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> but you likely have enough of it for a few days (likely close to a month) before your body needs to break down muscle and convert it to carbs for fuel (gluconeogensis).

That's not actually true, from my understanding. The body burns more fat than muscle, but muscle will still be burned if you are at a caloric deficit. I'd need to do some research to provide you with a good citation but this is something I've read about on multiple occasions while researching the keto diet (which I'm on currently).

Are you sure its muscle, and not a loss of LBM due to water/glycogen?

Ray Cronies, the author of hypothermics.com , did 24 day fast while properly measuring what body uses for fuel. It turned out that it was only fat with no any significant muscle loss. This matches from what I read experience of people doing even longer fasts for medical reasons. The moment when body runs out of fat reserves happens after about 40-60 days of fasting when one starts to feel very strong or even uncontrollable hunger.

You've fasted for a month once or twice, do I read that right? Did you do any kind of write-up about it, a blog, anything? Very interested in your experiences.

Not OP, but FYI people do this all the time on /r/fasting on reddit.

You may be interested in this case study of a man who underwent a 382-day medically supervised water fast. He lost 276 lb (from 456 to 180 lb).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/

Indeed - and another handful of week-to-three fasts.

No, I did not do any write-up. /r/fasting and /r/keto will probably satisfy your curiosity, but I will mention the following which are not entirely common (or not commonly described):

. my B12 normalized from "very low, needs supplements monthly" which it had been in for 6-7 years at that point, to "slightly above normal without any supplement", and is still there some 20 years later.

. libido went away for the fast, but came back later

. felt perfect, exercised, etc, but friend observed that I was moving much more economically - e.g. that I was lifting my feet only about 2mm above ground while walking. I didn't notice that until he did.

> I stop when I start feeling hungry - usually after a week or so, but once or twice after a month.

So first 5 days of your fast you don't feel hungry at all?

What was the reason you started to fast? I just wonder if there is any benefit of it for someone who eats healthy food, has no extra weight and good energy levels? It seems like most of these researchers are focused on already sick people and don't provide any data on healthy individuals, unless I am missing something, I don't see a reason to "reset" my immune system since it seems to be working fine.

Most people feel worst around day 2/3 when transitioning from glycogen to ketosis, after that you feel great.

Why should you fast if you eat healthy and have no extra weight? Two reasons:

1) What most people think is healthy is killing them. Even if someone eats paleo or keto, which are much closer to our ideal diet than anything else, they will still do things like eat a corn-fed steak. Corn-fed meat and fish is low in omega-3 and high in omega-6 and both of these things are very bad for you (omega-3 deficiency is the root dietary cause of depression as just one example). Yet, people think "I'm eating healthy".

2) Metabolically challenged cells are a definition of cancer cells. When doctors think your cancer may be metastatic they give you a PET scan. A PET scan measures the emission of positrons out of some radioactive glucose you're given. The glucose is disproportionately taken up by cancer cells for a couple of reasons, one is that they can't process ketones. Then they show you cool pictures of where the positron-emitting glucose is in your body, which is where the tumors are. If you fast, your glucose is low and those cells don't survive since there is no glucose. See 'Cancer as a Metabolic Disease' by Seyfried.

[warning: The above is not medical orthodoxy, but then medical orthodoxy hasn't made any progress on cancer in ~60 years]

Thanks for the answer. In the first reason to fast you are saying that people don't get omega 3 from corn fed steak. But when you fast you don't get that either? How is that a reason to fast then? I just feel like most people going into fasting because they have some health issue and try to fix it by doing fasting (I am not saying it does not work for them), I am trying to find someone who did not feel any problems and started fasting out of curiosity and see how it benefited them.

It's like having a bucket of water, when you eat it gets filled , then your body uses some of the water for energy. If you don't overeat the level of water in the bucket is always at the same, when you consistently overeat it overflows. When you fast - you can use the excess water you stored while overeating, it might be ok first couple years, but as since you are now eating less and your body uses water from a bucket more then you add to it - could it be that you will end up with an empty bucket at one point?

Your mental model of eating-as-a-bucket is broken, but you're not to be blamed since everyone thinks that and it's the official advice from most (all?) governments.

The calories-in-calories-out (CICO) model is true in a thermodynamics sense but it's like saying that Bill Gates got rich because he followed the money-in-money-out system. It doesn't really help us explain anything about Bill Gates. Or another, more damning, problem is this: We say a child gets taller because of hormones but they get fat because of calories. If you think about it for a while you'll figure out something is deeply wrong with the model.

This is a deep subject with a lot to say but I'd start with 'Why We Get Fat' by Gary Taubes. Then read his other books, then read Dr Fung.

But to answer you first point directly: What I'm saying is that people thinking they are eating healthy and actually eating healthy are two different things. Usually they think they are but aren't in reality, and fasting can help in a long list of ways detailed in Dr. Fungs book on fasting (and many other places too, his is just a good book). You can also find people on /r/fasting on reddit with a lot more detail.

Interesting. I'd love to read some more about keto -- could you recommend any good sources?

Seconded!

/r/keto on reddit is a great community to start from. They have a FAQ and so on.

For books, I'd actually start with The Obesity Code by Dr. Fung. It's not a keto book but it's very close, and you'll figure out that keto is metabolically very similar to fasting.

> (...) medical orthodoxy hasn't made any progress on cancer in ~60 years

Are you crazy or am I reading you wrong? You are saying you are as likely to survive cancer in 2017 as you were in the fifties? (from a medical perspective)

'60s but yes. The last innovation was the invention of chemotherapy, which I won't tell you about since it's not very pleasant but you can find the whole thing in 'Tripping Over The Truth' by Travis Christofferson.

If you look around your an find lots of graphs like this:

http://medicine-opera.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/cancer-...

which show that rates haven't really changed since 1930, give or take.

The variance you see in the graph is things like lots more people smoking then not smoking any more, the prevention methodology of either finding cancer early or preventing high-risk people (e.g. mastectomies). But the actual chance of death hasn't really changed.

Compare and contrast to things like surviving anything else (heart attack, stroke and so on) and it's night-and-day.

> The last innovation was the invention of chemotherapy.

Um.. immune therapies, targeted genetic therapies, TIL therapies... all kind of a big deal.

Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about.

And rates say nothing about efficacy / quality of treatment. (And even when new treatments are not more effective, often the side effects are much milder (to non-existent): getting an extra three years sick and in pain, vs getting them as your normal self is a huge difference)

Edit: what I mean by that is that rates of incidence say nothing about how effective the treatments are. It can both be true that rates are going up (say, due to air pollution) and that treatments are more effective.

---

Reply to comment below: again, you are wrong. Jesus, stop. One example: Ipilimumab and PD-1 inhibitors have a ~20% effectiveness rate against melanoma, a cancer that was considered a sure death sentence just 15 years ago. Some patients have not had any recurrence in a decade, they seem cured, which was unheard of before.

And targeted drugs like dabrafenib buy most patients an extra 6-18 months, almost side effect free. With more of these coming out, it seems like soon it'll be possible to cycle patients even longer (some combos already are known to extend their effect).

This doesn't qualify as "major"? The ability to reprogram our immune system to kill cancer cells, or to reprogram pathways in faulty cells?

I'm sorry I should have said the last _major_ innovation that made any difference.

All the things you mention are innovations, they just haven't really changed average mortality numbers, which is what I care about.

Edit: the parent post changed their argument to being about 'efficacy' or quality of care. Personally, I prefer a cure to a high-quality and effective 3 months in hospital then death. Thus I focus on the mortality statistics.

Edit again: quote:

> This doesn't qualify as "major"? The ability to reprogram our immune system to kill cancer cells, or to reprogram pathways in faulty cells?

I'd define major as some large change to average mortality from cancer. The same way heart attacks are now vastly more survivable, or we don't get them in the first place. For example, in another comment, someone linked to the NIH's numbers

https://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/viewfactsheet.aspx?csid...

They show from 1975 to 2007 incidence of cancer going from 400 per 100k to 461 (e.g. up). I'd define a major improvement as that going to 200 or 100 per 100k people (e.g. down). The 5-year survivability has gone up for the same reason incidence went up, early detection.

Yes, there are specific therapies that improve things 20% here or there for certain very targeted groups. I hope I am in one of those groups if I ever get cancer, but again the averages haven't changed much at all, especially when compared to other chronic disease.

Are you sure that graph shows what you're saying? Say overall lifespans increase, and several other causes of death decline (infectious diseases, preventable accidents), and most cancers hit people who are older. Then you'd have more people getting cancer, which means that stable death rates imply that people are surviving longer while they have cancer.

Am I confused?

I think that's a fair interpretation but that we can make others. It was just the nicest looking of the graphs I found on google images for 'cancer mortality over time' or some query like that.

The central point I'm trying to make, which was a surprise to me as much as others, is that there hasn't been some dramatic decline in cancer like I expected. If you look at graphs for other things we see amazing gains in prevention and treatment that don't particularly occur in cancer. To pick one at random, the pancreatic cancer line on the graph above is basically flat.

And so, if it isn't changing a whole lot, why is that? The standard theory is that cancer is really complicated and it's DNA. The alternative theory is that it's the mitochondria(l DNA).

I'm not in some crusade against medicine, it just seems to make more sense to me and explains the lack of progress.

As Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong. But then I also worry about the story of the doctor who invented washing hands between procedures, and the story of the doctor who discovered the cause of stomach ulcers.

> To pick one at random, the pancreatic cancer line on the graph above is basically flat.

Pancreatic cancer mortality is heavily correlated with age. What happened is that people now live longer, and when older people get pancreatic cancer, they have a lot more probability to die.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-s...

Unfortunately this is the kind of garbage claims people make to try and sway others into going against "the establishment" or in this case "medical orthodoxy". It is how they get people to go along with claims with limited or zero scientific support. Just attack doctors as the enemy, claim they are lying for profit, or hiding some cure, and then peddle some fanciful claim of their own. Its great that people are researching the affects of fasting and all these bits, but none of these fringe diets/theories has come out yet as a surefire way to do health and wellness. If the claims seem unbelievable, they probably are.

Of course you are more likely to survive cancer now than in the 50's. There is not a credible person that would claim otherwise... "credible" being the proper claim. Look at any cancer survival rate and you'll see improvement. That whole statement makes me question every word he/she wrote because it is just so false. At this point his/her words need serious references for proof.

[Edited for spelling mistakes]

I didn't believe it either until I went and looked at the data (see my other comment). Rates are basically flat for most cancer for the last 50-100 years. Compared with any other chronic disease survivability over the same time, it's insane.

For more, as I suggested, see Prof. Seyfried's book and Travis Christoffersen's book, Tripping Over the Truth.

These come from medical orthodoxy resources so caution abound /s

https://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/viewfactsheet.aspx?csid...

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics

And one more piece of reading about Dr. Seyfried... https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ketogenic-diets-for-cancer-...

From your first link, quote:

* In 1975, the incidence rate for all cancers combined in the United States was 400 new cases for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 199 deaths for every 100,000 persons.

* In 2007, the latest year for which we have updated statistics, the U.S. incidence rate for all cancers combined was 461 new cases diagnosed for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 178 deaths for every 100,000 persons.

...

The improvements in survival seen since the mid-1970s reflect progress in diagnosing certain cancers, such as prostate cancer, at earlier stages and improvements in treatment.

/end quote

They're saying almost exactly what I was: Incidence hasn't changed much, and the survival rate improvement is just from early detection. Actual ability survive, treat or cure cancer _itself_ hasn't changed.

Most cancer therapies have focused on making people with cancer live longer, not on "curing" cancer†. A cancer that kills you after 30 years instead of 3 is still technically "a fatality caused by cancer", but add up two or three of those and you've saved one whole person-lifetime.

† The HPV vaccine has somewhat "cured" cervical cancer, but that was effectively an accident!

You're right in that specific case, I'd love to live 10 times longer, but it's very rare. As an example, here's a random graph showing longevity post-diagnosis from 1971 to 2007 for 9 types of cancer:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/11/22/article-2064659-0E...

(You can find these graphs with some simple google images searches)

Notice that most cancers, the longevity doesn't change much at all in that ~40 year period. Personally I was expecting some dramatic improvements like the one you allude to (going from 3 to 30 years). It doesn't happen.

I think generally we somehow assume that because there's lots of money being spent on cancer and fancy machines and so on that everything must be better, when in the graphs we only see these various marginal improvements in some specific cancers. I think probably the number one reason for this mismatch is nobody likes to talk about cancer.

Those graphs are two-dimensional, squashing a whole extra dimension (stage of cancer at diagnosis) into an average.

My understanding is that most cancer research has focused on how to take advantage of earlier diagnosis by putting early-stage cancers into remission, or slowing their progression.

The "thing about cancer" is that it's somewhat exponential in growth: if you have cancer in one place, it's easy to treat; if you have cancer in four places, it might be in 16 places by the time you're treated those four.

It's like a manhunt for a criminal group that knows they've been made: they started out meeting in one building, but they're on the run, parting from one-another's company and spreading out across the world. If you catch the group when it's still in one building, you can just raid that building; but it's very hard to do raid a thousand individuals once they're living scattered across the whole world.

So early-stage cancer is "easy", and late-stage cancer is "hard"; and, insofar as we haven't come up with a brilliant way to solve the hard problem (a whole-body chemotherapy that doesn't hurt non-cancer cells) we've set ourselves to the task of combining screening with early-stage therapies to try to eliminate cancers before they can become late-stage.

You see that dotted green line that shoots way up the chart? That is for all cancers. The graph depicting ones that leveled off or appear to decrease are the hardest cancers to fight.. brain? pancrease? lungs?

I know you are smarter than this... Why are you ignoring the fact that all cancer rates of survival are skyrocketing by those measurements while the hardest cancers still remain hard.

:-)

I'm not ignoring it, it's there, it shows the median life expectancy going from roughly 1 up to 6 years. Great.

The problem I have is two things: First that most of that gain is from prevention and detection, not treatment. I really want the treatment to get vastly better like it has in the entire rest of medicine (give or take). Believe it or not, a 6-fold increase in 40 years isn't really that great of an outcome.

Second is the interpretation of the split. Your interpretation is that there are "easy" and "hard" cancers to fight. I think it's actually that some are easy to detect or prevent. At base, they're all as horrible as each other left unchecked. But, we can see a melanoma much more easily than a blastoma. Therefore the graph will fool us in to thinking there is progress at attacking cancer.

To tie it back to the books I mentioned earlier, to me, they have a much better theory for why all this is happening than the prevailing theory of "cancer is broken DNA" and "cancer is really complicated". The idea that a) it's mitochondria and b) it's actually quite simple, to me, seems to fit the evidence much better.

Your image comes from this report: http://www.macmillan.org.uk/documents/aboutus/newsroom/livin...

This is from a UK charity operating in England. England has poor cancer outcomes. The report was written before the "be clear on cancer" stuff currently happening.

It's worth reading in the context of this discussion you're both having because it gives a pretty balanced account.

> when in the graphs we only see these various marginal improvements in some specific cancers.

We see very good improvements in breast cancer, and this is partly because of the vigorous campaigning and fund raising. We've also seen big improvements in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and Rectal cancer.

From the second link:

«

In the United States, the overall cancer death rate has declined since the early 1990s. The most recent Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, published in March 2016, shows that from 2003 to 2012, cancer death rates decreased by:

    1.8 percent per year among men

    1.4 percent per year among women

    2.0 percent per year among children ages 0-19

Although death rates for many individual cancer types have also declined, rates for a few cancers have stabilized or even increased.

»

A sustained 1.5 percent decrease per-year is not something that can be wholly attributed to early detection or reclassification. It is huge; a 1.5 percent yearly decrease means halving mortality in ~50 years. If this metric is true (and there's no reason to discredit it), then:

- Some other mortality cause is increasing and dwarfing cancer; or

- Cancer survivability metrics are being negatively affected by early detection.

In any case, it's quite difficult to make a strong case that medical knowledge regarding cancer has not progressed in 60 years and that outcomes are stable. Such a large decrease in cancer death rates must be fueled by some major structural force.

As someone who has worked in the cancer research field, anyone making this claim is at best misunderstanding the data available to them.

Omega-3 only resolves depression temporarily by lowering the immune system (and thus inflammation). Resolving the underlying sources of inflammation and brain insulin-resistance is what helps depression, and yes, grain fed steak can be fairly inflammatory due to polyunsaturated fats, lack of glycine in the amino-acids, high cysteine and methionine and iron, and an imbalanced calcium:phosphorous ratio. Eating the whole animal would solve a lot of these issues.

Past the two day mark into the fast -- no, I don't feel hungry at all; in fact, food (thinking, smelling, looking it) ranges from "meh" to slight aversion at those times.

The reason I fasted the first time, was that I was a little sick, and lost my appetite; this is common. What is uncommon with me, however, is that when I have no appetite, I don't eat. And despite feeling excellent starting with day 3 or so, appetite only came back after more than three weeks.

Other times, I started on purpose; on those times, the first two days are sometimes a little hard (but not really).

Whether it is good or bad for you - I suggest you try. It is unlikely to be harmful, and it might teach you something you don't know. Or, it might be a waste of time.

I wasn't generally sick or anything, but I did have low B12 before my first fast; And I have perfect B12 since. At the time it was a complete mystery to myself and any doctor I've asked, but since it was discovered that the appendix is a vault of good bacteria, and it is likely that fasting caused to body to release some B12-converting bacteria. YMMV, especially if you have no appendix.

> you will need a lot more electrolytes

How do you get those electrolytes if you are fasting?

The typical way is some sort of homemade bone broth, since store-bought broth is usually just colored water.

Some people will use zero calorie sports nutrition drinks or some kind of magnesium and/or sodium pill (since it's not just NaCl you're losing when fasting).

I added a quarter of a teaspoon of salt to water everyday, and took some magnesium pills every few days. Did not supplement potassium, though common sense says I should have.