"Most people’s experience tells them that going a day or two without solid food produces profound hunger and discomfort. The thought of going two or three weeks or longer without food leaves them incredulous, and certainly not eager to undertake such a trial. After supervising hundreds of fasts, many lasting 2-3 weeks, and some up to 30 or 40 days, I can report the happy news that reality is nothing like (much better than) the feared image people hold about fasting.
How can this be?
For the first 24 to 48 hours after beginning a water fast, the body burns off circulating blood sugar and sugar stored in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. The “real” metabolic fast does not begin until one metabolizes their blood sugar, in approximately 2 to 3 days. At that time, the body begins to burn fat tissue for fuel. When that happens, molecules called ketones enter the blood circulation. These ketones have some very interesting properties.
For the faster, the main welcome property of ketones is that they suppress hunger. By day four or five of a water fast, hunger is usually gone and is replaced by a feeling of great well-being.
Why more energy, and not less?
So much of the energy that the body uses all day goes to digesting our food including muscular contractions of the intestine, chemical energy used to synthesize stomach acid, bile, and digestive enzymes as well as the billions of immune cells in the intestinal lining that interrogate the chemical nature of the food going by in the digestive tract. When that function is no longer required on a fast, all that energy is freed up and people surprisingly – but predictably – feel very light and energetic for the first several weeks on the fast.
It may be counterintuitive, but it is true nonetheless. The commonly-held image of a long water fast is of a person lying on their bed, weak, hungry and whimpering, trying not to think about food, when actually, the reality is quite the opposite.
People at our TrueNorth Health Center who are on a water fast, frequently stop me in our courtyard to say “Doctor, I haven’t felt this good in years! I haven’t eaten for three weeks, but I feel wonderful!” It really is quite remarkable.
It is during this time that we observe a normalizing of blood pressure and blood sugar readings and a subsiding of most pains, swellings, and other signs of inflammation. (See corresponding references below.)
During a fast, the body is in “Full Energy Conservation Mode” and it does not want to spend precious chemical energy on chaotic, heat-generating, activities, such as inflammatory reactions and growing tumor tissue. During a fast, hot angry joints in rheumatoid arthritis, gout and other inflammatory joint diseases (predictably) cool down, inflamed plaques of psoriasis in the skin are becalmed, and wounds in and on the body heal extremely well. If malignant breast cells are multiplying in tissues, the fasting body generates molecules called sirtuins which put the breaks on cancer growth.
Water fasting cleanses the body on a deep, cellular level
All of us, in our body cells, have remnant molecules of every restaurant meal, fast food snack, and processed food dessert we have ever eaten. There are flavorings, colorings, preservatives, dough conditioners, stabilizers, and thousands of other compounds that compose a chemical soup of modern cuisine in all the cells in our body. These substances accumulate in our tissues over time, contributing to feelings of chronic fatigue and bodily dysfunction.
A water fast has the effect of “taking your cells through the car wash” where day after day, nothing but pure water washes through each and every cell. This markedly lowers the concentrations of the foreign, disruptive molecules.
Thus, it is no wonder that people predictably emerge from a water fast feeling lighter and cleaner on the inside because they really are."
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