First time water fasting. I did a 48 hr fast last week, then had a days meal. Now I’m at 4 days water fasting. I’m wondering if I should keep going as long as possible or if I should break and focus on doing 3-4 day fasts every week instead. Or possibly a meal every 2 days. My goal is to lose weight, get better sleep, help with my back pain. I understand the body doesn’t start burning a lot of fat until you use up all your glycogen reserves and that takes a few days, am I doing myself a disservice by breaking every 3-4 days? Not sure what would bet the healthiest option. I’m hoping to find a plan that I can stick to and build a habit at least for the next month or two. Any thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.
For reference: I’m a male 5’9 230lb. I gained a lot of weight over the last 2 years. I’m relatively active but am hoping to be healthier since i started to have back pain.
The glycogen is mostly emptied within 12-24 hours (and a lot of water alongside) depending on the level of your activity. Doing some HIT on the first day can speed things up.
You will loose weight/fat while fasting, but how much you’ll regain back depends on how insulin resistant you are and how much will power you have.
There is no universal solution here, as everyone is unique in this regard. Nobody really knows what the optimal regiment is. 3 days is probably the minimal to give a good kick to autophagy and 5 days to start dipping into apoptosis and killing damaged cells.
Main benefit of fasting is restoring insulin function and resetting relationship with food, so you can slowly loose extra pounds over the non fasting time, while still enjoying life.
So focus on creating a sustainable schedule you can upkeep for _years_.