Fasting to improve mental function, reduce joint pain, improve physical strength & stamina, to break free of bad habits & to embrace a healthier lifestyle. Long duration water fasting has amazing health benefits that I want you to know about now!
Fasting can lower your blood pressure. Fasting can cure Type II diabetes. Fasting can help you recover from cancer. Fasting can improve mental function. Fasting reduces brain fog.
Fasting can solve a lot of problems with health that originate in the gut, from chronic over-eating, eating the wrong things too often, eating too much, not giving your digestive system a break.
Fasting lowers blood insulin levels, which allows the arteries & veins to dilate correctly with a nitrous oxide response, which means lower blood pressure. If we constantly eat food, our insulin levels stay elevated constantly & if this is continued it can cause insulin resistance.
This is why fasting, specifically long duration water fasting acts like a reset switch; because not eating for 8 days gives your digestive system & break & puts your body into amino acid recycling & clean up modes. Fasting activates survival genes & exploits epigenetic stabilization & the unlocking of parts of the DNA that produce healing enzymes. MTOR activation goes down & AMPK levels rise, thereby increasing NAD levels. Inflammation levels start decreasing. Blood pressure goes down to the point where anti-hypertension drugs must be discontinued.
Start by skipping a meal or not eating unless you are actually hungry. You are not your habits, you have absolutely free will & agency to control what goes into your mouth & when you choose to eat or not. A lot of people eat because they are bored, they snack because they have a bad habit, not because they actually need food. Our brains have been dopamine tuned to instant gratification by a society of overabundant access to cheap food calories all the time.
The official 3 means per day advice is absolutely scientifically false, its fake news or lies or misinformation or disinformation. Skip breakfast or skip dinner or skip both & eat one meal per day at lunch. Interval fasting a great way to try fasting to observe the benefits of a longer duration annual fast for 4+ days. I am at 25 hours of fasting now, just black coffee, neat tea with nothing added, water & a touch of lime juice in my tea, but no food.
Consider the water content of your food. A lot of people are not only dehydrated from not drinking enough water, but they eat overcooked foods low in water content that are hard to digest.
Consider the 4 states of Metabolism
Intake or Consumption of Foods, where you have control
Digestion Automatic
Assimilation Automatic
Excretion Automatic
The only stage of your bodies intake that you control is the eating & drinking part, when & what you are putting into your body.
Fasting gives your digestive system a break, something people with digestive disorders really need to consider doing. Water fasting keeps your system hydrated while you are not eating foods. If you have to eat something, some bone broth of a small amount of fruit ok. I added the juice of half a key-lime to my tea, at the 24 hour fasting mark & plan to continue fasting for 7-8 days.
Fasting improve mental function & can be used to treat Alzheimer & Dementia, ADD & ADHD in adults.
Since the time of Plato he was writing about how fasting from food for 24+ hours improve mental alertness, mental stamina, focus, memory function & executive functional improvements to the brain & mind that enable people to have clearer sharper thinking without mental fog.
Fasting increasing your endurance, stamina, drive, energy levels & motivation. The body activates all kinds of cool biochemical pathways to enhance our mind & body during fasting.
Careful to eat a light easy to digest meal when you stop fasting, like a small bowl of veggie soup. Then let your body assimilate that. Slowly increase meal complexity as you phase back into eating consumption, but continue to think about interval fasting, drinking enough water to stay well hydrated, going to be earlier & waking up earlier. Think about who you are, how you are operating!
Your are not a slave to your habits, you can break free and fasting can help you understand this free will agency & your ability to break free of habits. You're not a slave to your lifestyle. I have cooked meals & gone grocery shopping while fasting for 4+ days. You contain a consciousness that has unlimited potential that you're probably not readily aware of yet. Fasting can help you introspectively think about your life & persona & who you are becoming, so that you can be unleashed to make better diet choices, better lifestyle choices, so that you can become a smarter, kinder, more loving, more intelligent & higher functioning version of yourself!
Cardiologist Dr. Pradip Jamnadas has excellent YouTube videos to explain why fasting important, the amazing benefits of long duration water fasting;
This Guro explain fasting & why it works
I want to expand my experience with 3 day water fasting from Monday Nov 28th at 9:30am to December Thursday December 1st at 10am.
I drank a lot of water, took sea salt 1/4 tsp at a time to restore Na loss from drinking 5 liters of water daily
Pee, pee, pee, all day, all night on the hour, every hour, sometimes even more. Amazing what the funky smelling stuff smelled like coming out in my urine.
By the middle of day 3 on Wed evening, I was experiencing toxic shock from electrolyte imbalance & because I went cold turkey into a 3 day fast without going ketogenic diet first. I had been skipping breakfast for several months, but was also eating "Fun Size" commercial candies, probably 3-8 per day, so not a huge dose, but I was so addicted that even on my lowest days I consumed a fun size Hershey milk chocolate. I know the net carbs & sugar amounts are low, but I had also regressed to eating bread, noodles, pasta, rice & other carbs, like a beer periodically, G&T in the evenings, the Q-tonic tonic water has 11 grams of sugar, though I enjoyed the light version with only 8 grams & ran out of that one first. I stopped drinking any form of alcohol 5 days before fasting. On the Monday morning I started fasting, I ate a banana with my b-vitamin, multi-vitamin, D3 capsule, 1 g metformin, 20mg lisinopril, and 16 oz of water, then went to work & never ate anything solid or took any vitamins or medications. Day 1 was great, never felt hungry. Day two I had food cravings, dreaming of candy & baked goods like baklava & danishes & jellies & other sugar sweet desire items like spumoni ice-cream that I absolutely love the flavor of, even though I know the sugar bad for me as a pre-diabetic person on the border of Type II diabetes.
My interval fasting for several months leading up to the 3 day water fast consisted of skipping breakfast, with just black coffee or a tiny dash of while milk into the coffee or espresso. I had been waking at 3 or 4 am naturally for work, where I have to be to work at 6am after driving a considerable distance down I90 & I405 in western Washington. I would wait until 2 pm to eat lunch & typically at dinner at 6:30 pm & nothing after that. I had learned about interval fasting on Fastiq app on my iPhone, a few years ago whole researching the scientific benefits of interval fasting & longer water fasts. I found Pradip Jamnadas on Youtube & his videos combined with what I was learning from the pro paid version of the Fastiq app for iPhone were reinforcing lessons about why ketogenic fat burning states of metabolic energy production help to kick off cell recycling known as autophagy.
So what is Autophagy, its where your body consumes old broken mitochondria, lysomes, the organelles of cells, the old broken parts, to make ketones & to gather amino acid precursor ingredients to make new mitochondria & other organelles. The easiest way to access autophagy cell cleanup & repair modes that you body has the DNA & epigenetic instructions to accomplish, by interval fasting for 18 hours per day, followed by an 8 hour eating window. To start easily interval fasting, skip breakfast or dinner. Lunch will be your most important meal. To avoid malnutrition, your lunch must contain the bulk of your calories & nutrients, I am talking about your carbs, fats & proteins in grams per day + vitamins & minerals your body needs. It's also very important to drink 2-3 liters of clean sanitary water per day to stay well hydrated.
Let's say to start fasting your stop eating breakfast & wait until lunch to eat for the first time during the day. That would mean that from the time you finished digesting dinner yesterday +2.5-3 hours after eating, if you ate a responsible serving about the size of what you can hold in both hands forming a ball or your fist size, then your body will be done digesting & starting to assimilate dinner. After 5 hours, your body will start producing small amounts of ketones in your liver. By+ 10 hours after dinner the preconditions for autophagy are starting. By +15 hours your body producing trace amounts of ketones which you can test in your urine with ketone test strips purchased at your local drug store or pharmacy. At +15 hours your body starting some autophagy cell clean up & recycling & waste collection processes. This is part of why someones urine looks darker in the morning. If you skip breakfast & wait until lunch to eat, you will have been fasting for 16-18 hours or so.
My sister found that skipping dinner was the key to loosing body weight & feeling better. Depends on your schedule & sleep wake cycle. I am a lark, wake up early & go to bed early. So eating lunch at 2 pm & dinner at 6:30-7pm, works for me, since I tend to go to bed by 7:45-9pm then wake up at 3-5 am naturally without an alarm clock. I often wake up to pee in the middle of the night, since I drink so much water during the day that my body constantly dumping water. If I eat carbs I pee less, but feel more painful inflammation & soreness in my joints, and retain fluids & feel bloated & tired more often. This is why I started taking Metformin in the first place. Eating like a typical American, I gave myself Type II diabetes & Hypertension, something that's part of metabolic syndrome from abusing simple carbs & sugar, beer, pop, candy, ice cream, bread, rice, pasta & other white flour based foods that are easily converted to blood sugar increasing after being quickly digested. Jason Fung a nephrologist from Canada has these cool YouTube videos about how the metabolism works. Dr. Annette Bosworth also has similar content about digestion & ketogenic diets & how interval fasting or skipping meals can help people with diabetes.
If you take insulin, Novolog, Humalog, Lantus, short or long acting, and want to fast, you can. In a book about fasting for Type 1 diabetes, the endocrinologist doctor authors suggest the following.
Short acting insulin, stop taking it while fasting or you will go hypoglycemic & have a possibly fatal low blood sugar.
Long acting insulin, cut the dose in half, then slowly reduce the dose every day as you continue fasting.
If you take oral diabetes medications, do not take them on days that you are fasting, since they can cause a dangerous of fatal blood glucose drop or low or hypoglycemia.
Super important. Use a Dexcom or similar CGM continual blood glucose monitoring system to keep an eye on your blood glucose levels while fasting. Check every 30 minutes all day long to see how your body is responding to ketosis & autophagy as you continue drinking water & taking salt to abate electrolyte imbalance that can cause a nasty frontal diffusion headache, lethargy & worse if your Na levels go too low. As your body runs out of stored glyogen in your liver & muscles, it will start using body fat as fuel.
This is great because the fat burning of fasting tones up the body & starts eating up visceral & subcutaneous body fat, excess loose skin & other broken cell components with autophagy. The entire hormonal systems of the human body changes into a tri-fuel mode, when they can burn amino acids from muscle, fats from stored body fat, and glucose created by the liver via gluconeogenisis. Your brain can adapt to using low levels of glucose with ketone bodies to power braincells.
You will start to smell acetone in your breath & sweat, which means good ideas to brush your teeth & take a hot shower. As you continue fasting your body will keep burning stored body fat. Fat is the bodies energy storage. Fat is crated when we eat carbohydrates & blood sugar rises, the insulin levels increase to tell the body to store the blood sugar as body fat. Want to gain weight, eat a lot of simple carbs & sugar, processed junk foods, in larger servings, in excess, too many times per day. Your body will swell up with inflammation & more stored body fat around the stomach in particular.
I highly recommend starting by skipping dinner or breakfast. Then after you master 2 meals per day, try going with 1 meal per day, lunch. Then when you are ready & have mastered 1 meal per day, try a 24 hour fast. Let your body readjust for a few months, then try a 48 hr fast. If you feel good at 48 hours, then slowly introduce foods to prevent re-feeding syndrome, which can be fatal. Keep eating normally with interval fasting for a few more months, them try the 3 day water fast. If you are morbidly overweight or very fat, you can safely go to 7 days or more.
I have overweight friends who went blind into a 14 day fast & lost a lot of body fat & have changed their diet for the better & become stronger & more fit as a result, even though they are older now :) Good job Alicia :) I knew you could do it & glad I explained it to you & Jaeson. I am sadly disassociated from them now, at their discretion. I really wish I was still friends with them, but they told me they did not want me coming around anymore, sadly. Meg, my lovely wife, is more only true friend. I was friends with Matt Mayo, but he committed suicide. I was friends with my sister Andrea's late husband Drake, but he died of leukemia + covid. I was friends with my dad Ken, but he died of cardiovascular disease. I don't have any close friends anymore. Of the people who would qualify, they never call me.
Over the years I have only formed loose friendships with coworkers, nothing close. Meg is paranoid about spending time with anyone who is not a bible reading doer of the Holy Word of God in the Christian Bible. My closest real world friend now is a 68 year old man named Quentin. He is from South Africa, and we have really interesting discussions at work, during down-time between the morning & afternoon shifts, during our lunch break. Sometimes I have to eat lunch at 12pm noon or 1pm because I have to leave for my PM route at 2:20pm. I feel a lot better if I only drink black coffee in the morning. I take my vitamins & medications with lunch in the middle of the day. I try to eat a smaller lighter serving of food for dinner, as early as practical.
Yesterday, I got sick with some nasty upper respiratory virus. Made all my joints hurt, hot & cold flashes, now my airway & nasal sore like they were burned with a torch // huts every time I swallow. Hope I will be better after resting more. I plan to be back to work again Monday. I had to call out sick today, since I am very ill. I even slept in till 7:30 am, which is rare! I went to bed at 6:30 pm last night & had 8+ sleep periods last night. My Apple Watch battery died, so I did not capture the sleep data sadly, it would have been interesting to analyze & compare against my historical averages & trends. My nose is drippy now & my throat is still sore. I put voltaren on some of my joints to cut down on the pain. I even took a 375mg Tylenol last night at 3:30 am. When I get sick with cold & flu viruses, my neck, knees, ankles and hands start to hurt really bad. These are joint where I struggle with inflammation, so the virus pathogens attack these areas, since there is more blood flow to the red swollen places. Sleeping seems to regularly give me a neck headache, especially if I am sick with a viral pathogen. I used to have neck headaches all the time, but using a posture pump, paying attention to my body posture & getting more sleep seemed to really help. Taking metformin to drag down my blood glucose levels also seemed to help a lot.
