I tried ‘The Phoenix Protocol’ 7 day dry fast to get rid of parasites and for the overall benefits and got to 6 six followed by a 1 day dry fast.
I read other websites also in terms of how to break the fast, and doing so with a bit of wild caught salmon, 1 egg and some sauerkraut felt like a good choice (I know someone who did it with steak, cheese, liver and eggs!)
Nonetheless, I felt amazing and euphoric after my 1st meal in 7 days, but then some time after had the dreaded parasites symptoms still and felt like I’d be poisoned! Still feel it a bit today (next day).
Don’t feel it’s done too much damage, but devastating nonetheless, esp when I was going through it! Despite any damage done however, I feel like I’ll bounce back :).
Anyway, just wanted to know if anyone’s broken an extended dry fast with fish before and how they felt?
I think it’s more about re-fuelling with very small and irregular steps - irregular meaning unpredictable timings so that your body is unable to just adapt to X food every N minutes and stop making decisions. The worst thing you can do is ‘binge’ to celebrate and eat all the old things before that caused a problem.
Sugar, pastries, fast food, fizzy drinks, junk generally should all be out.
If you fill your stomach after it has shrunk, you feel bloated and sick pretty quickly anyway.
The whole point is to give a tiny amount of what the future regular diet you want is. E.g. just a mouthful then wait for a while.
This forces your body to become selective and efficient, because after 7 days, you have 1 mouthful of food. It needs to decide, do I turn this into fat? into heart muscle? into organ tissue? whatever it decides to do with the food, it does not have enough for the whole body, so it needs to select and choose. You want to repeatedly cause it to select and choose, and not be certain when the next food will arrive by not eating on strict timings e.g. every 20 minutes. This reestablishes your body’s priorities and food-routes and optimizes them.
Same with the water. You take little, irregular sips and have long pauses where you intentionally don’t give in to thirst. It forces the body to make a decision on how it prioritizes hydration. Do I rehydrate the brain? The feet? The lower back? If you build back slowly like this, deliberately giving the body not enough, then you will develop efficiency and the pathways you want - the important ones, will be emphasized.
When your body lives in abundance - all the food, calories, water it ever needs, there is no need to be efficient, and inefficient use of resources makes your whole body not function optimally. When you are optimal you don’t need or crave much.
You want to eat the diet you intend to eat going forward to re-fuel.
So breaking a dry fast after several days is a bigger deal than the standard water fasting or a short dry fast (like for Ramadan).
The process is called refeeding and you need to first reintroduce liquids and electrolytes to your body and do this slowly. Only then do you go to solid food and again you need to go slowly.
Generally it is considered that you need as long a time refeeding as your actual fast.
There are differing opinions on the best foods to do this. Some people just have fruit, but a lot of people here think carnivore is the way to go (I’m in the latter group).
The Phoenix Protocol by August Dunning gives a good explanation on what is happening and how to refeed in a way that doesn’t make you ill.