fast

Today marks the second day of a 72-hour fast. I'll eat on Friday (carnivore), fast over the weekend, and eat again on Monday. Lather, rinse, repeat until my doctor's appointment on December 16. I alternate between finding this a terrible experience and not caring at all. I've done longer fasts before: in high school—probably to impress a girl—I once fasted a whole week. By the end of that fast, I was weak and tired, but not hungry. More recently, a couple years ago, I fasted for five days, and that almost killed me, so I now know not to do that.

The experts I watch do encourage fasting (usually 24-72 hours), and most of them pooh-pooh the notion of a "starvation mode" that kicks in if your body is deprived of food. What's miscalled "starvation mode"—which sounds like something that turns on and off in a binary way—is metabolic adaptability, which actually occurs along a spectrum. Your body's metabolism can indeed slow down to keep you alive longer, but there are benefits to fasting that happen along the way, the major benefit being autophagy, in which the body self-eats (auto + phagy), cleaning out dead cells and other dross while you're giving it a break from constantly processing food. And that's the other benefit of fasting: when you're not taking in nutrients, you're not provoking any insulin or other hormonal spikes.

Full disclosure, though: I'm not doing a true fast. Generally speaking, the "purest" fast is a water fast. There is a such thing as "dry fasting," but that can easily become deadly if done wrong. Water fasting is the norm for most people who go this route. My current fast isn't "true" because I'm allowing myself to drink coffee with an artificial sweetener (Splenda) and a bit of heavy cream. Heavy cream is quite keto because it's fatty and very low-carb, but cream does contain calories, so I'd guess I'm consuming a couple hundred calories a day if I have, say, two cups of coffee. Sorry, but I generally can't stand coffee unless I sweeten it up and add cream. Straight black coffee, like unsweetened tea, isn't supposed to break your fast, but adding cream (and, arguably, sweetener) does break the fast. That said, I'm taking in no other nutrients for the day, so this is a sort-of fast. Think of it as extreme caloric restriction.

So that's the program for now. I'm doing this partly to make up for a very bad week last week: I cheated as I was prepping the Thanksgiving meal, and Thanksgiving Day itself was a major disaster, diet-wise. I then attacked the leftovers over the next couple of days (I came into the office over the weekend and helped myself to my own cooking), so one cheat day became several, and my conscience finally screamed that it was time to stop the madness. So here we are. I'm also having to make up for not doing stair work last week except for Tuesday. I did a single staircase last night; I'll do two staircases tomorrow night, and I'll finally do 2.5 staircases over the weekend. I might also try for a super-long walk over the weekend, and I'll be curious to see whether my numbers have stabilized since Thanksgiving. (Today's BP reading was a bit lower than it has been over the past two weeks, so that's something.)

More later. And don't worry. I'm not overdoing anything.