Comment by darrickwiebe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darrickwiebe | Hacker News Reader

Harpers Magazine published a much better written article that discusses this same Scotsman along with an American who achieved some slight fame for his fasting around the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, the author writes about his own fairly significant fasts.

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.

If you eat a lot and then go on a diet, remember that for the first little while a part of your weight loss is simply a reduction of gut content. If you go back to your old dietary volume, part of the weight you regain is simply the gut 'filling up' again.

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.

Another effect leading to weight fluctuations upon starting / ending a diet is the body's usage of glycogen stores as an energy source. For every gram of carbs the body stores as glycogen it stores around 4g of water along with it. Thus, when you burn through all the glycogen in your liver and muscles you will lose a lot of water weight, several kilos in fact. This weight will also be regained when you start eating normally again.

>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 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.

I came to the same conclusion. I think fasting is a good example of a weight loss approach that optimizes for low ego depletion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Fascinating, did you do anything special with liquids other than plain old water? Lemon water?

No, I only drank water. A lot of water. Even on my regular diet I drink more water than most people, but when fasting, I'm sure I drank 2-3x more water than normal. I would typically have a bottle or glass of water on hand all the time.

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.

I would recommend (as a fellow tall guy who was once about 50 lbs. overweight) that after your next fast, when you start eating again, experiment by only eating zero to low carbohydrate foods. Lots of meat and green vegetables. I think you will fine that the fast will kick start ketosis, and the low carb diet will maintain ketosis at a more pleasant level, but the fatty acids in the meat will provide energy, supplemented by the fatty acids being released from your fat cells.

Nitpicking, but did you provide a scribd link on purpose?

Simply the first link on Google to the text of the article.

OK, got it, thanks for pointing this out.

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