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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

How do you maintain energy levels through a 36 hour fast?

Edit: Thanks all! This’ll help me progress from 16/8 to consistent longer fasts.

I am relatively adapted to it at this point, so it doesn't bother me as much.

I time it so I start the fast towards the evening and then it ends mid-morning - so you're only really pushing through one full day without food.

I'll have coffee/tea for caffeine and electrolytes seem to help depending on your situation.

Start with several smaller fasts before going full 36 and if you need to eat before the full 36 hours are up, don't kill yourself.

The biggest realization is just coming to terms with how much what a lot of people think of as "hunger" is often just boredom or cravings and not actual hunger. That was eye-opening.

Do you break fast eating specific things or just go about eating your usual meal?

I typically don't eat breakfast. I eat a relatively low-carb diet throughout the day w/ more carbohydrates around my workout (in the evening)

While I haven't done 36, 24 is relatively easy. The idea that your body needs constant food intake is a modern myth. It's mostly your mind that's been programmed to want to eat that often. Also, once you eat the insulin spike triggers the next wave of craving, and so on. Fasting is not the same because you're well, um, fasting.

Also, if you avoid sugar for a week before fasting that helps a lot, or rather, I should say that it helps me. Eating sugar messes up my ability to know if I am really hungry or if it is just too many Candida bacteria in my system messing with my brain chemistry.

Anyway, if you like, try avoiding sugar leading up to avoiding fasting.

I would say that avoiding sugar as much as possible in general is a positive. Avoiding unnecessary insulin spikes is a positive.

I have been on IF for almost three years and started recently on 36 hours once every three weeks. If you can do 24, 36 is not too much of a problem. My last 12 hours of the 36 hours is sleeping, so I don't think about food or feel hungry when I am sleeping. Also, I ended up doing it for 38-40 even though my intention was to do it for 36 hours because of my sleep.

> The idea that your body needs constant food intake is a modern myth.

Modern food intake also trains the digestive tract (most notably stomach) to never be empty, and we end up confusing signals of hunger with an empty stomach.

I heard that Japanese (or was it China? Korea?) people have this rule of thumb of eating only up to ~80% of stomach volume; no idea if it’s factually true but having this rule of thumb of not filling myself to the brim as we seem to culturally do currently seems to be extremely positive I’m my experience.

Letting go the social baggage of “bon vivant” and “oh my god I’m so full this was soooo good” seems to be just as hard as not smoking when many around are smoking.

“one should eat to live, and not live to eat” says Molière, but even being acutely aware of that, I struggle to fight the deeply ingrained social pressure, as even most foodies/fasters I know seem to subscribe to this “all you can eat” way of life (although with healthy food)

Goddamit when I was feeling great, all sporty and fit (athletic even, dare I say) everyone was saying I was too thin, and now that I feel like shit having some 10+kg excessive weight to shed, everyone around says there’s no need to, and worry a lot when I don’t take a second or third serving.

In the West we've turned food into a source of pleasure. We no longer see it as a source of nourishment, and the foundation of our health, but as an entitlement to tongue orgasms.

Fasting helps to change our relationship with food. It's about proactive control and not succoming to the minor inconvenience of feeling a bit hungry.

I do. But as Soylent would demonstrate some people aren't interested in food as a source of pleasure.

>I heard that Japanese (or was it China? Korea?) people have this rule of thumb of eating only up to ~80% of stomach volume; no idea if it’s factually true but having this rule of thumb of not filling myself to the brim as we seem to culturally do currently seems to be extremely positive I’m my experience.

The traditional Buddhist notion is that one should eat to the point where one more mouthfull would fully satisfy oneself.

Build up to it from shorter fasts. Pay close attention to caloric intake, it's easy to undereat when fasting. Eventually you will be unable to not maintain energy levels though the fast.

I have done a couple 36 hour fasts. What broke me was hunger, not low energy. Didn't feel any less energized than usual, really. But resisting the urge to eat after you've been hungry all day and someone puts a meal in front of you is hard.

in many people’s experience (mine included) there’s phase change sometime in the 48-72 hour mark in which hunger/appetite essentially disappears (some describe it is gone, some as easily ignored background noise)

Personally, I’ve gone more than 14 days several times, I usually start when not feeling very well (and lacking appetite) which makes even the first couple of days trivial.

If you do want to go farther than 36 (at your own risk of course - I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice) make sure you are well vitamined, well hydrated, and well electrolyted (e.g. with snake juice) - very often, need for some essential vitamin/mineral masquerades as hunger or appetite.

To underline this. People have died starting eating after a long fast. While the risks are probably manageable, and other people have successfully been fasting a full year, do educate yourself on Refeeding syndrome before doing any extended fasts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome

> more than 14 days several times

Isn't that how anorexics end up unable to eat at all, though? They go so long without eating that the "good" bacteria that permits digestion disappear so they're no longer able to process food.

I am not familiar with the process anorexics go through, but it is likely very different - thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, do fasting of 2-7 days on a regular basis with no ill effect (on the contrary - often with good effect).

Good bacteria can likely be reinstated by the body itself (the appendix is a cache for them), from food, or if all else fails - by FMT. I’m not an expert on this, and may be wrong, but from a lot of reading - any anorexia symptoms and processes seem to be entirely absent from mindful fasting.

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