Fasting Challenge Next Week page 33

[ozzy]

I'll take a look..thanks for the help I'm pretty eager i just dont want to jump into it too soon

[lissee]

Well then, fasting on work days it is! Thanks Gopintos, Paleobird, and Piscator!

Very good point about the kraut, and it being so very low in calories. I'm thinking about starting to ferment a jar today. But have some in the fridge.

Maybe I'll try my own 4-day fast later in the week. I think for this first go around I'll do the first two days on Thurs/Friday, so that the last two are on the weekend, just in case my electrolyte balance goes off and I go loopy! lol It's cooler here now (Fall is my favorite season!) so I won't have to worry so much about dehydration from the heat.

Ooooo! I'm starting to get really excited about this.

[lissee]

I'll take a look..thanks for the help I'm pretty eager i just dont want to jump into it too soon

Believe me when I say, it'll be a lot easier if you're fat adapted, or are almost in the ketosis zone already. I did a 24-hour fast last week and it was easy-peasy.

[Sabine]

Ozzy- as a non-numbers way of figuring it, I would suggest you wait until you find yourself naturally skipping a meal, and not even noticing it, as in, 'I've been working on this project for six hours now, oh my goodness, is that the time? I should have eaten hours ago!'. You are almost certainly fat-adapted if that happens, and will be able to ignore your hunger/put it on hold when you fast. Before that point, you may have to be fighting blood sugar issues, as well as hunger and/or habit.

Going very low carb (20 grams or fewer- seems you just can't get away from counting SOMETHING, doesn't it! ) helps many people reach this state quickly.

[gopintos]

I think I just ate my last meal for a few... days Going for 48.

[Paleobird]

Yesterday I read the whole Eat Stop Eat book by Brad Pilon. I had read *about* it but not actually read it. Some very good info in there debunking the whole "You have to eat every so often or you will go into starvation mode and your metabolism will crash" nonsense.

He seems to be saying that the benefits of fasting are really kicking in at about the 24 hour point with no food but yet he recommends doing two separate 24 hour fasts per week. I think he is doing this just for the convenience and sustainability factor. Getting people to stick with it is easier this way. But I think one 48 hour fast in each week would be a good way to go. Pilon also shows the cumulative effects of fasting over time. Yes, you do lose "water weight " that comes back but over time when you do this consistently there is a downward trend.

Very interesting book. He basically says that it doesn't matter that much what you eat. Of course he says that healthy food is better than eating junk but that is just sort of a given. He doesn't try to dictate, Eat this, not that.

He says the body only has two states, fed and fasted. You are either in one or the other, no in between, either fat storing or fat burning. He says that it comes down to giving your body a long enough stretch in the fasted state to clean house and burn fat.

Both his graphs and those of pklopp, who did a series on fasting here a while back, show the maximum benefits of fasting topping out somewhere around the end of day two, about 40-48 hours in. So I'm thinking that one 48 hour stretch per week consistently every week for a while might be a more valuable experiment than pushing the boundaries of how long one can go for one looooong fast.

Hmm. Food for thought.

[Betorq]

I went to bed early tonight but woke up, as I think the siren call of PB's illuminating keystrokes beckoned me here...

I'm just starting another 48 hour fast, had 2 fatty, low carb, low protein meals earlier today, to hasten a ketogenic response. Will break this fast this time with same, fatty & low or no carb, low protein. I think, like PB, that 48 hours is the sweet spot. So maybe I won't do a 10 day fast in Hawaii in November after all, as it might be too harsh, & actually metabolically better to just keep doing a weekly series of 48s. Although I must admit that one 100 hour I did was a cool feeling...When you fast for a longish time, you kinda start to feel like you could just keep doing this, the not eating thing. jaja...

[Paleobird]

I didn't realize my keystrokes had cross continental reach.

It would be kind of interesting to do a really long one sometime, just to see what it feels like. I think there can be a danger in getting the idea in your head of "I am going to fast for X# of days and nothing is going to stop me". Perseverance and willpower are good but there is a fine line between strong minded and hard headed. It might be interesting to just start fasting with no particular fixed goal and see what happens.

[lissee]

I have a friend who was talking about the Eat Stop Eat book for a while, now I guess I'd better go get a copy! Thanks.

[Piscator]

It would be kind of interesting to do a really long one sometime, just to see what it feels like. I think there can be a danger in getting the idea in your head of "I am going to fast for X# of days and nothing is going to stop me". Perseverance and willpower are good but there is a fine line between strong minded and hard headed.

People who do fasts like that are just idiots.
Let me know when you want to do something crazy like that and then just offer me a challenge. I'm here to cross that fine line between strong headed and hard minded...