Fasting: Your Experience?

[jnjh]

I have fasted from time to time to detox my body and while it's not been fun at the time, the results are worth it. I used to be vegan and would do week-long detoxes a few times a year, at seasonal changes. The first two days I would drink water and freshly prepared juices, mostly carrot, apple and beetroot. Soup would be introduced and then fruit and vegetables. Those first couple of days tended to be tough, featuring headaches and general grumpiness. But by the end my body felt light and clean, and that was the desired result. I know plenty of people who regularly detox for health.

The last time I tried to detox, a few months ago, was a disaster. By the end of the first day I was craving food and took cookbooks with me to read in bed! Normally the first day is okay, the second and third days are hard and unpleasant, but you get through that and things become easier. People say the longer you fast the easier it becomes. I suspect the more 'toxed out' your body is, the harder the experience will be.

I have read a lot of conflicting opinion about the worth of fasting/detoxing and I don't think it's something people should launch themselves into. It's a topic of interest to me.

[bhughesiii]

I intend to try an 24 hour fast starting Sunday... Will be hard as I am going to the movies that night, but breakfast will be my last meal and I will continue on till breakfast on Monday.

[Psilomadman]

I've done the 10 day "Master Cleanse" before and after 3 days it was pretty easy. Its just drinking water with lemon juice and maple syrup if I remember right. Also you need some way to clean out in the absence of fiber so I would take an herbal laxative tea before bed and do a one liter salt water flush in the morning. I lost about 15 lbs and felt good.
Honestly though, I dont know how much it really cleans you out, though I'm sure it cleans the GI tract well. There's all kinds of conflicting stuff on actually removing accumulated toxins during a fast. Obviously you are going to clean out whatever was stored in the fat you lose, but I bet I lost some good muscle to. Short fasts would be better for muscle preservation, but are you getting enough time to clean out?
I dont buy into any of the extreme positions pro or con. I would think it would be good for clearing up food alergies as long as you figured out what was bugging you and did'nt go back to it after.

[namaste]

Yeah I've done it for a couple of days.

I felt irritable and found it hard to concentrate, and my lifts sucked.

Weirdly, I moved quicker in wrestling, but ended up getting injured.

[jnjh]

Yeah I've done the "master cleanse" diet, only for me it was about five days because I couldn't stand the taste of the drink - think I was adding too much cayenne pepper! (Actually that was the one that had me craving food so much I was reading cookbooks in bed).

I agree that fasting would quite probably work for determining food allergies, although this is better done by eliminating particular food groups at different times. If all food is eliminated at the same time, it's hard to tell what the culprit was. The answers come by slowly introducing given food groups one after the other and observing the results.

If you fast with both water and juice, you're getting some fiber, and sugars to keep you going.

[shaun680]

"A high meal frequency does not boost your metabolism"

So does this mean we don't need to eat every 3 hours?

[TakeFive]

Tried it (fasting) once. Hunger went away after several hours, then felt pretty good. Until late that evening. Seemed pretty pointless when there's an abundant supply of healthy food available. Maybe good for teaching you that you can survive without eating everyday, but that's probably about it.

And in my not so humble opinion, I absolutely believe this business of "cleansing" and "detox" is complete quackery. And dangerous too.

Look, show me how you measure detox. Do you assay a urine or fecal sample? Can you show that the content of heavy metals, pesticides, or Twinkie cream filling has increased, indicating a greater than normal rate of removal? Or do you just say, "gee my urine is almost clear and there's nothing coming out of my backside, so I'm almost free of poison", while not grasping the intuitively obvious - you've consumed nothing but water.

Think about it. This is the antithesis of stronglifts.

You can only bench 100 lbs this month. Two months later you can bench 150 lbs and your chest is a couple inches bigger. These are measureable and reproducible results - kind of the foundation of the scientific method that led us out of the dark ages. Can similar criteria be applied to fasting?

[jnjh]

I agree that it seems difficult to measure someone's level of toxicity or how much detoxification may have taken place after a fast or detox diet.

I don't agree that fasting or detoxing is the antithesis of stronglifts. If you come out stronger after fasting, then it can only benefit strength training.

However, it is possible you could lose strength ...

Hard science may very well not back up fasting/detoxing. In which case, it's entirely up to individuals to try these things out for themselves and investigate the results.

Yes, fasting can be potentially dangerous.

I certainly do no think 'cleansing' is complete quackery.

[Mehdi]

"A high meal frequency does not boost your metabolism"

So does this mean we don't need to eat every 3 hours?

Not for that reason. Plenty of other reasons to do so though. Post coming up on it during the next weeks.

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Regarding the detox, since it seems to be stressed in this thread quite a lot. I do not know if fasting is the best way to detox. I don't think stuff like lemonade diet is that healthy. Wouldn't fit for us anyway unless you do it during a rest week. But anyway: that's not why I wanted to do it.

The only real health benefit I see in fasting is that it shrinks your stomach and maybe give your liver and what else a break. The former helps people who want to lose weight/maintain weight (since maintaining weight is really hard when training hard).

Aside from that, I think we should look at the psychological benefits of fasting the most. Fasting needs you to apply mind over body.

Fasting (24-36h stuff) will not affect your strength when done properly. If it does, you're not doing it correctly OR it's pychological. I've lifted in a fasted state before (trying warrior diet) and things went great. I actually think that training in a fasted state is better. I think Martin Berkhan (leangains) has some research on that.

[Doo]

I have read of some benefits of an occasional fast but most of what I have read debunks the idea that fasting as well as sauna and herbal remedies "rids the body of toxins". That phrase sounds like a health food store promotional gimmick. I think the best thing for ridding the body of toxins is a good BM. Eat your fiber.

[atypical1]

Aside from that, I think we should look at the psychological benefits of fasting the most. Fasting needs you to apply mind over body.

That's probably the only reason that I can think of to fast. It sounds like you try to test yourself and your limits fairly regularly which is good but I'm not sure that fasting in and of itself does much to make you mentally tougher if you are already tough mentally. It seems like you're already pretty disciplined and have a decent amount of willpower. In that case I would think that eating stricter is much more difficult than fasting (at least in my personal experience). I think it's easier to just completely deprive yourself of something than to be completely selective about it.

Are you also practicing any sort of meditation or yoga to go along with the fasting? The meditation might help out with the mind because you'll have to really focus on not being hungry.

Are you going to keep track of this in a log?

james

[Mehdi]

Aside from that, I think we should look at the psychological benefits of fasting the most. Fasting needs you to apply mind over body.

That's probably the only reason that I can think of to fast. It sounds like you try to test yourself and your limits fairly regularly which is good but I'm not sure that fasting in and of itself does much to make you mentally tougher if you are already tough mentally. It seems like you're already pretty disciplined and have a decent amount of willpower. In that case I would think that eating stricter is much more difficult than fasting (at least in my personal experience). I think it's easier to just completely deprive yourself of something than to be completely selective about it.

Are you also practicing any sort of meditation or yoga to go along with the fasting? The meditation might help out with the mind because you'll have to really focus on not being hungry.

Are you going to keep track of this in a log?

james

I also think that fasting is easier than eating strict all the time, not that I have trouble eating strict. But nobody does the 100% clean thing, and those 10% binging thing sometimes it gets annoying. Might blog fasting in the future when I get some experience with this. Meanwhile will keep track of the fastes in my training log.

Not doing yoga. I'm doing daily affirmations/visualizations. Don't know if that fits your definition of meditation. Hunger is not a problem as long as I'm busy working.

Read "eat stop eat" today. Some interesting stuff in there. Pilon recommends 2 fastes/week of 24h so I'm going to try that. I'm also going to stretch the faste into a training so I eat on empty stomach. "Predators in the wild only hunt when they are hungry" - Ori Hofmekler.

[Rokku]

Good stuff. I started my own fast at 12pm today, and will go through til at least 12pm tomorrow. I had pangs at 6pm tonight (normal getting-home time), but just drank some water and kept myself busy; now two hours later and my hunger has passed. So much of it is mental...

The trick when breaking one's fast is to eat like you never fasted in the first place (ie, don't eat pizza just because you think you 'earned' it -- something it took a while for me to learn!)

Check Pilon's videos on YouTube at http://youtube.com/user/bradpilon -- lots of great stuff.

[TakeFive]

I agree that it seems difficult to measure someone's level of toxicity or how much detoxification may have taken place after a fast or detox diet.

I don't agree that fasting or detoxing is the antithesis of stronglifts. If you come out stronger after fasting, then it can only benefit strength training. .

I can measure strength changes in actual real world units. Show me a similar way to gauge the effectivness of "detox". You can't. Anecdotal evidence don't cut it.

Hard science may very well not back up fasting/detoxing. In which case, it's entirely up to individuals to try these things out for themselves and investigate the results.

What if instead of lifting weights, I just meditate on how much stronger I am for an hour a day for the next 3 months. Further, there will be no before or after measurements of my strength gains. Now in 3 months time will I be stronger? I may think I'm stronger, but probably have gotten weaker from lack of more productive excercise. But since I won't be measuring anything, there's no way to prove this mediation strengh training wasn't effective.

Yes, fasting can be potentially dangerous. I certainly do no think 'cleansing' is complete quackery.

Something that is potentialy dangerous and probably not backed up by hard science, and you don't think that's quackery? Will you please then give me the criteria for quackery?

Look, I know I'm being a bit of a turd here, but I really hate this wishful thinking because of the fraud and abuse it enables. I know one gal that got so convinced about this cleansing business that she was giving daily enemas to her kids. Later, she got enamored with natural vitamins, stuffing some 8-10 pills a day into her kids. This crap was provided by some "healer" who covinced her it would purge all the toxins from their bodies. I know another gal that was giving ox bile pills to leach out the mercury that supposedly caused her son's mild autism.

Gently, ever so gently I tried to coax these gals into seeing there was no evidence to support what they were doing, when inside I felt they were committing borderline child abuse. Meanwhile, the sleazebags that peddled this crap were harvesting hundreds of dollars from these women.

[mjh]

Look, I know I'm being a bit of a turd here

so don't be. You can engage in the discussion just as much without the attitude and sarcasm. You're also constructing strawman arguments: intermittent or occasional fasting does not equal three months of meditation with no lifting.

Your friends are good examples of people who got sucked into quackery. No one here is advocating anything like what you described. Nor is anyone making extravagant claims about fasting making you stronger, this is simply a discussion about peoples experiences of fasting.

I disagree that anecdotal evidence doesn't cut it. The past-time of weightlifting is built on anecdotal evidence... we do squats and deadlifts because generations of lifters have told us that's what worked for them and those around them. I use a foam roller, not because I've read studies that prove without a doubt it's good for me, but because people I trust have recommended it based on their experience. I think if we were going to abandon all practices that weren't grounded in hard science, we'd have to question a large amount of what we do.