3 day fasting to reset immune system

At the time I had no idea what was wrong with me so it was the last thing to try on my list out of desperation. I knew I felt worse after eating so speculated something was wrong with my gut and thought giving my gut a rest might help.

@Wonko I think only people who are severely underweight, have malnutrition, or other serious complications would die from 30 days of no food. I was relatively thin going in and still had decent amount of fat at the end. Of course there is re feeding etc to worry about also but I should imagine it would have taken at least 3 months before I starved to death.

 

I was put on a strict exclusion diet to try to work out allergies. I can't remember now exactly how long I was supposed to be on it, but my weight plummeted and I was taken off it early - possibly 4 weeks in.

I was still eating 3 meals a day plus snacks.

 

No food is not the issue, people can live for several months without food.

But no liquid - the kidneys need a constant throughput in order to detox the blood, and excrete a fairly fixed volume per hour - if this isn't replaced, by drinking, or as liquid gained from food, then all sorts of problems occur.

Urban legend, and google, tends to suggest that 3-4 days is the maximum a healthy adult can survive without liquid. The only cases of people going 7 days seem to be in deliberate attempts to kill people (e.g. in cases of terminal illness where the doctors are prevented from using drugs to end someone so choose to withdraw all 'treatment' instead), and I haven't seen reports of anyone lasting longer than 7 days in such a situation.

Which doesn't mean that some people don't last longer, it's just that if they do they are outliers and it would be 'unsafe' and unwise to assume that a typical person could, let alone someone with ME.

My understanding is that there are significant risks associated with not drinking, at the same time as not eating, far more risks than with simply fasting.

 

@Wonko I agree that not drinking is far more risky than not eating. I speculate that being bloated going in and not bloated at day 7 means that my body had extra water to use than a regular person. On the final day of dry fasting I began getting pins and needles in my limbs, my heart would start skipping and palpitating in a different way from my usual symptoms and I felt very off. So I figured it was a good time to end it.

One thing I still find confusing is that I drank a 330ml bottle of water and could still feel and hear the water swishing around in my stomach. I have mild gastroparesis but this has never happened with water. Perhaps my GI was asleep. Maybe if my body had absorbed all that water at once it would have messed up my electrolytes and caused big problem so my body decided to only let minimal amounts through? I don't know.

Interestingly enough with this fast I would still get my post meal symptoms but even with plain water. I took pictures on my phone of my stomach being flat, then very soon after drinking a cup of water my stomach would bloat out on the mid left abdomen only. I would get heart pounding and feel crappy in this time. This happens when I eat but it was an eye opener to have it happen when just drinking plain water. This is when I realized that the fast was probably not going to work.

 

@Dechi

Fast went really well for about 44 hours, after that I started getting the slight stinging feeling in my muscles that doesn’t feel right somehow. It could be nothing, but it’s something I never experienced before ME and obviously I don’t want to take any risks. I carefully eased back into eating over the next few hours. I got a little PEM the day after, another sign I overdid it slightly.

Around 36 hours seems to be a good target for me. Effective, but feels right and easy to do. I did one yesterday to test my theory and it went very well. No PEM today. It’s also short enough that I don’t need to take any special care when eating again which is good. I will try doing these shorter fasts more frequently and see if that still feels ok.

 

Just to clarify here.... you went 7 days not drinking or eating anything at all? And then did a further 23 days with no food at all and just a glass or 2 of water each day?

 

Yes that is correct. I didn't much like the idea of fasting so I wanted to get both dry fasting and water fasting done to a degree where I could be sure whether they worked or not. Unfortunately for me they did not but at least I could put the idea to rest.

 

I have now been doing alternate day fasting (36-40 hours fasting then eating normally for a day, rinse and repeat) since February with a couple breaks of a week or so.

It is something that has really worked well for me. I’m losing a bit of weight which I wanted. I also generally have more energy on fasting days, mostly because I’m not digesting food. Saving more demanding tasks for fasting days and using eating days for rest allows me to do a little more than I would otherwise tolerate. The routine of activity/rest also helps a little with boredom and frustration.

I should add that I usually feel a little better this time of year so that muddles it a little. Regardless the benefits are worth it to me and at this point I’m so into this routine that when I tried a weeks break recently I was impatient to get back into it.

I am fairly used to fasting and found the transition easy. I’m not hungry or feeling at all deprived, though the fact that food is often at least 50% entertainment can become very apparent at times! I do notice my apetite on eating days will increase if my activity level on fasting days is higher.

Weight loss and a bigger envelope are my main motivations, but a little mild autophagy could be a happy bonus. I find this a lot easier than calorie restricted meals. I still find that after about 40 hours it stops feeling good and starts to feel like a strain on the body which is why I stay within that limit.

 

It does appear that fasting can induce changes in the immune system. However you have to ask what kind of changes? The notion of a reset is problematic. I do think short fasts might help many of us, they are helping me, but given that so many of us cannot reliably get food and fast a lot anyway, and we don't get better, its very unlikely any number of us will see any kind of recovery.

I was just discussing this with another patient today in a private channel. We have so much trouble getting food so often that we often fast anyway. Many of us experience this.

Under no conditions would I restrict water. Water has no calories anyway, so why would you?

In terms of fasting the immune changes seem to usually start at around 12 hours from other reading I have done. Every hour after that has a changed immune response. Research on this won the Nobel prize a few years ago, but its more about metabolism than immune changes. The clip mentioned autophagy, which is what the Nobel prize was won for.

There was a lot made of caloric restriction to improve health some years ago. That research may have to be redone, as the rodents in the study ate all their limited food quickly, and fasted nearly all of the day. So was it caloric restriction, or fasting?

What comes up again and again is its the hormone changes, including metabolic hormones, that are important.

 

I'm the opposite. As I get older, if I don't have either a big dinner, or have a snack before going to bed, I wake up throughout the night and don't get a good night's sleep.

 

I know this is just anecdotal, but the person shown in this link seems to have managed to get his body to start "eating itself" and recycling excess skin.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/with-one-foot-in-the-grave-robert-turned-it-around-and-lost-200-lbs

I've seen other amazing results in people who have fasted extensively and posted before and after pictures online. They must have improved via autophagy - how else can the disappearance of huge aprons of skin be explained?

There was a man, whose name I don't remember, who was at one time the heaviest man in the world. He dieted and lost hundreds of pounds, and his apron of skin at the front reached his feet. He got his apron removed but if he had done what the man in my first link did he might not have needed surgery.

I have always shied away from fasting and haven't actually researched the theory behind it. I've been very low in iron or anaemic for a large part of my life. I struggle to keep my levels of iron up to something I can live with. If I fasted I'm guessing I would be living with very low iron permanently and low or practically non-existent levels of other nutrients too. And this idea makes me panic at the thought. I struggle with my health enough as it is and I cannot rid myself of the idea that fasting must be a way of making my life even worse. Or do people who fast live on handfuls of supplements every day?

 

I didn't invent the phrase it was one I read when I first looked up the meaning of the word "autophagy".

I'm not suggesting that I think fasting is healthy or a good idea or a bad idea. I can't get past the idea that people will end up in a state of having extremely low vitamins and minerals, and I have to admit I feel this way because I don't know enough about it and haven't researched it. I feel so ill most of the time that the idea of voluntarily making myself feel worse makes me go into a complete meltdown.

 

Not if you do something like 16/8 fasting, also known as eating time restriction. You can eat more or less normally, just not during 16 hours a day. Prolonged fasting might be a problem. However it is claimed, and I have not seen proof, that fasting makes the body more careful with nutrients.

 

It was prolonged fasting I was thinking of. I already restrict my eating to mid-afternoon up until about 8pm and after that I only drink tea or water - this isn't for health reasons it is just how I've eaten for many, many years. I'm still fat and getting fatter.