A year without food (2012)
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
("Je hebt trek, honger hadden we tijdens de oorlog")
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.
Not having eaten for 2-3 days would be hunger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I feel like a 2 year old asking this, but, "He defaecated infrequently, roughly every 40 to 50 days."
How does that work if he wasn't eating any food?
> I can feast everyday
Pardon me for asking, but which one are you doing exactly?
http://www.leangains.com/ is one of the better-researched sites promoting it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's pretty depressing. Maybe the next big thing in combating obesity would be finding some mechanism to get rid of extra fat cells?
Does this happen to anyone else?
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.
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.
Without protein his muscles and body organs would have been consumed and he would have died.
I have never fasted but am planning to soon.
I can say for myself that body doesn't even need as much as I eat.
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.
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.
No one should ever try this without constant medical supervison (which this guy had).
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.