My 40 Hour Fast Experiment

You might be asking yourself, "why?"

You might be also wondering "whats the point?"

And finally you're thinking.......

Before I start a word of caution. Just because I'm sharing my experience of fasting does not mean this is for you. This doesn't mean that you should go on Google and start researching how to fast and implement it in your daily life.

Fasting is a strict way of eating, and majority people will struggle with it. Let's put it this way, eating 5 meals a day with vegetables at every single meal, no skipped meals, protein at every meal, and only 3 cheat meals in the week is equivalent to playing recreational hockey with friends. Fasting protocols on the other hand, is like playing in the NHL. Don't be stupid and go play with NHL players when you don't know how to skate in the first place.....

Now that my disclaimer is out of the way, please read below.

If you have known me for a couple years, you probably know that I've been a huge advocate of Intermittent Fasting. There are many protocols, but the one I follow is a 16/8 schedule. Fast for 16 hours and then have a window of 8 hours to eat. Next week I will go into detail to why I do it, and how it's done. But for now I want to let you all know my experience with fasting for such a long period of time.

Let us begin with why I did this in the first place. Well for one, I love to experiment. I've been always interested in fasting and since 4 years ago when I started as a trial, I never stopped. I've seen and read people fasting for longer periods of 24 hours, so I finally decided to give it a go.

The science behind this method is fat loss, obviously. If you remember back when I wrote a couple blogs about certain hormones, this is where it all comes together. 

Dieting long term causes leptin to drop, which slows down your fat loss. The more active leptin is, the more fat you will burn. Having cheat days causes your leptin hormone to turn on and work twice as hard to burn all those excess calories, which in turn overall makes you leaner in the bigger picture. Starting to follow me now?

By having an "over feed"  one day during the week is more beneficial than have small cheat snacks throughout the week, as those small snacks can't trigger leptin as much as a full day cheat.

Following this I am able to prevent any fat gain from eating like a mad man, and any stagnated fat loss, which allows a hormonal benefit from the fast to proceed uninterrupted. 

My experiment? Saturday was gloves off for junk. Sunday fast for full 24 hours, then Monday at 11am (still following my 16/8 protocol) have my first regular meal in the day. Total 40 hours, no food.

Saturday 

Meal 1: Half of a spinach dip party tray, nachos with beef, cheese, guac, sour cream, salsa, left over halloween candy and to wash it all down a couple mimosas.

Meal 2: Burger with Caesar salad, more spinach dip and bread, and more halloween candy.

Sunday

Water, black coffee, and green tea throughout the whole day

Monday Morning

Water, black coffee

11am: First meal regular meal.

How did I feel? Sunday night I had a light headache and mild hunger, but I was impressed I wasn't dying on the floor in pain. I think the headache was due to dehydration. Even though I drank around 5 litres of water, I still felt like I could drink more. This is probably due to the lack of water from my food. Since I eat a lot of vegetables on a daily basis, and vegetables contain a lot of water, this makes sense.

On Monday morning I felt normal, nothing out of the ordinary, I actually felt better than I did on Sunday.

What do you think about fasting? Let me know!