Fasting: Day 1

This is Day 1 of my 21-day fast in Feb 2011 and probably the most in-depth fasting series you will ever find online. If you’re new to fasting, get the full background here: Fasting Experiment. Access all my articles on fasting: The Fasting Series.

Hi everyone! Today is the end of Day 1 of my fasting experiment and everything is going very well! :D First of all, a quick stats update for those who are interested:

• Starting Weight: 144.4lbs / 65.5kg
• Today’s Weight: 141.1lbs / 64kg (-3.3lbs / -1.5kg)
• Water consumption: 4.3 liters (drank throughout the day)
• Body Temp: 35.9 C / 96.62 F

If you haven’t done so, read my original fasting article to get the full background on fasting and what I’m doing. I’ve significantly updated the article today with new information on fasting and details of my experiment.

Overall Review

Today went extremely well — better than I thought it would be actually! I did not feel any real hunger sensations throughout the day, so it was really easy to go through the day without food. If every day is like today, the 21-day fast is going to be really easy. :D I’m really excited about what’s up next. We’ll see!

Mental Preparation

One thing that really helped was immersing myself in materials on fasting. I watched a lot of videos by experienced fasters on YouTube today. Some of them fasted for 21 days, one fasted for 30 days. It was interesting listening to their daily accounts throughout their fasts. I feel like I have a very strong idea of what to expect over the next 20 days (granted, everyone’s experience will be different), and because of this knowledge I’m prepared to handle whatever comes up.

What’s interesting is that a lot of the initial resistance is mental, because as I’ve mentioned in the original fasting post, unless you’re emaciated/thin or have some severe illness, your body has a lot of fat reserves (complete with the nutrients, vitamins, and minerals) that can last you at least 40 days without food. When your body switches from ketosis (burning from fat reserves) to burning from muscles/fat, it’ll alert you, where you will switch from not having any thoughts of eating to a sudden intense urge for food. This isn’t the feeling we’ve been conditioned to associate with hunger — it isn’t the emptiness of our stomach, stomach growls, or thinking that you need to eat. Real hunger is felt from the throat (not your stomach or your head). Suffice to say most of us will never experience this in our food-heavy culture today, where we eat based on external factors.

Generally I stayed away from seeing/hearing about food today, and also kept out of the kitchen when my mom was cooking in the evening. I think that really helps. If you’re fasting, you might find it helpful to keep yourself away from anything that triggers the thought of eating.

Detox – Waiting for it to happen

At this point it’s still Day 1, so my body is probably still burning glucose and possibly glycogen (in liver and muscles) for energy. It’s only in Days 4-5 when ketosis kicks in, and this is supposedly the hard part because that’s when the detox symptoms will start surfacing (removal of toxins from the fat cells). We’ll see how it goes. I’m listening to my body throughout the whole process and will let it guide me on what to do / what not to do.

One way to tell when you’re detoxing is to see the color of your tongue. If it’s white, that means your body is trying to purge out toxins in your body. When one enters ketosis, the white coating on the tongue will get thicker and thicker as the body purges out more and more toxins. At one point when the purging is almost done, the tongue will become clear (like pink). In one fasting video I saw, the person mentioned that the coating on tongue switched from really thick and white to suddenly clearing up (at this point she had fasted for a while).

Body Temperature

My body temp is 35.9 C. I didn’t take my temperature yesterday before I started, though my temperature hovered around 36.5-37.0 C before I think? Normal body temperature ranges from 33.2–38.2 °C, so it’s well within the range. I think my body temperature is slightly lower now since my body isn’t actively digesting food and I’ve been largely sedentary in the day.

Weight Loss

My weight at the end of the day is 64kg, so that’s a 1.5kg drop from yesterday (65.5kg). I know some of you are probably interested in fasting for weight loss purposes, so I’m going to track my weight throughout this journey too.

Of course, it’s important that you totally change your relationship with food and switch to a 100% healthy diet after your fast. Otherwise, whatever weight you lose during the fast will simply be regained after that.

Water Consumption

In total, I drank 4.3 liters of water today, which might seem a lot but it really feels normal to me. I’m not intentionally stuffing myself with water or anything like that. Once again, I’m just listening to my body. Whenever my lips/mouth feels dry, I’ll take a sip from my mug. To make things easy I’ve placed two mugs and one water bottle on my desk (400ml capacity each), so it makes drinking water easy. ^_^*

It’s important to keep yourself hydrated throughout the process (even if you’re not fasting, as I mentioned in the first tip of my healthy living post) as water helps your body remove toxins.

Fitness

As I had mentioned in my original post, I’m not intending to exercise during this period. At most I’ll go for light strolls, that’s it. Since the body gets glycogen from muscles during the third stage (before ketosis), it doesn’t make sense to build muscles during this period (just to get them burned away later). Exercising will also exhaust yourself and prevent your body from healing properly during this time.

Other Preparation

I’ve had quite a lot of time to plan for my fast today, even right down to how I’m going to break my fast at the end. I’ve also created an excel file with my daily measurements. At the end of the fast, I’ll be able to do a graph plot (mainly of my weight) so all of you can see the fluctuations/changes throughout the 21 days.

Otherwise, there’s really nothing else to report. I’ve been getting some work done, prepared for my next coaching session, and am generally enjoying the second day of CNY. *dance* Overall I’m just taking things easy and seeing how things go along.

Stay tuned for tomorrow

That’s about it from me for now! Stay tuned for Day 2’s update tomorrow. Many hugs to all of you!

Update: Day 2 is up!

This is Day 1 of my 21-day fast in Feb 2011 and probably the most in-depth fasting series you will ever find online. If you’re new to fasting, get the full background here: Fasting Experiment. Access all my articles on fasting: The Fasting Series.