hey yall! apologies for any formatting issues, i’m on mobile. i’m mostly into fasting for the toning benefits and breaking weight plateaus, in addition to mental clarity and other health benefits. stats are 18F, hw 220 lbs, cw 144 lbs.
last month, i embarked on a 9 day/212h fast for the first time - i didn’t have a set goal, just wanted to see what doing a fast longer than 48 hours would feel like. here’s how it went:
starting weight before fast: 147.4 lbs ending weight: 131.8 lbs. weight approx 3 days after: 150 lbs. weight 7 days after: 144.6 lbs….
ive been in a plateu ever since. i ate around 2.2k cals daily for the week after (and i weigh all my food, so i know it was accurate) and burned about 2.4k according to my fitbit. i did notice that i had pretty bad issues with constipation/very slow digestion times and extreme bloating for a while after but even then im very confused about how the weight gain hasn’t gone away over a month later.
i also have a bunch of questions that I’ll list below:
i know that this makes no logical sense CICO-wise and my doctor has 0 clue about why this happened, so literally any insight is appreciated. i really enjoy fasting and would love to try another long fast - i’m just scared of this happening again.
Are you including your drinks and sauces etc in calory count? Doesn’t really make sense for you to gain so much weight back unless your calory maintenance is way below 2.2k/day. Could be hormone imbalance holding onto water weight.
Ive never done a fast above 6 days and haven’t suffered the issues you are describing but I’m sure others on this sub can help
From what I can tell you haven’t done anything wrong. I expect a lot of your weight gain is just from waste and water retention which is normal. You really can’t put on that much pure fat that quickly even if you wanted to. It’s also possible that the low point you hit could have been skewed a bit by dehydration and a relatively empty gut which would immediately rebound when you begin eating again. I would try to avoid stressing about it and just keep following your chosen schedule. For the constipation I usually pound down a cup of coffee plus a chaser of a few tall glasses of water. Some light exercise can also help, but if you’re still blocked up just bite the bullet and take some milk of magnesia, stuff’s like draino for people.