You might’ve heard about fasting, intermittent fasting, fasting mimicking diets, and water fasts, and been confused about why someone would intentionally not eat food – crazy right? Maybe not.
I discuss why I started fasting, my experience, basic information, and tips for you – basically my fasting experience.
For a general overview of the health benefits of fasting in general, I recommend this article by Healthline. I’m going to be covering my experiences, routines, and tips for you in this post and not as much of a scientific-based article this time.
Why I Fast
The Main Reasons I Fast (Trusted Medical Source):
- Lower and stabilize my glucose markers
- Keep my brain sharp and healthy
- Maintain a lean muscular body composition
- Boost autophagy
- Potentially increase longevity
- Potent immunomodulatory effects
- Gut health improvements
As you can see there are so many benefits to even just intermittent fasting. I’m intrigued by a lot of these benefits, especially immunomodulation, longevity, autophagy, and gut health.
In terms of immunomodulation, one study concluded that “undoubtedly, the preclinical and clinical data presented here and in earlier studies are beginning to indicate that certain forms of fasting and specific compositions of these fasting-like diets can promote potent and coordinated immunomodulatory effects with the potential to be effective alone or in combination with drugs or biologicals against autoimmune diseases, cancer, neurodegeneration, and other diseases involving the microbiota and immune system.”
I like the idea of giving myself a rest from food, resetting my gut to some extent, increasing my willpower, and improving my relationship with eating as a whole.
Most people are constantly eating and while that’s not necessarily bad the benefits of fasting at least intermittently are worth looking into in my opinion.
- Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links so we may receive compensation if you sign up for or purchase products linked below from Amazon or other affiliated companies. Full Affiliate Disclosure. This post does not contain medical advice, we, Hardmaxing.com, are not medical doctors, this information is for general and educational purposes only. Full Medical Disclaimer.
My Fasting Experience
Intermittent Fasting
I fast intermittently by not eating breakfast often which if I’m being completely honest just happens naturally. It’s often hard for me to be hungry enough to want to eat breakfast at all but on the rare 5-10% of days, I do enjoy a breakfast.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ll reach 6 pm and notice I didn’t eat anything for the day and just go with dinner and snacks – it all balances out in the end.
I usually start eating around 12 pm – 2 pm and stop around 8 pm – 12 am which gives me around 12-14 hours of fasting on average. It’s not as much as some people but I enjoy snacks and sleep fairly late – I like that I get some benefits of intermittent fasting from my standard routine.
In terms of experiences with this type of fasting, I notice nothing negative besides that some days right before noon I may start to get hungry. Most of the time though I just feel normal and the longer I fast the sharper I usually feel.
I do want to recognize that I’m a thin person at baseline and while I love food my volume of eating over a day just doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to what other people eat. It’s not a struggle for me to follow a schedule like this but I understand for some wanting to implement this it would probably be extremely hard/need to be built up to.
That aside – this means around 90-95% of the time I’m actively intermittent fasting to some extent. Not much work on my end for lots of potential benefits.
Extended Fasting
Although I’ve been doing intermittent-style fasting for a few years now, I recently started getting more into the health and biohacking space so I decided to try out extended water fasts.
Although it seems like autophagy and glucose levels are improved with shorter fasts as well, I wanted to go for longer fasts which bring me into a state of ketosis and start to potentially maximize the benefits of fasting.
I’ve now done around 3 extended fasts over 2023 for about 2 to 3 days total each time. I will say I struggled a lot more with this type of fasting.
Potential Negatives
The first day is usually fairly easy while the second and third day just feels awful for me. It’s like my whole body is weak, tired, light-headed, etc. It’s ironic because you would think if you’re hungry you would be more energetic to be able to go find food.
I also noticed I was constantly dreaming about food during this time. I remember during one of my fasts I started creating an entire list a few pages long of foods that I would eat as well as browsing grocery websites salivating over all the food I would eat.
It’s seriously distracting for me at least, so I would consider your first longer fast over a time when you might not be doing as much in terms of workload, physical activity, etc.
I didn’t, however, notice it being any harder to sleep at all – but when I’m awake for those 2nd and 3rd days I’m definitely “wired in”. My jaw is clenched, my body tighter, focused on what I’m doing (when I’m not thinking about food).
My sense of smell was also extremely heightened, it was like I was transforming into a dog or some sort of animal with an extreme capacity for smelling foods. If nothing else, fasting changed how I viewed myself at a base level – really weird.
I know some people don’t experience these negatives during extended fasts and that may be due to using electrolytes, but there’s no other word for it other than feeling weak.
I would say it gets easier over time but my second two extended fasts lasted shorter than my first (around 48 hours each) because I didn’t have the willpower anymore.
Time
I ALMOST forgot about this – another crazy aspect of extended fasting. I don’t think you realize how much of your day/time is spent around food. If you’re interested in optimizing your time – try this.
It’s crazy how much I associated food with binging entertainment. Let me explain: I went to watch a show to relax one night and I immediately started thinking about finding a mindless snack to enjoy with my mindless show. Automatically and subconsciously.
Think about it – you’re likely saving at least an hour or more daily especially if you eat socially a lot. Over two or three days you can really see how weird this starts to become in terms of time.
Appreciation
You will appreciate food SO MUCH after ending a 2-3 day fast. Not insanely processed or sugary foods – REAL FOOD.
Your entire relationship with food will be put into a new perspective if you haven’t fasted like this before. I was craving avocados with whole grain toast and eggs, watermelon, for example.
If you are heavily addicted to these unhealthy types of foods maybe this could change your mindset a bit – you’ll realize how good real food is. Although I have to admit I still dreamed about sugar cookies, cookies, doughnuts, cinnamon rolls, etc.
Joints
My joints personally snap or pop a ton. What I noticed on the third day of fasting is that this snapping stops for some reason and slowly comes back after resuming food. Just something small I noticed.
My Tips
Break Fasting Slowly
This is something I didn’t do during my first extended fast and only learned that it was bad and potentially even dangerous after.
You need to slowly reintroduce foods to not shock your system overall, especially avoiding insulin spikes, electrolyte imbalances, and straining/overwhelming your gut.
I suggest eating a few nuts or small vegetables or a bit of popcorn and then waiting an hour before getting into heavier foods.
Hydrate Well
This is pretty well known so I’ll just gloss over it: when you don’t eat you aren’t receiving many vitamins, nutrients, and electrolytes so you might experience cramps, dehydration, etc.
I suggest enjoying salted water or if you’re more advanced try out electrolyte packages or various supplements (I avoid these so as not to ruin my fasted state with calories/products).
Time Correctly
If you are looking to end a fast at a specific time like 48 hours or 72 hours, maybe start in the middle of the day so that you can end in the middle of the day.
You’ll want to eat a lot and if you end a fast late at night (when you ended dinner originally most likely) you won’t have enough time to slowly reintroduce eating.
Get Warm
You will be cold – when you are processing food your body is colder. You need to be in a warm place consistently which again is super inconvenient.
Trust me you do not want to experience this cold without good blankets or coats available – this might’ve been the most painful part for me.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading – hopefully you learned from some of my experiences and studies I touched on. Fasting has so many benefits you should implement it in some capacity or at least give it a try.