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Comment by jraby3 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve gone on multiple 3-5 day fasts and disagree (or at least haven’t gotten to this point).

My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.

Haven't gone 3-5 days but done more than 1 day, hunger paradoxically goes from high to low/none in 24 hours. I can feel weaker but not hungry the way I feel at first.

After adjusting to rare meals I 100% feel better after 8 hours of not eating than when I eat often.

Do you spend physical effort during that time? Eg. exercise, move heavy stuff, intensely walk. (I don't)

Also what do you eat/drink before you fast. If I stop eating without preparing and changing my diet (eg. low carbs) I can get shaky and lightheaded.

Same. I’m over 24 hours into a fast right now. Zero hunger. I guess it’s different for person to person, kind of like just about everything seems to be.

At day three I was fine until I told myself I was going to get some food. Then I felt like I got hit by a truck in my stomach and nearly threw up I was shaking and so hungry. So I ended up breaking a three day fast at a Taco Bell instead of the grass fed steak I had waiting at home. Best Chalupa I’ve ever eaten in my life.

The body is a mystery! I guess biology is influenced by thought as much as the other way round...

Same here. My hunger plateaued after two days, but didn't go away, just became a bit more bearable. 12 days was the longest fast I've done.

12 days with no food? Like just water and electrolytes etc.?

This is some spartan discipline.

Definitely doable and very common in many old cultures, have a look at the film "The science of fasting" (original German), might be eye opening: https://youtu.be/WgLJ_dfKy1E

> Video unavailable. This video contains content from LDS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds

I hope LDS burns in hell, whoever they are.

Same here. Guess they don’t like Ecuador.

Apparently the only whitelisted regions are DE and FR, so they don't like a lots of people.

Latter Day Saints??? The Mormons? (I get the copyright block message here in the USA)

I looked it up, and it's "content management company" Little Dot Studios, who seem to make money by claiming things on youtube to steal ad money and extort people.

Ugh. I hope the Mormons hit them with a trademark violation!

https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=WgLJ_dfKy1E

Why would you do this to yourself?

Last week I fasted for 5 days. Today I ate sugar again. I cannot speak for OP but my primary reasons were curiosity and becoming more aware of my body and energy levels. The last days I was super active, productive and in a crazy good mood. Today I feel like a slump. I probably will do it again and 5 days was much easier than expected. You probably need some experience to do it for 12 days, but I am very confident that it is manageable after the second or third time. It‘s like sport. People say „why would you do it“, but when you experience it by yourself you know intrinsically that it isn’t actually that bad.

Is it discipline? Or a medical condition? For example, I wouldn’t say someone with anorexia has impressive discipline. I can’t think of any reason rooted in reality why someone would fast for almost 2 weeks straight.

Same. 12 days. Was training like a machine I felt almost high. Very clear mentally. Lots of extra time. Wasn't particularly hungry.

I'm confused. You say "same", so you agree with arunix and jraby3? For them their level of hunger increased the longer they fasted. But then you wrote "wasn't particularly hungry", so you agree with franciscop?

Impressive if you did training while fasting btw!

I should have been more clear. For me at least, the peak hunger point was approximately 48hrs. It subsided substantially from there. I am fit and train often. But I've had a life long unhealthy relationship with sugar, which I managed to solve some months after I started fasting.

This reminds me of how some people argue they actually drive better when drunk.

Many studies have proven that:

1. Driving ability is impaired by alcohol consumption (or lack of sleep, incidentally)

2. People are very bad at estimating how severely impaired they are (wrt being drunk or kust tired)

Are there any similar studies around ability to mentally focus / perform physical activities while fasting?

Perhaps it depends on the intellectual load, and only doable if watching TV.

You mean no food for two days? Agree you grow very hungry. But 1 meal a day, after a week or two it becomes a habit and you don't feel hunger, even though you are losing weight.

However make one exception, and hunger comes back immediately. Hard to get on those diets (hunger only goes away after a week) and stay on those diets (one exception, a loving mum who thinks it's not healthy, christmas, etc, and the diet is dead).

Maybe I am lucky, but for me it works like this:

If I skip food after (early) dinner and don't think about it more I can easily skip breakfast the next day and then I can easily skip lunch, dinner and supper the following day.

If I start to think about or expect food however I think I can easily get in trouble.

Disclaimer: I have only done this for 4 or so days.

It does depend on different people, but yeah peak hunger is around 2-5 days in (again depending on multiple things) so doing multiple 3-5 day fasts just seems torture to me when you could've done a longer one and not be so hungry in the process. I have done three 10+ days fasts (trying not to get stuffed just before) and usually at 2-3 days is the peak. Days 4-5 are also hard, and you might get a punctual "hunger pang" much later on depending on what's going on (e.g. walk by a pizzeria), but overall nothing at all compared to day 2-3.

This is based on the experiences that I've seen (as my comment before) derived from reading 10s-100s of people's experiences about fasting on Reddit groups over the years. Not scientific, but also not taken from thin air.

What is mentioned in article (ramadan fasting) is essentially half day of fasting, not multiple day endeavour.

The longer north you come however, the longer the fast can become I understand as many (most?) Muslims looks at the local sunrise and sunset.

Agreed, I am an experienced faster. My longest fast was 5 days (no food mon-friday)

I've never felt "not hungry" during a fast. I think "I don't even feel hungry" is something people just say to cope. More like a mindset than an actual feeling.

Yep. Actually I feel myself turning into a wild animal. I can smell food from distances and food becomes my only thought.

But the SMELL of food!

I think my normal sense of smell is not great, but when hungry... It's just glorious.

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