Water Fasting
You have finished the two weeks of prep. By now your hard work should be paying off. Hopefully, your gut microbes are weened off sugar enough that you have a good chance of getting through full day water only fasts. Its time to get serious. Full day water fasting will absolutely empty your short term stores of glucose and glycogen. With these stores barren and no other source of carbs, insulin levels will drop and the body is forced to covert stored fat through gluconeogenesis into energy call ketones. All healthy cells in the body can process ketones for energy. Cells affected by illness or cancer CANNOT use ketones for energy. The fast will do two things, reduce insulin levels such that the body will uses stored fat for energy, and suicide weak and diseased cells through cell apoptosis.
Believe or not, your body was designed to work this way. Fasting is very good for your health, starvation not so much. Fasting increases energy levels, starvation decreases them. The trick on calorie reduced diets is NEVER let your body get into starvation mode where your basal metabolic rate drops.
This is why you need to measure your insulin and ketone levels. Measuring eliminates any guessing as to whether or not your body is in fat burning or carb burning mode. Since insulin cannot be measured outside of a laboratory, we substitute blood sugar. The FreeStyle precision Neo is one of the few certified blood sugar/ketone meters in Canada. In the guide use the Blood Sugar Tab, to see the Glucose Ketone Index (GKI) ranges that are beneficial to your health. GKI is a easy way to relate both glucose and ketones to a single value. For most people their GKI is 50-70, you need to get this under 9 to be in state of ketosis.
Fasting can be hard. It is best to start off slowly and work your way up from short fasts to longer ones. Recommend start with a 1 day 24 hour fast, follow strict keto for a couple of days. Start another 1 day fast, if you feel good, extend it to 2 days, follow a strict keto diet for a couple of days. Use this progression until you can easily do a 3 day water only fast. Once you can do a 3 days fast then 6 days in not any harder. Fasting is mostly a state of mind and your gut. Once the gut is rid of the sugar cravings, fasting is no big deal.
Most people will reach a a GKI of 9 or less in a couple of days of fasting. If you don’t, this is a good indication that you have lots of glycogen in your liver. This is sometimes call “fatty liver.” Don’t worry, a slightly longer fast (6 days) will sort this out.
Warning – On a fast you need to drink half you body weight in water everyday and watch your sodium and electrolytes levels, especially if you are feeling poorly. People often feel horrible on fasts as the stored toxins in the fats are released. It happens so often it’s called the “keto flu.” Lots of water will flush the toxins from your system. The trouble with drinking lots of water on a fast is that the low insulin levels pull sodium out of your kidneys, hence the need for electrolytes and supplemental sodium.
This is controversial
Duration of a fast. How long to stay on a fast? Consensus says 7-10 days before your basal metabolism rate drops. However, by measuring ketone levels 3-6 days appears to put the body into heavy ketosis (ketones > 3 mmol/l, GKI <3), meaning all of the body stores of glucose and glycogen have been used up. At this point insulin levels are low enough that a keto diet will continue to reduce weight and body fat. In AnAverageJoes opinion, there is no benefit to continuing the pain of a water only fast longer than 6 days.
If fasting is so helpful, why not lose all the weight through fasting? The longest record fast in history was 382 days carried out under strict medical supervision. It is highly doubtful that the average person working 9 to 5 can fast for 30 days or more and still function normally in society. There is substantial research supporting losing weight too quickly has negative health benefits. It took years of dedication and poor habits to get into the poor shape we find ourselves in. It will take a bit of time to put everything right. Patience is the key. Experience has shown that the approach of two weeks prep, followed by progressive fasting ending with a 6 day water fast, followed immediately by 8 days of keto diet will result in 15-30 lbs of weight loss, along with a decrease of 5-10% body fat. All of this is achieved in 4-8 weeks without dubious supplements, doing anything too crazy or painful.