Recap, insights takeaways from a weekend with no food

This past weekend I fasted (no food, only water) from Friday night to Sunday night.

It was my longest fast to date — my previous max was the weekly 24-hour fast I’ve been doing for the past month — and my first attempt at a 48-hour fast.

I thought I’d share how the 48-hour fast went, along with my notes and takeaways from the experience.

To begin, though, let’s talk about why I decided to not eat for a couple days in the first place.

Less is more, stress is more, and Antifragile

Fasting is just the latest application of the general Less is more philosophy, which seems to be increasingly relevant to many areas of life.

For example, in Bringing it all back home I claim:

The big theme I see from say the past 10 years is that we’re prisoners of abundance. We have too much food, too many networks, too much square footage, too many choices, too much media, too many cars, too many distractions, too many narratives, the list goes on.

For another example, Less is more is also the top principle in my Media Diet 2020.

The food angle to Less is more stems from my broader reasoning that the standard American diet — and societal norms that encourage routine, regular, balanced, high quantity, low quality food consumption — is bad for our health.

If we focus on the quantity angle for now, and if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s pretty clear that we don’t need to eat as much as we do.

Just because it’s lunch time doesn’t mean I need to eat right now. Just because the hotel has an all-you-can eat buffet doesn’t mean I need to load up three plates and stuff myself. Just because almonds are keto-friendly doesn’t mean I need to shove handfuls of them into my mouth throughout the day. Just because I worked out this morning doesn’t mean I need to eat a box of thin mints.

But not only do we need to reduce the amount of food on our plates in our daily habits, we would also benefit by incorporating stressors and variability to our food consumption routines.

I learned from cold exposure training with the Wim Hof Method (WHM) in Iceland and Poland that occasional trauma and shocks to the system make you stronger, healthier and more alive.

This concept also applies directly to nutrition: fasting is the food version of an ice bath. In other words, fasting trains you to navigate and respond to trauma (i.e. no food), and grow stronger from it.

Finally, what really convinced me to start intermittent fasting were Nassim Taleb’s great thoughts on fasting, and examples of the associated health benefits, in his excellent book, Antifragile, which I read earlier this year. Here are some particularly relevant excerpts from Chapter 22. To Live Long, but Not Too Long:

So if you agree that we need “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so. Assuming that we need on average certain quantities of the various nutrients that have been identified, say a certain quantity of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. There is a big difference between getting them together, at every meal, with the classical steak, salad, followed by fresh fruits, or having them separately, serially. Why? Because deprivation is a stressor — and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery. Convexity effects at work here again: getting three times the daily dose of protein in one day and nothing the next two is certainly not biologically equivalent to “steady” moderate consumption if our metabolic reactions are nonlinear. It should have some benefits — at least that is how we are designed to be. I speculate; in fact I more than speculate: I am convinced (an inevitable result of nonlinearity) that we are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition — at least over a certain range, or number of days.

And there is this antifragility to the stressor of the fast, as it makes the wanted food taste better and can produce euphoria in one’s system. Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover. *The principle disease of abundance can be seen in habituation and jadedness (what biologists currently call dulling of receptors); Seneca: “To a sick person, honey tastes better.”

Scientists are in the process of discovering the effects of episodic deprivation of some, or all, foods. Somehow, evidence shows, we get sharper and fitter in response to the stress of the constraint.

Let us remember that we are not designed to be receiving foods from the delivery person. In nature, we had to expend some energy to eat. Lions hunt to eat, they don’t eat their meal then hunt for pleasure. Giving people food before they expend energy would certainly confuse their signaling process. And we have ample evidence that intermittently (and only intermittently) depriving organisms of food has been shown to engender beneficial effects on many functions…The antifragility of humans manifests itself in the response with up-regulation of some genes in response to hunger. So once again, religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally. In fact what these ritual fasts do is try to bring nonlinearities in consumption to match biological properties.

Timeline from the 48-hour fast

With my mind made up that fasting is a health habit I need to start practicing, over the past month I took weekly 24-hour fasts every week, usually every Monday.

Those 24-hour fasts usually went fine. And even though I still experienced some levels of anxiety heading into each weekly fast, I decided it was time to level up and go for a 48-hour fast this past weekend.

I mentally committed to the two-day fast early in the week, ate a big meal Friday evening — probably unnecessarily big, due to anxiety for the coming days of food deprivation — and didn’t eat again until Sunday evening.

Here are some notes, highlights and activities during my 48-hour fast:

Early to bed; great sleep Friday night
Woke up Saturday morning and read in bed for a bit
Morning warm-up: outside, barefoot, in the grass and sun, 50 air squats, light stretching
Red light therapy for about 20 minutes
WHM breathing exercises and brief meditation
50 pushups
Kettlebell workout
Foot strengthening exercises (round 1)
Cold shower
Took the dog for a nice long walk
Foot strengthening exercises (round 2)
Found stuff to do around the house to stay busy and moving
50 pushups
Writing session
Another nice long walk around the neighborhood
Bedtime around 9:30 Saturday night; took time to wind down, avoid the phone, and relax with stretching and foam rolling; lights out around 10:30.
Had some trouble sleeping; woke up to go pee a couple times; stressed out a bit just from thinking too much about fasting; not too bad though
Woke up Sunday morning feeling good; not starving or anxious
Morning warm-up: outside, barefoot, in the grass and sun, 50 air squats, light stretching
Red light therapy for about 20 minutes
WHM breathing exercises and brief meditation
50 pushups
Cold shower
Made some tea and read out on the front porch in the sun
Took the dog for a nice walk
More reading
Foot strengthening exercises (round 1)
50 pushups
Writing session
Another nice long walk around the neighborhood to close out the last couple hours of the fast; was feeling happy, strong, energized and centered

I broke the fast at 7pm Sunday evening with a fat ribeye steak, some sauteed veggies, and the final episodes of The Last Dance. After 48-hours of no food and only water, I felt great, like I could dunk from the free throw line! Maybe slightly delusional too.

Takeaways and lessons learned

Overall this was a great experience, and it wasn’t nearly as tough as I anticipated.

In fact, it was even enjoyable. Toward the end of the day, I wasn’t salivating for that ribeye steak — rather, I felt like I could even go another day.

I plan on continuing the practice with weekly 24-hour fasts, monthly 48-hour fasts and quarterly 72-hour fasts.

Here are my big insights from my first 48-hour fast, including tips I’ll incorporate into the next one. I think these apply to fasts of any duration. In fact, most apply to non-fasting scenarios too.

Stay moving throughout the day. Workout, take walks, do stuff around the house. Avoid sitting for too long. If you remember nothing else on this list, remember this one!
Reading is fine, but don’t dive too deep. During the fast I read articles and newsletters that, stylistically, were pretty quick-hitting, and I took a break from War & Peace. Remember to stay moving!
Minimize screen time on the phone, laptop or TV.
Drink plenty of water throughout the day. My mouth was parched a lot more than usual so I drank a lot more water than usual.
Don’t drink lots of water late into the evening. I woke up two times in the middle of the night to pee because I was chugging water so close to bedtime.
Don’t eat too much for dinner. Because I fasted from dinner Friday to dinner Sunday, my meals before bed on both days were big. I could hear my stomach grumbling as my gut was digesting all that food late into the night. This likely affected my sleep. Therefore, next time I’ll probably try fasting from lunch to lunch (instead of dinner to dinner) to give my gut more time to digest everything before I hit the hay at night.