Beautiful Fast

[bestestbetty]

Wow... you inspire me to fast once again! I still suffer with some pain and I know the break the body recieves through fasting can only help. Wonderful job!

[The Dane]

hey MightySunTzu, thank you so much for your contributions to this thread. Your knowledge on the subject is truly unmatched here.

I just had one quick question. Due to some complex and poor behaviors I have in my relationship with food I've been searching for something that I can truly stick to and be happy with. I'll leave the specifics out but basically I'm just curious what your opinion would be on water fasting every 24 hours, that is every second day?

I feel this cycle would allow me to forget about food one day while leaving me fresh and ready to eat wholesome live foods on my feeding day. Obviously I would not gain the full benefit of an extended fast but I believe there could still be a lot of merit to this idea... besides, I still enjoy the odd extended fast once or twice a year

Any thoughts or concerns?

Thank you

[MightySunTzu]

Originally Posted by bestestbetty

Wow... you inspire me to fast once again! ... Wonderful job!

Hey betty,

Great and thanks .

Originally Posted by bestestbetty

I still suffer with some pain and I know the break the body recieves through fasting can only help.

Yes i completely agree.

Originally Posted by The Dane

hey MightySunTzu, thank you so much for your contributions to this thread. Your knowledge on the subject is truly unmatched here.

I just had one quick question. Due to some complex and poor behaviors I have in my relationship with food I've been searching for something that I can truly stick to and be happy with. I'll leave the specifics out but basically I'm just curious what your opinion would be on water fasting every 24 hours, that is every second day?

I feel this cycle would allow me to forget about food one day while leaving me fresh and ready to eat wholesome live foods on my feeding day. Obviously I would not gain the full benefit of an extended fast but I believe there could still be a lot of merit to this idea... besides, I still enjoy the odd extended fast once or twice a year

Any thoughts or concerns?

Thank you

Hi Dane and thank you for that .

My opinion based on what i have read is that this can be extremely beneficial. Even Wiki appears to have some good information on it: Intermittent fasting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also a slight variation on this is what is promoted on leangains, something Excellent Lodestar and others have embraced with outstanding results. 11% Body Fat. It is something i would like to try at some point, possibly even very soon once i refeed the 17 day fast.

One of the perks is that you should be able to live a normal life while engaging in this type of (intermittent) fast, not being saddled with the typical weakness most commonly encountered in a longer fast.

Intermittent fasting is not my specialty and is not something i have ever done so I'm not sure about all of the nuances, but my only concern is that at some point it will likely be time to stop and give yourself a chance to fully replenish your nutritional stores before continuing. If you have some good links i would be interested in reading more.

[MightySunTzu]

About 13.5 months ago i posted about the tragedy of having badly damaged my heart by unknowingly pushing too hard in a run and over-extending it. Before this incident my level of fitness was such that my resting heart rate was a beautiful 40 bpm.

After the incident it was about 80 for several days before finally working it's way down to about 65-68 and then 60-63 over the next few weeks... and 60-63 is where it remained over the following 13 months, even through 2 major resting fasts of 30 and 36.5 days and another of medium length, a 17 day fast that was concluded about 2 months ago. Lastly about a month ago i began to dry fast 16 hours each day, eating with full (not partial) nutriment within the remaining 8 hour window.

Before engaging the first healing fast 13.5 months ago, intuitively i felt that i would know my heart was healed only once my resting heart rate returned to about 40, something i believed i would possibly achieve in that first fast but didn't.

In any case and without further ado, here are the most recent developments. 2 weeks ago the rate was still 60-63 as it had steadily persisted over the previous 13 months. Within 2 days it was 58. 2 days after this it was 52 and today it was 44!

It's an extremely surprising and spontaneous development after such a long wait and i don't want to make any absolute conclusions just yet, but I take this as an exceedingly good sign that the healing of my heart may finally be nearing completion.

Here is the original post: Beautiful Fast

[WannaFast]

Congratulations! That's a wonderful development. Do you attribute the recovery to your long fasts or also other measures? What sort of exercises were you doing in between your fasts?

[MightySunTzu]

Originally Posted by WannaFast

Congratulations! That's a wonderful development. Do you attribute the recovery to your long fasts or also other measures? What sort of exercises were you doing in between your fasts?

Thanks WannaFast, i'm pretty excited about it. Since i was eating healthy and resting intently for about 6 weeks before conducting the first healing fast and nothing seemed to be happening, i credit the fasting more than anything. Even though the heart rate only decreased by about 5 during the fast (from 65-68 to 60-63), there was immense healing in terms of strain, soreness and newly gained capabilities. I emerged from that fast able to walk up my driveway without straining my heart and far beyond this i was also able to do strength training and moderate cardio without same, none of which i was able to do after the 6 weeks of resting and before the fast.

Nevertheless i knew that a lot of healing remained unfinished as there was still a strained/sore feeling that would come and go, especially in times of stress and i was also aware that i wasn't ready for intense cardio as i was gently and cautiously re-exploring my limits. So basically that first healing fast returned me to being able to live a relatively normal life again.

In between fasts i have been doing strength training about 3x per week, recently fairly intense but cautious (reaching about 90-95% of max h/r) short duration interval cardio about 2x/wk, moderate short duration steady state cardio (about 80-85%) 2x/wk and gentle short duration cardio (maybe 60%) on trampoline generally 7 days a week primarily for the lymph flushing benefits. Before the first fast i could do none of this without strain except for the very light cardio.

I also consider healthful eating (and the equally important absense of unhealthful foods) to have been an important contributing factor in moving forward and i don't know much about the healing benefits of 16 hour per day dry fasts that i have been doing each day over the past month, but i suspect they have been helping too. What is your biochemical take on the healing benefits of such short term intermittent fasting?

[Andrew Gubb]

Hey SunTzu,

I apologise for being too lazy to google the info but I was wondering about something.

To do a long fast, do you think I'll be able to keep working? Someone else on the forum said they took a holiday for the first 3 days and then could keep on working (for a ten day fast). Is this common?

Currently I'm waiting on having some holiday time to do a serious fast.

[MightySunTzu]

Originally Posted by Andrew Gubb

Hey SunTzu,

I apologise for being too lazy to google the info but I was wondering about something.

To do a long fast, do you think I'll be able to keep working? Someone else on the forum said they took a holiday for the first 3 days and then could keep on working (for a ten day fast). Is this common?

Currently I'm waiting on having some holiday time to do a serious fast.

Hey Andrew,

No worries. It's often not as easy to find exactly what we're looking for in Google as we might hope .

Regarding working in a fast, this will vary greatly from person to person. Myself i have done both working and resting fasts and i prefer to have the freedom to rest as much as possible. I've always been able to push myself to work when necessary though, except for a couple of rare instances of healing crisis that came and went deep into longer fasts... but again each individual is different and this will not be true for everybody.

It is common but not a general rule for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd days to be rough and for things to ease up after this. This is often attributed to withdrawals from addictions, whether open or hidden (caffeine, sugar, msg and alcohol among others). For me i don't recall these days as having been particularly hard except for the hunger aspect which usually for me excludes day 3... i usually wake up at the beginning of day 3 with no appetite and no desire to eat.

Days 1, 2 and/or 3 are by far the days where the feeling of physical appetite is the strongest for most people and most commonly this disappears thereafter (coinciding with the body's transition into ketosis [stored body fat as the primary fuel source]) and remains completely dormant until the fast is broken. Emotional desire for food is another issue entirely and often doesn't go away at all.

[Andrew Gubb]

Thanks a lot MightySunTzu, that was helpful

[WannaFast]

Originally Posted by MightySunTzu

Thanks WannaFast,.....
What is your biochemical take on the healing benefits of such short term intermittent fasting?

Thank you MightySunTzu for your thorough reply. I admire your ability to fast that long and do it right. Can you tell how you break your fast --or maybe you wrote it already, please say where and I'll look-- and what's your refeeding phase like. Do you start exercising during your refeeding phase?

My take on short term intermittent fasting... I do not consider it fasting. Fasting in my book is when you go into ketosis or at least deplete (and then replenish) your glycogen stores. But!

Compared to 5-6 meals a day, which is the other end of the spectrum of daily eating (which of course has it place, like for example during the refeeding phase) eating once a day is far more healthful habit than a more frequent feeding. Eating twice a day (a meal and a snack) is fine too. Everything else is for growing children.

Once a day meals are better digested, the body goes through a cycle of eating, digesting --thoroughly!-- resting, using some of liver glycogen, some tissues cells may be stimulated into autophagy... Metabolism becomes very efficient. Sensitivity to insulin goes up. It's all written up in intermittent fasting literature. I think it is a very healthy way to live (provided it's not rigid and you can allow yourself to break your routine sometimes).

I used to largely live like this, for a while, and I believe it enabled me to eventually fall into spontaneous 24-48h fasts, especially after I'd do glycogen loading. So for me the first 2 days of a fast are the easiest. After 48h my liver glycogen usually gets depleted and it becomes tough until ketosis kicks in in earnest.

I like your nick. May I ask why you picked the name of the legendary Chinese general?

[forecast]

Originally Posted by MightySunTzu

This is to be a fast consisting of distilled water only and I have completed almost 2 days so far.

fasting is good, -
but distillate water is a strongest solvent, and it remove mostly salts from the body, -
how are you going to handle this...?