All About Fasting

[Fluffy]

Has anyone in the forum dealt with an eating disorder, such as binge eating and successfully tried fasting?

I am asking because I am trying to understand the difference between starving and fasting as both trigger hungry signals and can make one not feel great, for fasting that's usually when one is new to the practice and getting into it (from the research I have done, please correct me if I am wrong)

I guess I am confused because as I do The Work, I am coming home to the idea how important to is to listen to our body's signals as someone who has spent most of her life in her head and overthinking, not paying attention to what the body needs.

I know there is a ton of well documented research on the benefits of fasting but I am having trouble reconciling the benefits while ignoring our bodies cue for hungry

I'd really like to get to a point of fasting for 3 days but I right now am un able to make a full 24 hours as I get so sick and low energy and then end up eating so much which seems like binge eating

Is my body not ready to fast do you think?

Edit: I realized I already posted something like this recently. I clearly need to re-read this thread more thoroughly. I can't delete the post so I made an edit

I’ve done a lot of fasting that I wasn’t mentally prepared for. I think it caused, or at least contributed to some deranged eating habits and relationship with food, though I always have had a tendency to want to overeat (sweets, never steak). At one point I was having one meal every 2nd day, excluding only wheat products. I became obsessed with being extra lean and would hate myself if I ate out of that sequence.

I wrote elsewhere that I overcome the majority of my deranged eating habits by letting myself eat whatever I wanted and as much of it as I wanted. I came to a point where I didn’t want for a thing much anymore because I’d satisfied all the cravings I’d missed out on and was actually getting enough nutrition which fixed my mental health.

I see this post was from March. Have you tried again since?

 

[Fluffy]

A short article on the benefits of dry fasting. The author has a lot of content, including certain protocols for addressing long covid and autoimmune conditions.

His claim is that a 1 day dry fast (no food and no water) results in the same amount of autophagy as a 3 day water fast.

The Science behind how a 1-day Dry Fast is equivalent to a 3-day Water Fast in Raw Autophagic Power

LC3 is a protein that is critical to autophagy. We can use this information to see how much autophagy is happening at a given time.

www.dryfastingclub.com

While the study shows autophagy does significantly increase after 1 day of both calorie restriction and dehydration, I think his analysis is missing something.

View attachment 100764

Dry fast autophagy jumps to something like 2.8 after just 1 day, then tapers off. Hey says it's 3.0 in his video, but it's not at that level to my eye. He's inflating the numbers a bit.

It also appears he doesn't know basic math? Day 1 of a water fast = 1.5. Day 2 of water fast = 1.5. So the cumulative Day 2 water fast LC3-II level = +3.0.

So 1 day of dry fasting does not 'provide more "additional" autophagy than 3 combined days of water fasting.' Dry fasting provides in 1 day around the same amount of additional autophagy as 2 combined days of water fasting.

That aside, I've never tried dry fasting before, and will give it a try. He also has some other interesting information about dry fasting, such as metabolic water, which I'd never heard of. Our body creates water internally while in a state of dehydration. Our body fat is a storehouse for the ingredients for water! Our muscles can provide water, too.

This is how dry fast fanatics - or those desperate to heal - can survive periods of no water intake for 9 to 11 days. This is also how Native Peoples could do well on their vision quests, which generally entails going into a sweat lodge and dropping a ton of water, then hiking up a mountain, sitting in prayer for four days with no food or water, hiking back down the mountain, and then going into another sweat lodge. I'd always wondered about the biology of that.

Metabolic Water and Fasting | Wet and Dry

Discover metabolic water, produced by animals as they break down nutrients like proteins and fats, helping them maintain hydration in limited water conditions.

www.dryfastingclub.com

I read somewhere in all the fasting literature I read many years ago, can’t quote it because I couldn’t even begin to know where it came from, that when we dry fast instead of our cells kicking out toxins the toxins are burned up inside the cell which turn into little furnaces leaving no waste product behind.

I’ve always wanted to try dry fasting intentionally. Long ago when I was using heavy drugs I would not eat or drink for days on end, I was actually in pretty good health albeit the drug use which obviously had many mental elements, though physically l was the healthiest I’ve ever been.