A 3-Day 80-Hour Water Fast: After 10 Hours
Well, 10 hours was easy - I was asleep! But I usually have a decent breakfast, so wandering around without the aroma of coffee and burnt toast feels like the shop hasn't opened yet. Went back to bed. I wonder if I can sleep through the 80 hours.
Have found some interesting videos, so will share them.
The Mystery of Fast-5 and D.I.E.T.: Bert Herring, MD at TEDxRiversideAvondale
Bert Herring made a sobering discovery: our so-called normal diet is not natural at all but the product of corporate interests. Eat More.
Fast-5 is very simple: eat all your daily food within a 5-hour period. So, you can have breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner, depending on your metabolism and lifestyle.
This is what Buddhist monks do (without having read the book), they have breakfast and lunch and are not allowed to eat from midday till the following sunrise.
I'm not sure why Herring picked a 5-hour period (and not 6, for example) as it leaves 19 hours for ketogenesis to start, which is usually 10-12 hours after eating. Guess you'll have to read his book.
Why fasting bolsters brain power: Mark Mattson at TEDxJohnsHopkinsUniversity
Funnily, Mattson also criticizes both the food and pharmaceutical industries for promoting the standard diet without researching its effects on health.
"If you're hungry, you don't want the brain to shut down." says Mattson. Indeed, both fasting and exercise can improve mood and cognition.
My own experience tends to be the other way round, so that if I am thinking hard about something and engrossed in my research then I may skip a meal. I hadn't really considered that this may feed into a virtuous loop whereby the lack of food itself then raised cognitive functions.
This is not starving to death! This is about using our biological cycles to enhance our life and abilities. We seem to live in an age where we have more knowledge than ever before and yet there are forces trying (rather successfully) to make us dumber and sicker than we should be.
The messages we are sent via the magic of propaganda are "Eat More!", "Eat Less!", "Eat Different!", so long as you keep eating. Just something to think about.
I'll do a follow-up "After 20 Hours".
Previous articles on fasting:
Starting a Three-Day Fast: Some Insights From Stem Cell Research
Thank you for the videos. I'm going to suggest them to my husband too.
Thanks, I'll share some more. I do watch them first, just in case they are dull :-)
Also, if you find anything interesting, do feel free to share.
I guess gamers are practicing that unwittingly as well!
Superfoods are an example. They drive products, they drive blogs with new recipes. But common and cheap foods like oats or spinach are quite the superfood when you pit them against more modern stuff like kale or avocado. See for instance this.
Doing a fast that lasts for 12 hours is quite easy (considering you're asleep for most of them), and so probably something everyone should be doing. 5-hour eating binges and such, on the other hand...it would be difficult to cram all them calories in that short a space. But then again, it could be easy once you get used to it, it would free up the rest of your time to do your work.
Regarding breakfast being the most important meal of the day (that the speaker criticizes in the first TED vid): I also find it the easiest meal to skip! Maybe it has to do with being acclimated to 'fasting' during sleep.
Agree, and so many staples are now GMO products - recently found even in certified organic produce (and that's another long story about the hijacking of the organic industry). My daughter loves her oats porridge! We eat fairly well, hence it wasn't a fasting diet as such (although seem to have lost about 4kg) but rather an attempted immune hack.