3 Reasons Why I Do A 5-Day Water Fast Every Year

Photo by manu schwendener on Unsplash

Every year for 5 days I eat nothing and only drink water, here’s why…

1. It JUST makes sense

“Eat 3 meals a day” they say.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” they say.

Who said so? Captain Kelloggs… hmmm I wonder what his motives are.

I jest, but as a society, we never allow ourselves to be hungry. Eating every 3–4 hours has been normalised.

But have you ever stopped to ask if it’s natural for us?

I have…. And it had me exploring how our ancestors lived…

Homo Sapiens have been around for 300,000 years, whilst agriculture, domestication, and a predictable food supply have only been around for the last 12,000 years.

That’s 288,000 years of surviving as hunter-gatherers with no predictable supply of food.

288,000 years of women foraging and men hunting, potentially for days, and once they hunted down their feed, it would have been shared with the tribe. Before starting the process again, and going another few days without food. They certainly wouldn’t be chowing down on a Nutri-Grain bar in the middle of a 20-mile hunt.

A quick look at The Hadza of Tanzania, who are the world’s last full-time hunter-gatherers, tells us they are doing something right as they have a low tendency to develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease.

Now of course there are a lot of variations that go into this, but when you do a 5-day water fast and experience the energy and clarity of mind that comes with it, it all seems to make sense. Our body is incredibly smart and if I felt like my body was giving up as the fast got longer, then maybe I’d think otherwise. But instead, you feel great. Focussed. Energised.

Our bodies adapt, and they tell us what’s good.

But with our western diets and eating patterns, we don’t give our bodies the opportunity to talk to us. They have become lazy, and they no longer know how to run off their own energy sources.

Fasting forces your body to shift back into a more ‘natural state’ whereby it burns fat for energy.

And again… when you experience the sustained energy that comes from burning fat for fuel, it’ll make more sense to you too!

2. For the health benefits

Now before I go on… let me cover my ass and say I am not a doctor, so if you are interested in testing out a 5-day water fast… seek medical advice first and DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

Moving on…

What piqued my interest in fasting was reading the book The Longevity Diet and hearing longevity expert Dr. David Sinclair swear about the benefits of fasting.

From my understanding, fasting appears to be one of the most beneficial modalities when it comes to longevity.

Central to this is a process called autophagy. Which is the body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells. A process that is found to stave off diseases, including cancer.

Again to me, this makes sense. If we are eating every few hours, and constantly asking our body to digest food, we never give our body an opportunity to turn around and work on itself.

Eating regularly leads to loss of autophagy. And this study found this caused neurodegeneration in mice.

Fasting, on the other hand, slowed down neurodegeneration.

And it doesn’t seem to stop there.

• Autophagy leads to retaining muscle mass.
• This research found that in rodents intermittent or periodic fasting protects against diabetes, cancers, heart disease, and neurodegeneration, while in humans it helps reduce obesity, hypertension, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. Thus, fasting has the potential to delay aging and help prevent and treat diseases while minimizing the side effects caused by chronic dietary interventions.
• This research found that fasting led to improved insulin sensitivity
• Enhancing growth hormone secretion

Then of course there is the fat loss… which I will say should not be the sole reason why you do it. But losing a few extra lbs I see as a cherry on top.

Personally, I went from 104kg down to 97kg, back to 100kg when I regained my water weight. Where I have seemed to have settled and can certainly notice the difference. Plus my cravings have massively decreased, and fat seems to be falling off me this past week, despite eating as much as I want in my feeding window.

But as I say this should not be the reason you do a water fast, especially if you have any history of eating disorders.

But, regardless of all these potential benefits, the main reason I do it annually is…

3. Because it’s good to do hard things

In the book In Love With The World, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says,

“Anything that interferes with mindless repetition can function as a wake-up call, and an antidote to automatic behaviour and habitual fixations. To encourage curiosity and flexibility, it’s important to discover our limits, and then stretch a bit further.”

Meaning, to break the mould of conditioning it’s good to do extreme things.

Something I agree with wholeheartedly.

Every time I do a 5-day water fast I realise how fixated I can get on food and eating. As well as how often I use food to distract myself from discomfort… often boredom.

But when you fast for 5-days you will see that hunger is not the hardest part. In fact, research tells us fasting can make you physically less hungry.

The hardest part is that by removing food, you remove an external stimulus leaving you to sit with whatsever’s going on inside…

And I noticed in those moments when I would usually reach for food to distract myself from the inner discomfort I felt, I instead found myself reaching for my phone in its replace.

Which is what we do, right!? When discomfort asks for our attention, we react by trying to get rid of it.

But discomfort is our biggest teacher and ticket to liberation, as if we don’t run away from discomfort and instead learn to sit with it we begin to build a gap between the stimulus (discomfort) and our usual sub-optimal response (eating in this example).

So instead of replacing food with my phone, I didn’t run away from these unpleasant feelings. I didn’t try and manipulate them into pleasant feelings. Instead I sat in silence with what was. Boredom. Frustration. Hunger. Whatever appeared.

And by simply observing those sensations and feelings, they often dissipated. I felt bigger than them. They no longer controlled me. I managed to get distance on my reactivity.

As Viktor Frankl once said in his famous quote,

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

The gap lead us to liberation, as without that gap there is no awareness that we are caught up with the content of the situation, and we get completely lost in our outer world. Attached and defined by whatever arises, and our life is at the mercy of our emotions and conditioned mind.

The practice of sitting with discomfort and observing the mind is mind training.

Budhhists call it Pain Meditation which comes under a category called Reverse Meditation. Whereby they deliberately invite in whatever is unwanted and unwelcome. The goal, to cut through mindless behaviour loops, to disrupt us into waking up from our sleepwalking habits.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote again,

“When we meet pain [discomfort] with resistance, the pain does not diminish. Instead we add suffering to the pain. The feeling sensation of pain arises in the body. The negative reaction to pain arises in the mind of the fixed self and transforms physical pain into an enemy. That’s how the suffering arises. When we try to get rid of pain, we pit ourselves against ourselves, becoming private war zones-not environments best suited for healing. For many people, self-pity attaches to sickness like sticky glue, and the voice of the ego asks, Why me? Yet this voice does not reside with the pain in the body but with the mind that identifies with the pain.”

The stoics engaged in similar training, where they proactively lived the very things they feared the most.

Seneca argued that by actually living out your fear, the fear of poverty, for example, you diminish the fear itself.

Seneca wrote in a letter to a knight named Lucilius,

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

He goes on…

…my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our needs.

…let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.”

By facing our fear we transform the present. By accepting and leaning into discomfort, we break the habit of reacting, and regain control of the moment.

So are you ready to give it a go?

Here are my recommendations…

• Don’t start it the day after Easter Sunday!!!! That was a bad call, but there is never a good time to do this. But to make it easier for you prepare by reducing your calories leading up to it. Especially carbs and sugar, so those first few days aren’t so much of a shock as your body shifts to burning fat for fuel.
• Quit coffee a week before. I love coffee and only have 2 cups a day, but every time I come off for a week, I get the worst migraines. Combining this with not eating for a week is not cool!
• I would also recommend doing a number of 24-hour fasts leading up to it. Perhaps one per month for 6 months.
• Then during the fast… Don’t eat ANYTHING. Nothing. In the Longevity Diet, Dr. Valter Longo talks of a Fasting Mimicking Diet whereby you intake a small number of tailored calories. I’ve tried this before and it was A LOT harder. To me 100% decisions are easier than 98% decisions.
• Drink good quality water. I didn’t measure exactly how much I drank. Maybe 3 liters. Basically, I drank whenever I felt like I needed to.
• The only other thing I had was these electrolytes that contained Sodium, Potassium, Calcium & Magnesium
• I think it’s wise to quit any intense exercise. Although I went to the gym on day 5 as I had to channel the energy I had that day, but otherwise, I didn’t do any intense exercise. Just lots of walks. Go with whatever feels good for you — but dont be stupid!
• Go big on meditation. I did around 1.5–2 hours per day. As above, learn to sit with whatever arises in the present moment — hunger, boredom, frustration. Be the awareness of these feelings, not the feelings themselves.
• Sleep as usual and nap when you can.
• I also booked myself a massage. Not sure of the research here, but it felt like combining the process with a detoxing massage would further aid the process of renewal.

My experience…

Day 1 — easy. Feeling motivated. Wondering if I could do 7 days this time…

Day 2 — cancel that, 5 days is enough for me. Booked myself into a spa for the day. Read lots. Relaxed. Journaled. Usually the hardest day for me, but cruised through.

Day 3 — feeling refreshed energised and focussed. Hunger seems to have vanished… But my word the evening was another story. It was painful watching my wife eat. My daughter’s fish fingers looked like haute cuisine. Took myself off to meditate. (Note to self… don’t take dinner with these two for granted. Cherish them. You never know when it’ll be your last).

Day 4 — home straight. Feeling alive and a sense of clarity and connection to something bigger than me. Again the evening was another story. I genuinely couldn’t stop thinking about food. I couldn’t get to sleep for around 30 minutes as I fantasised about my first mouthful tomorrow evening.

Day 5 — this energy shouldn’t be legal. Felt an urge to go lift weights. PB’d on number of chin ups in one go. Perhaps because I’m 5kg lighter! Lunch time… can I make it to dinner? No… 117 hours is enough. Lunch it is.

How to break a fast?

I remember reading the incredible book Unstoppable many years ago when survivors of the prisoners of war in Japan gorged on food when they were rescued and subsequently died as a result of refeeding syndrome.

So the logic is to slowly introduce easily digestible food, and foods that don’t spike your insulin.

Something I have tried in the past… but you try to slowly introduce food after not eating for 5 days!

And my theory is that if you hadn’t eaten for 5 days in the wilderness, you wouldn’t slowly build yourself up to eating the antelope. No. You’d eat the f*cken antelope.

Again. Not. A. Doctor.

So after repopulating my gut with probiotics from kefir and sauerkraut, I booked myself into my favourite restaurant and ate chicken, chicken liver pate, and sausage washed down with a pineapple juice. (It’s worth saying here, I’m currently testing an adaptation of a carnivore diet — hence all the meat)

And I felt great.

But my friend who did it with me didn’t. In fact, he was sick for the 3 days that followed. So my suggestion is to go easy. Find your own way and what works for you.

This is something I will continue to do once a year. It just makes sense for me.

So if you’re ready and got your doctor’s note…

• Schedule a date.
• Tell people.
• Do it with someone. I’ve done it alone and this time with someone, it’s much easier with someone.
• Then fully commit. Don’t entertain the thought of breaking the fast. The strength of mind you get from simply committing and following through is enough to transform your life.
• Avoid distracting yourself with other external things. Sit in silence. Embrace the discomfort.
• Make time to journal, think and strategise — the clarity of mind you get in the 5 days is incredible.

But that’s my opinion. You’ll figure out your own way. Too many people spend too much time researching the “perfect” way to do these things. But your body will guide you. Trust in that.

Good luck,

Joel

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