Dry fasting

[H2Ogrl]

Dry fasting is going without food and water. I just finished a24 hour fast and feel nauseous. Has anyone else felt like that. I took some water, but not helping. I think I will be forced to eat something, but has anyone had this experience?

[Parthon]

*gasp*

The nausea is caused by being dehydrated. When you don't drink water, or if you exercise and lose a lot of it through sweat you will suffer from the effects, starting with headaches, dizzyness and light-headedness, then nausea and a weak feeling along with muscle cramps, tiredness and eventually resulting in fainting and death.

While food fasting is good to get rid of toxins, you still need water. I know that what I'm saying seems old hat and passe, but it's true. The body can go 30ish days without food, but only 3 days without water.

Just start drinking small amounts of clean water often and you should be fine in a few hours.

[Ninja]

if you go without water for even one day, your brain and eyeballs will shrink, causing you pain. The nausea is caused by your body diverting all available moisture to your vital organs... and the stomach is not one of them. You need to drink water!

[bdp]

I do not encourage dry fasting for more than 24 hours. </disclaimer>

Fasting is misunderstood by most people. Almost all symptoms are caused by detoxification. When your body doesn't need to detox, fasting does not cause symptoms besides weakness/tiredness.

Dry fasting is nothing new. My community has a tradition of doing a 24 hour dry fast every month. I've never known of anybody that had symptoms beyond the expected detox.

I've done this monthly dry fast for 20 years now. I used to have very mild symptoms (ie detox), but they stopped once I adopted a vegan diet.

On a bet, I once dry fasted for 50 hours without any symptoms. I do not endorse such a long dry fast--I'm just putting it out there.

[IamBren]

My research about fasting says that not only is it not a good idea to go without water but it's completely unnecessary to do so. People experience amazing results on water fasts.

[openeyes]

Originally Posted by Parthon

The body can go 30ish days without food, but only 3 days without water.

More realistically, the body can go 60-90+ days without food (not that going that long would be healthy), and at least 6-10 days without water. The water figure comes from a hiking book (Beyond Backpacking by Ray Jardine) that gave stats on how long one could expect to survive without water while continuing to hike, depending on the temperature. Even among the terminally ill, it can take a week without food or water to lapse into a coma, and another few days to finally die.

I've fasted two days without food or water before and felt perfectly fine, just somewhat missing the act of eating and drinking, though at that point I'd been doing weekly one day water fasts for a couple years, and my diet was fairly good. I don't feel a need to do any more dry fasts, it was just something done out of curiosity.

[H2Ogrl]

Thanks everyone for your support! I think I rushed into it- if that makes sense. I have done plenty of short waterfasts, and so thought I could easily do this. Afterall I was only going to do 24 hours....yeah...big mistake. With anything you should work up towards it, and this should have dawned on me. I am feeling much better, but am curious to try it again.

[Angela]

Yikes! I hope you don't next try a Breathfast!