Im new… i read the wiki, but does fasting help you burn fat or do you only lose water weight? What are some good methods to use to burn fat and stuff…sorry i’m clueless, everyone seems very nice in this sub. Excited to learn and be a part of the community!
Watch these two videos for extensive information on fasting:
WATER FASTING: The Complete Guide (Fastest Fat Loss Method)
HOW TO BREAK A FAST: Best Results & Worst Mistakes (Refeed Syndrome)
Yes Water Fasting does burn fat. Body Fat is stored energy and your body breaks it down and puts that stored energy into action in the absence of other nutritional intake. This begins to happen in as little as 16 hours without eating.
Of course fasting burns calories. Your body is not some magical machine that runs on nothing. You always burn calories no matter what you are doing. When fasting you are simply not replacing the calories, so you end up losing weight.
Fasting burns fat after you’ve digested everything in your stomach and after the body has used up the short term energy reserves (glycogen if I’m not mistaken). That takes about 16-20 hours.
ChatGPT tells me (if it’s reliable …) that 100g of human fat is 900 calories, so if you usually burn up 1800 calories in day (almost certainly more, but let’s keep it simple here) and if you were only using fat for your energy levels that you’d lose 200g of fat per day.
Fasting is as good of a method for weight loss as any (the best in my humble opinion because it has other benefits as well which you don’t get on a diet that just reduces calories). Just start off slowly. At the beginning even going for 16h without food was difficult for me (which some people do every day - intermittent fasting).