This morning is the beginning of day 6 of a fast. I weighed myself at the beginning. I was 284.5 lb.
I weighed myself this morning to find that I was 269.2 lb. A loss of 15 lb. In five days.
Based on various materials I’ve been reading on fasting I was expecting a loss of around half a pound a day. Certainly not this.
I’m guessing a lot of this might have been water weight and I won’t get the same results in the following week, but still it seems like an awful lot.
Has anyone else experienced this rate of loss?
I plan to continue for at least another 8 days, so total of 14 days. But I might go longer than that if I’m feeling okay. As Dr Fung says, after several days of a fast, you actually feel comfortable with not eating and the pangs of hunger are reduced. The waves of ghrelin are lower. I’m in that current state right now.
Anyway, I wonder what others have experienced.
Maybe a bit high but definitely within the realm of possibility. Certainly most of it is water weight and perhaps some, let’s say, colon weight as well. I would expect the difference between now and the next 8 days to be less.
1/2 lb per day is the fat loss estimate, not the total weight loss estimate. Once you start eating again you will rapidly gain like 10 lbs in 2 days and you will see the more realistic number closer to half a pound per day.
I lost over 10 lbs my first 4 day fast, but it was really only about 3.5 lbs after I started eating again which is still great for only 4 days. This is normal, especially if you normally eat a fairly high carb diet (I.e. the standard western diet), as the glycogen reserves require a lot of water to maintain and that all goes away when fasting.
So this also has something to do with your starting weight. When you start higher and have a lot more to lose, the weight tends to fall off not only quickly but in big whooshes. The initial loss always is a lot of water and glycogen - your liver stores a lot of glycogen - especially if your daily diet consists of very carby and sugary foods. That all clears out the first 24 hours and will likely come back when you eat again unless you keep your diet lower carb. I can have flexuations of 8-10lbs of water sometimes over night. If you can stomach it, daily weigh ins and keeping track of it in an app that averages out your weights (happy scale or libra) will help you see your particular patterns because every body is different. Great work so far!