Welcome to the Dry Fasting Club
Introduction to the world of dry fasting
Dry fasting is an under-researched form of fasting that is viewed as dangerous by a large portion of the medical community. Nevertheless, progress is often made first, while supporting evidence follows later. I personally view dry fasting as a secret art that has been around for thousands of years, and we catch glimpses of the lost knowledge through ancient texts like the Bible and both Muslim and Jewish religious practices of Ramadan and Yom Kippur. One is a 30-day intermittent dry fast, and the other is a 25-hour HARD dry fast. Dry fasting, like many other naturopathic treatments, requires someone to be open to trying new things. But not only that, but it also requires someone to be aware that modern medicine, although great at treating acute problems, fails drastically at understanding and healing chronic underlying conditions that cause many of our society's illnesses. If you’ve ever had a skin condition like eczema, you know that you can go to your doctor, and he will prescribe you a corticosteroid to reduce inflammation and itching at that moment, but more often than not, the underlying issue will remain, and progressively get worse.
I remember when water fasting and even intermittent fasting used to be viewed as taboo, and yet nowadays it is moving into the mainstream. People’s positive experiences have reached a critical mass and shifted the tide. Everyone’s talking about intermittent fasting. Even so, there is very little money to be made in research about .. well. Nothing, because fasting does not force you to buy a product (usually, because there is now an electrolyte and supplement craze going on), so with nothing to sell, there is very little incentive for funding trials. Even so, the critical mass has pushed even researchers and doctors to take fasting much more seriously. Although water fasting is growing in popularity, dry fasting is still viewed as a death sentence by many people. The common idea that you’ll die without water in 3 days is used as a fact and creates a bias in most people.
I know how hard it is to break that mental barrier to even attempt dry fasting. I consider myself a person that is very open to new concepts and I have this mentality that I’ll try nearly anything once. But even then, I thought dry fasting was just too much. If I thought that, Where does this leave a majority of people who are risk-averse? I fully expect most people to never even take a second glance at dry fasting, but I also hope to help those desperately seeking something that might work.
This podcast will focus on all things related to dry fasting. The beautiful thing here is that everything related to dry fasting has in some part relevance to all other forms of fasting. I view dry fasting as the final chapter of the fasting journey. No matter where you are on the fasting journey, if you choose to pursue it, you will eventually end up on dry fasting. For most people, the only reason they have not reached it yet is that they’re stuck or simply not ready yet. Most people will get stuck at one point and think they’ve reached the finish line with extended water fasting for example, but what they don’t realize is that they’re really just waiting for someone to get them unstuck, and this can come in many different forms. It may be as simple as nudging them into the idea of dry fasting because they’ve never even heard of it before. It may require a few anecdotal experiences. It may require desperation after having tried everything else. Or it may require more scientific research to back it up for them to try it. No matter where the stuck person is. I hope that I can provide a resource that allows people to learn enough to be able to ask the right questions when it comes to dry fasting.
Before this initial episode gets too long, I’ll want to quickly just touch on a few of the things that make dry fasting so much better than water fasting. These are all important aspects of dry fasting and we’ll dive deeper into them throughout the next episodes.
Dry fasting is superior to water fasting in these main areas:
Speed of healing and strength of healing: You enter ketosis faster, and stronger when you do both food and water deprivation. In fact, there’s this thing called the acidotic crisis that occurs around day 7 of a water fast. It’s when the ketones in your body keep accumulating and creating a more and more acidic environment, to the point where you hit an upper threshold of acidity and your body starts new mechanisms to get it under control. These mechanisms activate very potent healing. In Dry fasting the acidotic crisis is reached on average around day 3, so that’s why most people look at dry fasting as being about 2-3x stronger than water fasting.
Dry fasting creates A hypertonic environment, which basically means a higher concentration of solutes in blood plasma due to lower water content. So think of more sodium, potassium, minerals, proteins, blood cells, and more. This activates stronger autophagy. [Hypertonic stress promotes autophagy and microtubule-dependent autophagosomal clusters]. Deeper autophagy that cleans up the inside of your cells.
Smaller toxin load, metabolic water vs dead water vs deuterium (heavy water). When doing dry fasting your body has to run on metabolic water more and more as the days progress. And metabolic water is basically water that your body creates,the official definition is:. [Metabolic water refers to water created inside a living organism through their metabolism, by oxidizing energy-containing substances in their food]. This makes sure you tap into your bodies already pre-packaged water located in your fat cells. This water has already gone through the whole process of purification. So you are not taking in dirty/dead water that requires body cleansing (think microplastics, lead and other toxins), because you are not drinking anything, so the water your body is using is perfectly clean and adapted to you. This lowers the toxin load and the effort your body needs to do, and both of these allow the body to focus more on healing. Because the body is able to go into a fully rested state, people who dry fast notice that they just don't get the same hunger cravings that you would while water fasting. This is a huge reason why so many fasters that end up trying dry fasting, jump ship, and never water fast again. Also As we age, we accumulate deuterium water in our cells. Deuterium water is basically heavy water, and it has an extra hydrogen atom. In fact, there’s a study { ___ } directly linking aging with the extra water in our cells. They find this correlation is all their subjects, but don’t understand the mechanisms. What if it’s deuterium? This ‘heavy water’ can accumulate and gets harder and harder to release by the body. With tons of bad downstream effects, so getting rid of this water can be extremely beneficial, and dry fasting is one of the most effective ways to do so.
No extra treatments or preparations are necessary. In water fasting, there’s a lot of additional treatments that people take to strengthen the detoxification process. They perform enemas, take baths, try different mineral waters, they try to find the right supplements to take so they can stop hunger and weakness and headaches. You bundle up from the cold feeling that water fasting brings. None of this is necessary with dry fasting and you still get more healing. It’s less worry and less stress. The absence of water neutralizes inflammation, since inflammation requires water. It also triggers internal cell mechanisms that do the cleaning. It’s often said that the cell turns into a sort of mini furnace that does the burning of toxins. Personally, I believe that there are mechanisms at play such as the microtubule dependant autophagosomal clusters that help burn and rework proteins inside the cells that you just can’t get with water fasting. There’s a heat that is felt when doing extended dry fasting, which is the opposite of water fasting. This heat is felt by the faster, even though often you’ll check your temperature and your body core temperature remains stable. It’s almost like magic.
Weight loss speeds up and stays off. Although water fasting is good for weight loss, it’s very common to see weight return quickly after finishing a water fast. When you complete an extended dry fast, the weight stays off much better. The process of burning the fat to create metabolic water does a very good and thorough job of ripping the fat cells apart. We’ve all heard that fat cells are never really destroyed, and that’s why it’s so easy for weight to bounce back after diets. Well, not the case with dry fasting. The body also adjusts to no water by NOT burning muscle if it can avoid it. It focuses strictly on fat reserves because they have both energy and high amounts of water. So not ONLY do you lose weight more effectively, you also conserve muscle better than on a dry fast. Honestly, if the weightlifting community found out about dry fasting, the popularity would explode. I bet that there are some who have discovered just how good it is, but they can’t talk about it without being viewed as crazy.
Skin improvement and stronger anti-aging effect. So there’s so many good things, but i’ll finish off on this one. The body creates an insane competition where weak cells lose to healthy cells when it comes to survival. This is just common sense, take away water and everything is going to compete for the few water molecules left. The result is that your body is left with a higher composition of healthy strong cells, which then get to replicate. Skin is noticeably smoother and younger after a dry fast, and another amazing thing is that it’s common to see people say that cellulite and loose skin gets tighter.
I’d like to leave you with this thought based on philosopher Bruno Latour that I heard on a philosophy podcast recently, and his argument that science has strayed from searching for truth and accuracy. Latour argues that we as humans have never truly been modern, and that nature is not something that we can ignore in the pursuit of science. In this context, we can see post-modernists or self-proclaimed scientific realists argue that fasting is dangerous and does not work, and there’s not enough research, without even considering historical evidence and people’s experiences. The same people call naturopaths quacks and line up for the newest medication to treat their symptoms without even considering that the other side may have some sense to it. I’m not saying one side is more right than the other, but what I am saying is that if you cannot even IMAGINE a world where your beliefs are wrong from either side, then you have descended into a hive-mind-like behavior similar to religious zealots in the medieval ages. The world is full of unsolved mysteries, and sometimes approaching things using caution, common sense, and a little hope can make all the difference.
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Interesting. Thank you.