5 Day Water Fast, Is It Crazy?

Two weeks ago I completed a 5 day water only fast. After doing so I realized that I had posted about what I was doing, but never explained the reasoning behind the fast or what convinced me to do such a “crazy thing”. I use the quotes, but after I explain my reasoning the quotes and words will no longer be useful. So, this is an attempt to quickly, yet thoroughly explain the benefits of days without food.

This is my third attempt at writing this article and keeping it to the point without going off on a tangent. I am realizing that in order to explain my thoughts thoroughly on diet and exercise there will have to be more of these posts. For those of you that know me well this is not surprising to you at all.

As a general rule in my practice, and in my life, I find it hard to give advice on a subject or supplement in which I am ignorant to. With that being said, I like to use myself as a guinea pig to decide what is going to give me the best results. This makes it more easily transferable to my clients and friends. I spend a great deal of my time researching diets and exercise to find what will yield the best results for myself, as well as in the lab, so that I can help people with the most up to date research out there. My wife can attest to this as I was reading her research from Pub Med last night in bed, she was not as enthused as I was. Apparently, the effect of methylene blue in the preservation of neuronal tissue in TBI isn’t as mood setting for her as it is for me.

My research has done little for my marriage, but it has led me to grow a large group of highly intelligent people in which I pull my information from. They are all highly educated people that run research programs at major universities and are on the same quest I am on, which is to create a healthier longer life span for humans, specifically “health span”.

For those of you that know me well, you know that I am constantly manipulating my diet in some capacity. I have tried or researched almost every fad diet out there and will soon have some type of article about all of them if people are interested. I am not a food writer nor am I a journalist, I am writing this due to the large amount of questions I am getting as to why I would want to not eat for 5 days. It has occurred to me that most people are not obsessed with the research part as I am, nor do they have the time to put in the research and I am becoming quite tired of the false information that is circulating on social media as being “healthy advice”.

I’m sure by now that people have become accustomed to hearing “Keto”. This is a giant buzz word floating around out there right now and this is exactly where my fascination with fasting would start. The Ketogenic diet has gained recognition over the last several years and has gained a lot of attention from the scientific community as well. Depending on where you are getting your information there are many misconceptions about the Ketogenic diet out there. While this post is not about the ketogenic diet, I will go into a little bit of detail about it to better explain my reasoning for fasting.

The ketogenic diet is basically the removal of any substance that will create a glucose spike resulting in an insulin spike. The idea is to create a higher blood ketone level which will cause one to stay in a ketogenic state burning ketones as fuel rather than glucose. Most tissues in the body can burn ketones as fuel and your body can keep blood glucose levels lower, which decreases the amount of insulin that is dumped into the blood stream. Ketones are created by the breaking down of body fat into acetyl CoA which is then entered into the Citric Acid cycle in the mitochondria which in turn is used to make ATP or fuel for our bodies. Your body can only do this when it is either in a starved state or in the case of low amounts of carbohydrates i.e. ketogenic diet.

Most people associate the Keto diet with weight loss and yes going into ketogenesis will facilitate weight loss as I just quickly explained above, but the benefits of being in a ketogenic state are far more in depth than fat loss. Many entrepreneurs have jumped on the fat loss portion of this diet to make a quick buck as it will yield quick results of losing weight, what they also highlight is that you can eat all of the bacon and red meat you want. This led me to realize that some people were promoting high amounts of protein, which is not conducive to keeping a high ketone concentration. The results they were getting were more from the reduction of refined sugar and simple carbohydrates than from high amounts of protein and fat. Actually, protein incites an insulin response and actually increases blood glucose levels as protein is converted to glucose in the liver, so many of the results of the weight loss from ketosis were directly from the reduction of sugar and not the increase in protein. This would mean that once you had lost the immediate weight, if you continued to eat high amounts of protein and fat you would still plateau, strictly due to the fact that people were consuming too high of levels of protein. Be careful who you take diet advice from, this is just one example I can give to people giving advice on weight loss that will yield results, but is not always what is best for us for the long term.

I saw the benefits of ketosis, they were there in the literature and in results, but just like every other fad diet created it would be very hard to sustain for long periods of time. That is why fad diets fail, they are not sustainable. Just to be clear I do eat high amounts of saturated fats, but not from animal sources or dairy. There is too much research outlining the detrimental effects of fat from animals. Also, please note that I am not a vegetarian and do enjoy steak and red meat like everyone else, I just enjoy it in moderation.

All of this digging and research led me to look more into the other way of obtaining high levels of ketones, fasting. After researching fasting I realized I could get deeper into ketosis by not eating or ingesting anything, even fat would increase blood glucose levels taking you farther away from the benefits of ketosis every time you ate it. My entire life everyone had told me you need to eat breakfast every day and never go longer than a few hours without eating. They also claimed that you could “boost metabolism” if you ate every 2-3 hours. You always need to be eating. This is how you gain muscle! It makes sense you have to be eating to gain lean muscle mass and be healthy right? I mean after all this is what body builders do, they have to be healthy, right? I used to fall into this way of thinking and would actually give out this advice (I feel disgusted with myself right now). There is actually no scientific evidence to my knowledge that has proven that any of this is true. If you find any please present it.

Lets be clear, you can and will gain muscle if you eat every 2-3 hours and if it is clean healthy foods you will stay lean, I am not arguing against that, but at my age my goal is not to gain size of any type, but rather a longer health span, so eating to gain is not going to be beneficial at all to increasing my health span. Eating every 2-3 hours does not increase metabolism or at least has not been proven by science. I know some dietitian will provide some type of case study and that’s great, but for purposes of longevity and health span it is irrelevant.

So now I know l can get deeper into ketosis and get all of its benefits without eating. This started to become very interesting to me and many of the researchers I followed were becoming bigger proponents of this as well, which led me to more people that had been studying fasting for many years. Fasting has been around for the length of time that humans have roamed the earth. The early hunters and gatherers would routinely go weeks without food or between meals. How could they do this? Was the human body designed or accustomed to doing this? Well the evidence is showing it was. We can survive for long periods of time while routinely fasting. Survival is one thing, but is it healthy? Once again common knowledge I have been around says we need to eat 3 square daily, fasting couldn’t be healthy. Turns out that fasting is incredibly healthy and has actually been written about for centuries. All major religions around the world promote periods of fasting. Ben Franklin and many of the Greek philosophers wrote about the benefits of fasting, so how did this once well-known health benefit become lost in translation so to speak? Could it be the introduction of fast food and the major industry that has become food production? You mean people would falsify health benefits to make money? Ok we will stop at this rabbit trail, but you can see where I am going with this.

So, as you can see, I question everything that I see or read now, especially with the rapid rate of false content on social media. The fasting thing did not so quickly resonate, given I was indoctrinated with food like everyone else, but the benefits of ketosis were too apparent to not read further. Digging deeper into the fasting thing led me to discover the results of decreasing insulin resistance, the ability to reverse the effects of Type II diabetes, the decrease in blood lipid levels, the reduction in heart disease, reducing the amounts of free radicals in the body, etc. These were all pretty basic results that could be affected with regular diets, but the few that caught my attention were the evidence of longevity, cell autophagy, DNA repair, stem cell activation, increased immune function, decreasing incidence and reversing effects of autoimmune diseases, and a possible decrease in AD.

The introduction of these possibilities started getting my gears turning. In the recent year I realized that I was on a quest for longevity. Mentally I was not describing it as longevity in the years past, but rather a “healthy lifestyle”. Healthy Lifestyle to me recently has become a buzz word in my head and l have since moved on from those terms and replaced them with longevity and health span. The introduction of fasting has now deepened my interest in health span, especially if we can help control or manipulate the effects of some of these “end of life” or chronic diseases, and this is where the introduction of fasting became a part of my lifestyle or quest to increase health span.

When I first introduced that I would be doing a 5 day water fast I was called crazy. People would say, “won’t you hurt your metabolism”, or “why are you trying to lose weight”? My answers were, “well, I may be crazy”, “no” and “I’m not trying to lose weight”. This is where I want to make a distinction that I am not ever trying to lose weight and that diets mostly fail because of the negative connotation we associate them with, which is doing something we don’t like and being unhappy doing them. I create and manipulate my diet so that I am happier and feel better while helping to produce healthy results that will last my entire lifetime. Fasting is now just a small part of what I will continue to do for the rest of my life to promote healing on a cellular level.

My reason for doing the fast originally was to see how well my body would react to that length of time and to find the sweet spot for my body and where I feel I function the best. I have been doing intermittent fasting for over a year now and usually stick to the schedule of 16:8, which has yielded great results for me both physically and mentally. I knew that intermittent fasting gave me great results, but I was also reading about cell autophagy and the area in which this would become optimal. Cell Autophagy is a natural bodily process that involves the removal of old or damaged cells or organelles within the cells of the body, creating cell turnover. Its almost like doing an engine overhaul. When you take yourself into a fasted state your body goes into a defense and a “self preservation” mode. Your normal cells will put up defense mechanisms leaving the old cells to be destroyed and this creates cell turnover. Not only does this happen to old or damaged cells, but can also happen to cancerous cells that are in your body. Cancer cells cannot survive in a non-sugar environment, so the farther you can take yourself into ketosis or into a starved state, and the lower you can get your blood sugar levels the more damage your immune cells can do to the cancerous cells. This is also being studied by the top cancer researchers around the world. Many of them are actually starting to promote periods of fasting before the introduction of chemo therapy rendering the chemo more effective against the cancer cells and less damaging to the normal cells of the body, due to the protective mechanisms elicited by our normal cells during the fast. With the cleaning out of the bad or damaged cells of the body due to the process of cell autophagy, we must replenish our normal and immune cells which causes an influx of stem cell activation particularly for our immune system in the body. What this means is that we are causing the promotion of new immune cells.

The most important reason as to why I completed the fast was the evidence that periods of caloric restriction can have on the lifespan of organisms ranging from yeast to mice. Restricting calories for longer periods has led to an increase in life span of all organisms that have had the restriction applied to them. Many of the reasons listed above all contribute to this increase in lifespan, as well as many other contributing factors but it is a great place to start to increase the health span of humans.

People who have ever been in a deep state of ketosis will know that you get a strange sense of clarity and actually get an energy that is not reproducible even with large amounts of caffeine and there is not the following crash. This is due to the adrenaline response that is elicited when your body kicks over into the burning of your own body fat. Think about this for a second, if we lived 1,000 years ago and we had to hunt for food especially in the winter, we may go days without eating, what good would it do for us to get weak and tired if we haven’t eaten? Your body’s natural response is to kick over into ketosis with an adrenaline spike to make us capable of hunting for food. Its hard to go on a quest or hunt for food if you have no energy. This is why we get an energy spike or adrenaline spike when we switch over into ketosis.

The final and most important reason for me to fast was a mental and hunger control issue. I knew through my research that I wouldn’t die, I knew I wasn’t going to pass out, I wouldn’t become hypoglycemic (another term people use that they may not fully understand), and I wasn’t going to lose muscle mass. The only thing I was worried about was dehydration and I took steps to prevent this as I will explain later. I knew that before I started dabbling in intermittent fasting that I would get hungry about 2 hours after meals. This hunger was usually due to a slight decrease in blood glucose because I likely had eaten some type of carbohydrate, which caused an insulin spike which then initiated a hunger signal and some fatigue which everyone can attest to. My body signals were telling me I was hungry, but that was only because I had programmed it to tell me that by always eating. I wasn’t truly hungry and I didn’t really need to eat, it was a signal that I had developed that was tricking me into hunger. This is how we can become very obese very quickly especially in the U.S. When I started intermittent fasting my hunger pangs went away, especially in the morning, but I was still programmed to eat at about 2pm. After a few weeks of changing up my fasting schedule the hunger urges began to change and become less prevalent. All of this reassured me that I could definitely go 5 days. Besides, if you accomplish not eating for 5 days you can accomplish many things in life. Now I know that if I haven’t eaten in a few hours that I have no reason to eat that I am not truly hungry. It also reinforced the fact that if I am out somewhere and there is nothing for me to eat but junk food, I do not have to eat it just to satisfy eating. I will not starve and can make a healthier choice later.

As I started telling people I was met with great resistance and people claiming that they couldn’t do it. My mindset never wavered and I was locked on my goal. If someone said they couldn’t do it, then they probably couldn’t even though I knew deep down they could, they simply had no desire to. This in many ways drove me to want to do it more. Yes, I can do something someone else can’t and that made my determination grow even more. Before I started, I was already in the mindset that I couldn’t fail and that I wouldn’t and that made going the 5 days incredibly easy for me.

One of the most common questions I get is why 5 days? Like I mentioned earlier, your body will store up to 36 hours of glucose. After about 36 hours you will go into ketosis, depending on if you are working out and what physical activity you do. I recommend if you are trying to find your sweet spot or when you get into ketosis you measure your blood ketone levels. I knew I wouldn’t get into ketosis until about day 3, so I wanted to get full effects of cell autophagy and my body running on my own body fat so I sat the goal of 5 days. Many other people that do this regularly recommend 5 days as well. I knew 3 would be easy and they say the mental clarity and true euphoria of fasting doesn’t hit until days 4 and 5 so it was an easy decision for me.

After day 3 the fast did become much easier. Hunger pangs stopped hitting as hard and less often. I could be around food and it didn’t bother me. I didn’t have too many cravings and the cravings I would get were actually healthier choices. I honestly never got any cravings for sweets or refined sugars. One of the most surprising and cool outcomes was my appreciation for food and the preparation of it. It may have had something to do with half a season of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain on day 4, or just the fact that I didn’t eat for 5 days, but the appreciation of cooking hit me hard. This is one benefit my wife may have gotten from my fast.

I did not get cranky and I was not low energy. Day 2 was the hardest day as far as not feeling great or energized, but days 3-5 were a breeze and I felt great. The cranky feeling people get is more of a mental problem of them thinking they should be “hangry” than actually being angry and hungry. We have commercialized hangry so much that we actually think that it is a real feeling, even though there is no evidence to support this. Thank you Mars Company.

I did consume water during the fast and one beef bullion cube in the evenings to get some sodium content, which helped me to hold onto water to prevent dehydration. I also took 600mg of magnesium nightly which helped with water retention, but this is something I take regularly. I also took vitamin D another supplement I consume daily. This was all that I consumed during the fast, along with large amounts of water. No, I did not use any flavoring in my water.

Another misconception about fasting is that you should not exercise while fasting. This is a false assumption. I was able to sustain my same workout regimen which is composed of strength training and HIIT training in functional movement exercises. My workouts felt great and had no issues with feeling weak or having ineffective workouts. I was energized and was never hungry while training. Physical training is a very large part of my life and I have done fasted workouts in the past with great results. Training in the mornings while fasting helped keep my mood upbeat and my energy high throughout the day. I did not notice any strength differences while fasting.

This article was written to describe one person’s research and experience. This is not a medical recommendation for anyone. If you are a diabetic or suffer from any cancer or autoimmune diseases consult your physician before attempting any type of fasting.