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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

> I'm fasting regularly, which will realistically extend my food supply.

Isn't fasting the opposite of storing food for an emergency?

Surely storing food on your body as fat is one of the safest and easiest ways to store it.

Yes, you're technically burning through your body's food supply when you fast. While that has survival implications, that's not really the point. The average American overeats like crazy and is addicted to junk food. Fasting helps to break that addiction so that you're more likely to use your crisis food wisely and not feel hunger pangs. When I tell people that I comfortably fast for 4 or more days, they think it's crazy and they can't imagine it, but it's really not that hard. That tells me that people are liable to digging into their food too early on in a survival situation.

The truth is that while I am gradually burning body fat intentionally, I've still got weeks worth of fat on my and probably will when I decide to reduce my fasting back to eating one meal a day. I'd rather burn that fat and eat minimally for the first week or two of a crisis before digging into my reserves. Let's say I learn that the supply chain will be broken for longer than expected; I want to have food around so I can calmly address the issue without having to panic about where I'm going to get my next meal.

To put it simply, I don't think most people have the discipline to not pig out on their earthquake kit or their pantry if they're stuck at home during a pandemic. There's a bit of a caloric tradeoff in gaining that discipline, but I think it's worth it.

What fasting method do you practice? It sounds interesting!

I don't have much of a specific method, but usually I try to go at least 48 hours and limit myself to a 1 hour eating window. The key is getting your electrolytes. It's amazing how big a difference they make. Otherwise, I just take fasting day by day. I try to be conscientious and recognize whether I'm genuinely hungry or just desiring food because I'm bored. If it's the former, I'll break my fast. I eat pretty healthy when I break my fast, but I don't make a fuss about too much carbs or whatever because I'll get satiated too quickly to even get close to overeating.

since you sound well versed - what would be a good food-free way to get electrolytes?

The best way is to make an electrolyte drink yourself. Here's my recipe:

- 2 Liters of water

- 1/2 teaspoon of pink salt

- 1 teaspoon of potassium chloride

- 1/4 teaspoon of food grade epsom salt

- Lemon and stevia used sparingly to taste

It's not the best tasting thing ever, but you get used to it. Using filtered water will make it much more palatable. I think salts make poor tap water quality more obvious.

You can always drink Powerade Zero or something like that. I don't think there's really anything wrong with that, and I drink those sometimes. It's just more expensive and the artificial sweetener might spike insulin.(I doubt that's a big deal) The recipe I described is pretty dirt cheap.

I used to have a hard time fasting for more than a day or doing a ketogenic diet because I simply wasn't getting my electrolytes. This was accelerated by the fact that I was drinking way too much water and urinating them out. Replacing electrolytes throughout the day keeps me from feeling miserable.

One might think pedialyte was the best formulated option, but it tastes terrible in my opinion.

I've never had pedialyte, but I don't imagine it tastes better or worse than what I make. :)

48 hours is about the most that I have done.

Even at 24 hours you begin to recognize how much of modern life revolves around eating. Trying taking a stroll through the city while fasting. Within 10 seconds you see people eating icecream, candy bars, cokes, a zillion restaurants, convenience stores, not to mention alcohol.

With fasting I found I had low energy and would be really, really bored. There was a lot of temptation to fill time with just munching on something.

I also found that when I broke my fast, I didn't eat as much as I expected to. No huge pigout meal or anything.

I am not religious, but I think Ramadan is an example of a really healthy religious practice because it reminds people of their relation to food.

This is a strange thread for me to suggest this, but check out the Zero Fasting app.

Heard of it but never tried it. Thanks for the suggestion!

You seem to think it's obvious that you last longer if you ration yourself rather than eat until the food is gone and then burn fat. That sounds reasonable, but I can't exactly think of a logical argument why. Why do you think it should be true?

You make a valid point. Overall, I look at fasting as a form of preparedness before a situation because it trains the body and mind to not crave to eat in excess. But, as you correctly pointed out, I was thinking of fasting as long as much as possible to try and limit digging into my food reserves. There may be strategy in saving body fat for later in a crisis. I'm not sure.

My line of thinking is that, early on in a crisis, I don't know how long a crisis is going to last or how intense the looting will be. It could be that a week goes by and all the store shelves are bare; although I'll have potentially put myself at risk by lowering my body fat, I'd still feel more secure having extra food for myself and perhaps someone else than having eaten most of it when I didn't need to and now there's no more food to go around. Having extra food around the point at which I may need to get out of Dodge seems preferable to me than to hit the road with only bodyfat and few to no provisions.

I don't think there's a good answer to that. You make a great point. I do still think fasting is a useful in helping people break food addictions and learn self control.

Your body learns how to fast, just like it learns how to run. If you fast regularly, you body switches into "fasting" mode quickly, and you feel much less of an impact cognitively or physically, than if you've never fasted before (or haven't fasted for a long time).

If it comes down to who can just survive the longest with zero calories, someone weighing 300 pounds is probably going to out-last me. But if there's any level of physical or mental activity required to survive and/or actually acquire calories, I'm going to have a big advantage.

EDIT And if, as another commenter mentioned, it comes down to making a low number of calories last a long time -- again I'll have a big advantage.

Absolutely! A lot of is is psychological, too. I try not to bring up the topic of fasting too much around people, but when I do, people think it's nuts to even just eat one meal a day! Of course, I would have thought that's nuts years ago. But after trying it myself, even if I don't continue to fast regularly, I know that I could do it if I needed to and that it wouldn't be a big deal.

It's so weird -- people say, "Oh I could never do that, I get SUUUPER hungry." Um, do you think I don't get super hungry? But it's not linear. People are 1 hour late for a meal and they're a little hungry; 2 hours late and they get quite hungry, 3 hours and they're super hungry. They extrapolate, and think that after 24 hours they'll be writhing in agony or something. That's not how it works.

A very rough rule of thumb is that your body can convert ~1% (probably closer to 0.8%) of your body fat into usable calories per day. If you're going to rely entirely or partially on stored body fat, be sure you have enough to cover your target calorie deficit.

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