151–158 of 158 posts
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You went 60 days without eating?
Yep. Lost 80 lbs in 2 months. Got a few e-mails about this comment already so I'm throwing together a quick summary of what I did, results, and logs I took during the fast. Learned a lot since that fast though, it was over two years ago at this point. Eating is definitely optional if you have the body fat.
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The amount of carbohydrates you need in your diet to survive is exactly zero. They’re a non-essential macronutrient. The amount of glucose you need in your blood stream to keep everything running smoothly is a very small amount easily produced by your body through a process called gluconeogenesis. I went 60 days sans any calories and my body self regulated glucose just fine.
I went 21 days with just water and electrolytes. My son is a type 1 diabetic so I had access to a glucose meter to test myself with. My blood glucose level at about the halfway mark was 59mg/dL (for reference, most non-diabetics should be between 70-130.) I won't say fasting for 21 days was the most pleasant experience, but it is entirely doable by the average healthy person. Nice job going 60 days. The hardest part…
> your body closely regulates the level of glucose in your blood. Your brain would literally starve without it. Is this actually true? Having done the ketogenic diet and bringing carbohydrates down to almost nothing, my brain definitely didn't starve. In fact, running on ketones was amazing.
We are down to anecdotal evidences here. So as another anecdote, a guy I know went on a carb-free diet and developed diabetes as a result. His body lost the ability to process sugar. Bottom line, most people needs a balanced diet - including carbs that are one of the pillars of nutrition. A given individual's body may be able to compensate for the imbalance on its own, but let's not generalize that to the entire popu…
They're simply not, the body can manufacture all the glucose it needs.
The ketogenic diet is glucose sparing, that is your insulin levels are dramatically lowered since the very small amount of glucose you're eating should go to the tissues that require it, not into your fat cells.
So if you're on a ketogenic diet and then eat a lot of glucose, your body takes a little while to ramp back up insulin. That's not the same thing as insulin resistance or impaired insulin production in diabetics.
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I went 21 days with just water and electrolytes. My son is a type 1 diabetic so I had access to a glucose meter to test myself with. My blood glucose level at about the halfway mark was 59mg/dL (for reference, most non-diabetics should be between 70-130.) I won't say fasting for 21 days was the most pleasant experience, but it is entirely doable by the average healthy person. Nice job going 60 days. The hardest part…
Do you mind sharing some of the side-effects you experienced as well as your goal overall for the 21 day fast? Mostly curious about weight/mass loss numbers but also any adverse bodily reactions.
For the remainder:
I felt tired, cranky, cold (especially at night), and on occasion I would have trouble getting to sleep. My inflammation was markedly decreased. I have dermatographia (skin writing) where I can use my fingernail to draw a line on my arm (for example) and within a couple of minutes it will swell up like an allergic reaction. After about 5 minutes it goes away. I tried doing this halfway into my fast and while the inflammation was still there, it was much much much less noticeable (and not puffed up.)
As far as overall goal, aside from losing some weight was trying to reset my immune system which has been out of sorts for the past couple of years. I've been through a battery of tests to figure out why I've been feeling less than normal (brain fog, neuropathy, etc.) for the past 2-3 years and I was hoping it would help. Alas it did not. I lost 31lb and gained about half of it back after a couple of months. I wasn't following any particular diet after the fast, particularly because when I experience these bouts of brain fog/malaise, I don't feel motivated to stay on track.
I've started walking 5-7 miles a day and exercising over the past couple of months and have noticed some improvement. I did a 3 day water fast a few weeks ago, who knows if that was a factor. I'm maybe 85% of the old me, which is a massive improvement from where I was coming from. Hopefully things continue to improve (or simply doesn't get worse.)
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You went 60 days without eating?
I just found out that the record is 382 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
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Uhh, I have a log of that somewhere one second... This is day 61, I'd estimate like 4k-ish calories. 07:51 - Woke to Alarm 08:34 - Weight 199.8 - Bodyfat 26.1 08:41 - Start First Meal - Handful of Spinach Wilted in 2 tbsp Butter - 5 Olives - 1 Dill Pickle Spear - 6 oz Pickle Juice 08:45 - End First Meal 08:50 - Drank 1/2 Liter Water 08:57 - Start Sauna 165.0 F 09:00 - Drank 1 Liter Water 09:12 - End Sauna 182.5 F 09:…
You fasted for 60 days and the first thing you ate to break your fast was... spinach? You have next-level willpower.
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Any liver issues? Did you have any steatosis/fatty liver before? Clear that up at all?
None that I was aware of, though at my weight I'm sure there could have been. Kinda kicking myself for not getting a good set of blood tests for the 'before' results.
Thanks for sharing your story!
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this makes no sense biochemically. your hypothesis seems to be that a lack of carbohydrates (read: sugar) caused an individual to develop diabetes, but "diabetes" generalizes down to: - the body (pancreas) does not produced insulin at all (type I) - the body's cells are resistant to the produced insulin (type II) we should be able to basically rule out type II because there should have largely been no insulin produce…
> "losing the ability to process sugar" seems really sketchy, because those are all critical cellular processes that don't just go away. I have no idea as to the validity of this anecdote but the idea isn't unprecedented. For example, correcting an iodine deficiency can cause the same thyroid issues that a deficiency can cause.