Water Fast

[ter]

I am beginning a 30 day water fast today. I decided it would be good to log my progress on a daily basis or more if it helps. I have made the decision to fast for several reasons, among them are weight loss and to hopefully make me feel better physically and mentally.

[Daffy Duck]

Cool. Keep us updated.

[ginkgo]

Have you ever fasted before? I have fasted 12 days and am on day 13. My log of it is under the 31 day challenge. Here is a website about fasting, juice fasting and the lemonade diet or master cleanse. Master Cleanse Lemonade Diet, Juice Fasting and Water Fasting

It has quotes from 19MDs about fasting and it has the most common things that can go wrong on a fast and kill you. A juice fast or lemonade diet has much less chance of these things happening. So if possible, it is safer to have it monitored by a professional who can take your blood. I am not doing that since I do not have the insurance for it.

I had mentioned that the pro fasters do not suggest fasting while on drugs. So CroMagna checked this with an MD and decided not to fast, even though he wanted to. So the ideal thing is to find a doctor to monitor or supervise the fast.

[jamesbiz]

Considering weight was one of the only things you mentioned as being important, maybe you should not do a fast. If you had other reasons, fine, but not weight. You will not be losing the right type of weight and you WILL gain it all back, and more.

[Wilder]

Jamesbiz is right on this one, trust me. Though I would be interested to learn about the effects fasting would have on the mentality! Didn't budah come into Nirvana through fasting?
I'm interested to know if your doing this for a religious purpose or non-secular?

[ginkgo]

Originally Posted by jamesbiz

Considering weight was one of the only things you mentioned as being important, maybe you should not do a fast. If you had other reasons, fine, but not weight. You will not be losing the right type of weight and you WILL gain it all back, and more.

Saying that he will gain it back is like saying that a criminal released from prison will commit crimes and go back into jail. Yes, he will unless he does what Michael Jackson suggests in Man In The Mirror-- "if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change."

[jamesbiz]

Originally Posted by ginkgo

Saying that he will gain it back is like saying that a criminal released from prison will commit crimes and go back into jail. Yes, he will unless he does what Michael Jackson suggests in Man In The Mirror-- "if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change."

61% of criminals are repeat offenders. The number can go up and down depending on country. So yes, it's pretty easy to say that a person who gets out of jail, will commit a crime and go to jail. And 61% is just those who got CAUGHT for the second time.

It will be almost impossible to not gain the weight back. He'll have do start up his metabolism back up sooo slowly and he'll have to be just as strict for 30 days after the fast, if he wants to not gain back MORE then he lost. Most of the weight he'll lose will be from muscle. That's just how the body works when you completely starve it. The second he gets back to eating, the body will go into overdrive to store fat for the next "famine" ( which is what the body thinks is happening).

Now if his goal wasn't to lose weight, I would have absolutely no problem with it. But if his main intention is to lose weight, he will fail.

[Barcs]

I agree that the primary goal should not be weight loss, however you certianly don't lose mostly muscle. I fasted for 3 weeks early last year and I lost mostly fat. Fasting shouldn't be some quick fix, though. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat healthy and exercise. Fasting can be a good jump start to a diet, but you absolutely need follow it up with proper diet and exercise. That's way more important than the fast itself if weight loss is your goal.

[jamesbiz]

Originally Posted by Barcs

I agree that the primary goal should not be weight loss, however you certianly don't lose mostly muscle. I fasted for 3 weeks early last year and I lost mostly fat. Fasting shouldn't be some quick fix, though. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat healthy and exercise. Fasting can be a good jump start to a diet, but you absolutely need follow it up with proper diet and exercise. That's way more important than the fast itself if weight loss is your goal.

Yes, of course, your body is different then every single human on this planet. You trying to say then that you lose mostly fat? Becauase that goes against just about every medical text book ever written. The body cannibalizes muscle. That's the whole point of starvation mode. Why would it give up important fat? You are turning off your metabolism. Not only that, but it will be very slow for awhile after that. Your body will and DOES tap into the muscle supply right away. You also can not exercise while fasting because that will burn even more muscle. Your body will lose muscle not matter what if you are not using it. There is a simple reason why, muscle requires a lot of energy to sustain, so they body in its infinite wisdom slowly degrades muscle if your not using it, cause it assumes you don't need it. This happens if your fasting or not. Your body is a machine really, it doesn't think much of anything at all. Eating too little, however, does lower your metabolism because your body is eating up its muscle mass. This is not a temporary change though, as the words "starvation mode" may lead you to believe. The lowering of your metabolic rate will be permanent until you exercise to build back the muscle you have lost.

Consider, however, that muscle takes the most energy for your body to maintain. A person with a lot of muscle mass burns more calories per day than a similarly built person who has less muscle, even if both are just sitting on the couch watching TV.

So, when someone stops fasting, he or she will have lost weight because they have lost muscle mass. However, his or her body will now burn less calories per day than it did before they started fasting. If that person were to start eating again as they did before the fast, he or she would now gain weight, where as before the fast, they broke even, and neither gained or lost.

I dare someone to use a body fat scale on their next fast. Nvm actually, because I'd doubt they'd be willing to tell us the real results.

[ginkgo]

The starvation mode is a myth. Many never read or learn about something but talk about it from what they heard in a bar or a forum. Here are 2 of the quotes of the quotes from 19 different MDs on my site.

Hereward Carrington, M.D. wrote a book called Vitality, Fasting and Nutrition. He says "fasting is a scientific method of ridding the system of diseased tissues, and morbid matter, and is invariably accompanied by beneficial results....The whole secret is this: fasting commences with the omission of the first meal and ends with the return of natural hunger, while starvation only begins with the return of natural hunger and terminates in death." Natural hunger is the body saying that it is time to stop the fast.

Dr. George F. Cahill, Jr., of the Harvard Medical School, has noted that "man's survival [of long abstention from food] is predicated upon a remarkable ability to conserve the relatively limited body protein stores while utilizing fat as the primary energy-producing food."

[ginkgo]

Originally Posted by jamesbiz

61% of criminals are repeat offenders. The number can go up and down depending on country. So yes, it's pretty easy to say that a person who gets out of jail, will commit a crime and go to jail. And 61% is just those who got CAUGHT for the second time.

It will be almost impossible to not gain the weight back. He'll have do start up his metabolism back up sooo slowly and he'll have to be just as strict for 30 days after the fast, if he wants to not gain back MORE then he lost. Most of the weight he'll lose will be from muscle. That's just how the body works when you completely starve it. The second he gets back to eating, the body will go into overdrive to store fat for the next "famine" ( which is what the body thinks is happening).

Now if his goal wasn't to lose weight, I would have absolutely no problem with it. But if his main intention is to lose weight, he will fail.

A posthospitalization questionnaire was sent to 709 obese individuals who had fasted at the University of Pennsylvania hospital [currently one of the top 10 hospitals in the country], whose pioneer fasting program was supervised by Dr. Garfield G. Duncan. Of the 50 percent who responded, approximately 46 percent had continued to lose weight, and 21 percent had remained at the reduced level at which they had completed their fast.

My chiropractor was very overweight. Dr Fuhrman had him fast for 12 days and go on a vegan diet. He lost 79 pounds in 6 months and only a little of that was during the fast.

[ginkgo]

Originally Posted by Wilder

Jamesbiz is right on this one, trust me. Though I would be interested to learn about the effects fasting would have on the mentality! Didn't budah come into Nirvana through fasting?
I'm interested to know if your doing this for a religious purpose or non-secular?

Buddha

Gabriel Cousins, MD (psychiatrist), says "I often observe in the fasting participants that by four days of fasting, concentration seems to improve, creative thinking expands, depression lifts, insomnia stops, anxieties fade, the mind becomes more tranquil and a natural joy begins to appear. It is my hypothesis that when the physical toxins are cleared from the brain cells, mind-brain function automatically and significantly improves and spiritual capacities expands."

The above comes from this site: Depression Self Help. Natural Healing of Mental and Physical Issues

I already do a meditation for spiritual growth that works great so fasting is no fun at all for me. I am on the 13th day of my 31 fast that is logged on this forum.

[jamesbiz]

Originally Posted by ginkgo

A posthospitalization questionnaire was sent to 709 obese individuals who had fasted at the University of Pennsylvania hospital [currently one of the top 10 hospitals in the country], whose pioneer fasting program was supervised by Dr. Garfield G. Duncan. Of the 50 percent who responded, approximately 46 percent had continued to lose weight, and 21 percent had remained at the reduced level at which they had completed their fast.

My chiropractor was very overweight. Dr Fuhrman had him fast for 12 days and go on a vegan diet. He lost 79 pounds in 6 months and only a little of that was during the fast.

yeah that only works for obese people. I've read about the same thing. That would also require them to not eat even close to how they ate before. It's a lot easier to not eat anything for a few days/weeks then to eat healthy for years. After a few days, your body just stops craving the food and it no longer hurts, vs a fat person craving food with in hours of not eating food.

I mean duh, I already said that you have to start off very slow after the fast to not gain it all back and more. I also never said that a person will always gain it back or not lose more weight. I did say that the weight you lose on a fast will not be mostly or even close to being mostly fat. It will be a lot of muscle, which in turn will lower your metabolism even more. If you go on a fast, and then not eat a single thing that turned you fat in the first place, then yeah you won't gain the weight back. That's a simple concept. How many obese people have you seen be able to not only last through a fast ( considering there is a very good chance a lack of will power caused the obesity) but to also change their entire lifestyle around for the rest of their lives?


It's funny because I don't see anything about post fasting in that study. What did they eat? You think there is a reason that only 50% responded? What are the chances of a person responding to a questionnaire to say that they failed? SO we have 25% of all participants continuing to lose weight. How do you know they didn't drop their calorie intact dramatically? How do you know they didn't become belemic or anorexic? How do you know they didn't use diet drugs after they started eating? I'd wager to say that only a tiny percentage of those people actually went on to continue losing weight, ( HEALTHY WEIGHT) after their fast with out means of any of the above things. Just by eating healthy and exercise. I'd love for you to prove me wrong, but that study is extremely biased and doesn't include even close to enough variables to prove your point