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Ok. How did you not eat for 40 days and why? I heard you can go without food for 30 days. My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much bett

Ok. How did you not eat for 40 days and why? I heard you can go without food for 30 days. My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much better with food.

keewee7 4y ago
>My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much better with food. Three days is the longest people should go for if they haven't tried fasting before and don't have experience with gradual refeeding. Any longer than five days and you risk running into the refeeding syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome
- paulgerhardt 4y ago
  There's a lot of people overindexing on the dangers of refeeding. It is important to factor in after a week (honestly more like 15+ days) but also trivially addressed.
- alecst 4y ago
  This is something I hear repeated without hard evidence. Plenty of people do 10+ day fasts and don’t get refeeding syndrome. I have never heard of it happening. While I can’t prove it doesn’t happen to some sensitive people in rare cases, my tendency is to think this is an urban myth. We’re not talking about holocaust victims or hunger strikers.
  - paulgerhardt 4y ago
    If you’ve practiced a normal diet and do a seven day fast you’re going to be fine. If you’re anorexic, fast for 40 days, and don’t supplement with salts (particularly potassium) you’re going to have refeeding syndrome. If one’s worried about it, just get ones blood work done before one starts eating again. It takes about an hour and will show you exactly what you are low on what to supplement to get to baseline. To the extent people are advising one not to do an extended fast without medical supervision - eh - basically the extent of the medical supervision is "let's run a panel every few days and see if anything is dangerously out of whack" - and maybe confine you to a hospital for the duration - but if you're not outside and walking a normal amount and say confined to a room you absolutely will lose a large amount of muscle.
sjtgraham 4y ago
- paulgerhardt 4y ago
  Don't know why are being downvoted. This matches my own experiences. Then again, given people's general response when I bring this up it feels squarely in "What You Can't Say" territory[1]. I no longer bring it up in casual conversation. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
  - Retric 4y ago
    People are downvoting because it’s actually very dangerous. You can probably go 6 months without calories, but many people die on hunger strikes within 2 months because the body can’t magic up salt etc. This is why starving people will eat leaves and dirt.
    - staticassertion 4y ago
      You can go way, way longer than 6 months without calories, depending on your fast stores. Yes, if you fast you should still ensure you're taking vitamins.
      - Retric 4y ago
        It takes an unusually high BMI to last 6 months, I doubt the average HN reader would make it.
  - number6 4y ago
    Food can not legally enter your body if you do not consent. Just say no! Yeah I know this joke. But 40 days is a long time. After 3 days I felt my mouth ake and my breath went sour and I was irritable. But Hunger wasn't even a problem.
    - sjtgraham 4y ago
alar44 4y ago
They likely had broth/tea/vitamins.
paulgerhardt 4y ago
I did it back during Covid. I did it imperfectly (just water initially - don't do that, see below). It looked like a vaccine was two years out, getting covid was inevitable, and the outcomes of getting sick were not good for obese people. At 28 bmi I figured the best thing I could do was lose weight, wear gloves, mask up, not travel, and expose all my mail/packages to UV light. Made sense at the time with the lack of empirical evidence we had then and needed to work from first principles. This was March of 2020. Longer thread on the subject: https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1463309372793057285 https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1463309372793057285 tldr; We store fat to get us through periods of lack of food. Bears do this too. We literally have a "machine" inside us that we evolved at great expense that gets us through periods of no food. Fat storage is an "extra" feature - not the default. Chimps and gorillas don't have it for instance - if you've seen one, they're basically ripped, no real fat storage - probably because we evolved on the savannas (or similar environment with seasonal food scarcity) and they evolved in the jungle where food was always present. Simple (not easy) fat loss guide: drink water, supplement with essential vitamins and minerals that you don't store naturally in fat (i.e. sodium, potassium, magnesium, b vitamins, and vitamin c). As I understand it, most other vitamins are fat soluble and thus...stored in fat. No, you don't lose much muscle (I lost 0.1%) - I believe because the body makes an exogenous amount of HGH when fasting (but not during calorie restriction). Currently of the mindset short term fasting (less than 7 days) is better than calorie restriction for weight loss. Long term fasting (15+ days) has mild negative outcomes but is an appropriate option when the alternative is death by "X" - included co-morbidities caused by long term obesity. Sustained vitamin deficiency over months or years (anorexia) can cause worse outcomes than obesity. A "one and done" fast is not that.
- aeonik 4y ago
  Honestly this is very impressive. You definitely have what it takes to survive an apocalypse. I also think that level of caution is warranted in an unknown pathogenic environment. Was food delivery not an option, or were you worried about that being a vector of transmission?
  - jb1991 4y ago
    I read it as fasting was intentional to reduce BMI.
ed_elliott_asc 4y ago

Ok. How did you not eat for 40 days and why? I heard you can go without food for 30 days. My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much better with food.

keewee7 4y ago

>My longest fast was 3 days and while I liked it, I function much better with food. Three days is the longest people should go for if they haven't tried fasting before and don't have experience with gradual refeeding. Any longer than five days and you risk running into the refeeding syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome

paulgerhardt 4y ago
There's a lot of people overindexing on the dangers of refeeding. It is important to factor in after a week (honestly more like 15+ days) but also trivially addressed.
alecst 4y ago
This is something I hear repeated without hard evidence. Plenty of people do 10+ day fasts and don’t get refeeding syndrome. I have never heard of it happening. While I can’t prove it doesn’t happen to some sensitive people in rare cases, my tendency is to think this is an urban myth. We’re not talking about holocaust victims or hunger strikers.
- paulgerhardt 4y ago
  If you’ve practiced a normal diet and do a seven day fast you’re going to be fine. If you’re anorexic, fast for 40 days, and don’t supplement with salts (particularly potassium) you’re going to have refeeding syndrome. If one’s worried about it, just get ones blood work done before one starts eating again. It takes about an hour and will show you exactly what you are low on what to supplement to get to baseline. To the extent people are advising one not to do an extended fast without medical supervision - eh - basically the extent of the medical supervision is "let's run a panel every few days and see if anything is dangerously out of whack" - and maybe confine you to a hospital for the duration - but if you're not outside and walking a normal amount and say confined to a room you absolutely will lose a large amount of muscle.

sjtgraham 4y ago

paulgerhardt 4y ago
Don't know why are being downvoted. This matches my own experiences. Then again, given people's general response when I bring this up it feels squarely in "What You Can't Say" territory[1]. I no longer bring it up in casual conversation. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- Retric 4y ago
  People are downvoting because it’s actually very dangerous. You can probably go 6 months without calories, but many people die on hunger strikes within 2 months because the body can’t magic up salt etc. This is why starving people will eat leaves and dirt.
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    You can go way, way longer than 6 months without calories, depending on your fast stores. Yes, if you fast you should still ensure you're taking vitamins.
    - Retric 4y ago
      It takes an unusually high BMI to last 6 months, I doubt the average HN reader would make it.
- number6 4y ago
  Food can not legally enter your body if you do not consent. Just say no! Yeah I know this joke. But 40 days is a long time. After 3 days I felt my mouth ake and my breath went sour and I was irritable. But Hunger wasn't even a problem.
  - sjtgraham 4y ago

alar44 4y ago

They likely had broth/tea/vitamins.

paulgerhardt 4y ago

I did it back during Covid. I did it imperfectly (just water initially - don't do that, see below). It looked like a vaccine was two years out, getting covid was inevitable, and the outcomes of getting sick were not good for obese people. At 28 bmi I figured the best thing I could do was lose weight, wear gloves, mask up, not travel, and expose all my mail/packages to UV light. Made sense at the time with the lack of empirical evidence we had then and needed to work from first principles. This was March of 2020. Longer thread on the subject: https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1463309372793057285 https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1463309372793057285 tldr; We store fat to get us through periods of lack of food. Bears do this too. We literally have a "machine" inside us that we evolved at great expense that gets us through periods of no food. Fat storage is an "extra" feature - not the default. Chimps and gorillas don't have it for instance - if you've seen one, they're basically ripped, no real fat storage - probably because we evolved on the savannas (or similar environment with seasonal food scarcity) and they evolved in the jungle where food was always present. Simple (not easy) fat loss guide: drink water, supplement with essential vitamins and minerals that you don't store naturally in fat (i.e. sodium, potassium, magnesium, b vitamins, and vitamin c). As I understand it, most other vitamins are fat soluble and thus...stored in fat. No, you don't lose much muscle (I lost 0.1%) - I believe because the body makes an exogenous amount of HGH when fasting (but not during calorie restriction). Currently of the mindset short term fasting (less than 7 days) is better than calorie restriction for weight loss. Long term fasting (15+ days) has mild negative outcomes but is an appropriate option when the alternative is death by "X" - included co-morbidities caused by long term obesity. Sustained vitamin deficiency over months or years (anorexia) can cause worse outcomes than obesity. A "one and done" fast is not that.

aeonik 4y ago
Honestly this is very impressive. You definitely have what it takes to survive an apocalypse. I also think that level of caution is warranted in an unknown pathogenic environment. Was food delivery not an option, or were you worried about that being a vector of transmission?
- jb1991 4y ago
  I read it as fasting was intentional to reduce BMI.

ed_elliott_asc 4y ago