Fasting: a 24-Hour First Try

re: fasting

Update: see my 42-hour fast.

A lot of claims are made that fasting can improve health. Such as 24 hours or even 2-3 days, and/or intermittent fasting of 14-18 hours regularly. I’ve done intermittent fasting many times, and 14 hours is easy, 18 hours a little harder but getting hungry.

Yesterday I tried my first 24-hour fast. Maybe the day was badly chosen as I felt a little tired out of bed, as has been the pattern the past 8 weeks. And I rode my bike for 350 calories in the morning thus putting additional pressure on my body to draw on its energy stores.

I stuck to it for 24 hours, and then found at 8 PM that I could quite easily eat 1500 calories! What did that do for me? Seems kind of broken as a strategy.

While I became fairly hungry, hunger was not a pressing issue. Rather, it was the disruption of the structure of my day—with no meals (and thus no obvious breaks), no picking figs off the tree or tomatoes from the garden, I felt rudderless and a little frustrated too. Especially since it was one of those blah days I’ve been suffering from.

Were there any benefits? Could be, but the whole thing felt like an artificial exercise. If I try it again, it would be better to have a whole day activity such as hiking, to avoid the feeling of an undifferentiated day at home. OTOH, were I not been impaired by my ongoing challenge, normally I can write code 10 hours straight, and that would have made it easy, with something to focus on. But that sort of thing is a wearisome task on such days, like carrying the One Ring to Mount Doom.