aren't going to spend money on research that could show that the most effective form of weight loss available is freely available for everyone.

I won't say I felt amazing for the duration - I fatigued easily, as could be expected, but other than that and some light-headedness when standing quickly from a seated or reclined position (which is common for people following a keto diet, too), nothing felt seriously off.

Religious laws have lots of "thou shalt not", but rarely any "thou shalt only in moderation". The laws of kashrut are incredibly inconvenient, but they're remarkably easy to follow in practice because they're absolute - either a food is kosher or treif, with no middle ground. You don't have to exercise judgement or restraint, you just have to blindly obey a set of well-documented rules.

Fad diets like paleo are ostensibly irrational, but they're a good fit for human psychology. Counting calories is a minefield - it's too easy to slip up, too easy to deceive yourself about the size of a portion, too easy to nibble at something while you're cooking and forget to count it. A diet that says "don't eat grains" might be theoretically sub-optimal, but it's easy to stick to and much more resistant to self-deception.

Exclusion diets also front-load the burden of self control. If you don't buy any cookies, you have to get into your car and drive to the store if you get a craving for them. If you've got a jar full of cookies, you're relying on pure self control to eat only one rather than scarfing the whole lot. They're always sitting there on the counter, tempting you to break your diet.

here's the mathematical evidence: Over a 30 year period, this intake has to be incredibly precise. In 30 years, you take in about 22 million calories (assuming 2k per day). Now, if you're off by even 5%, say 1m calories then you would gain or loose 300 pounds!! (at the well known 3400 calories per pound) The vast majority of humans and even animals, don't count their calories, so how can they eat exactly the precise amount of calories to be able to sustain roughly the same weight. The reason of course, is because while you may not be counting your calories, your body certainly is, and counting them much more precisely than you or I can. IT adjusts the amount of calories you consume to reach the target weight. Now that target weight is decided by your body's set point - YOU can not change it. If you're body tells you to eat, you must eat. And you can't just trick it by eating a ton of super low calorie spinach.

Now, you may be able to reduce your caloric intake with sheer willpower, for a day or a week, or a month or even a year. But, the body will always be trying to compensate for this. And unlike you, who will grow weary of fighting this war, biological processes don't get tired. They fight and fight just as effectively 1 year later, 5 years later or even 20 years later.

Try this experiment: just once, try to eat half the lunch you ordinarily would eat. I bet you can't do it. Just try it. And if you could do it, you would quickly realize how miserable the rest of your afternoon would be.

Everything we've done: trying to reduce our caloric intake to excessive exercising as far as loosing weight is concerned is sort of a hack. What you really want is to reduce the set point. Once you reduce your set point, loosing weight will be completely effortless. If you look at all the normal sized people, all the epdimelogical studies show: they don't excercise more and they don't eat better, their bodies simply have the correct set point.

Some muscle loss is inevitable over an extended period of time, but muscle tissue and especially bone tissue aren't storage forms of energy. Fat is.

I definitely felt weaker at the end, but was back to my pre-fast strength level within a few weeks with regular exercise.

I can't assuage your concerns, and I'm not advocating that others do what I did. But, by being careful with electrolyte supplementation and extremely careful when re-feeding, the process was free of negative side effects, for me.

Re: your interest, there's a segment in a movie called 'The Science of Fasting' available with Amazon Prime streaming which follows a woman undergoing chemotherapy whose doctor ok'd her desire to fast during the process based on promising results from an animal trial[1]. During her first round she fasted and only minimally felt negative effects from the chemo. During her second she ate normally and reported feeling substantially worse. The film also goes into how fasting significantly alters short-term gene expression, which might also be of interest.

I agree that the area is exciting. What little work has been done seems to show that the field holds huge promise for a number of therapeutic uses, the least of which is weight loss.

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boo...

Gut flora is not hard to restore, and in fact people have to do it quite often since antibiotics take their toll on it.

He had electrolyte maintenance and periodic monitoring. Fasting is a remarkable component of the cure for all sorts of things.

> Punishing your gut bacteria/etc just because you can is not healthy.

Your gut bacteria don't care. They exit as poop and the remainders will be selected for survival, not "punishment". How does one "punish" bacteria? What does that even mean?

downvoters: I'm not wrong

I come from a country where skipping a meal is unthinkable and grew up thinking it was unhealthy to not eat when you're supposed to, let alone not eat at all.

During that day I was surprised how "energized" and focused I felt after the initial lunch-time "hump". I reached a point at which I just wasn't hungry any more; I wasn't feeling full of energy but I wasn't tired either, and I was very focused for some reason.