Recently, I did 36hr prolonged fasting. I was so energetic and active during the fasting and I did not feel any weakness during the fasting. I ate a Homemade Veg burger to break my fast and I suddenly felt like vomiting, had a headache, and had slight stomach pain. It happens whenever I break my 36hr fast. Is this normal? Please advise.
I am a 29yr old / 80kg / 170cm Male with No health complications.
There are two aspects of your nervous system: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. To simplify, the sympathetic does “activities” and the parasympathetic does “functions,” including digestion. Issues can arise when switching between them, particularly when there’s something “extreme” about it: think of being in the middle of eating and getting terrible news, how the food would sour in your stomach and you might even throw up or feel like you needed to urgently go to the bathroom. That’s the body abruptly shifting gears to that “fight or flight” adrenaline response, and it being in direct internal opposition to “rest and repose.” Here it certainly seems like it could be the shift out of fasting after so long. To your body, 36hrs is completely arbitrary: it’s not a day/night cycle, it’s not a certain point in your routine, it’s just a number you picked. So unlike other times when there’s good internal preparation for eating, perhaps breaking those long fasts is coming as too much of a surprise for your body to be ready to ramp things right back up enough to handle complex food. To try to fix it, I’d consider two approaches: simpler food, and better foreshadowing. Simpler food is obvious, though you can go very simple indeed with just juice/broth to start, and by foreshadowing I mean, getting your body ready to eat. Warm-up “stretches,” basically: if you’re just grabbing a burger from the freezer, heating it up, and eating, try deliberately adding steps where you’re interacting with food more prior to consuming it. Prepare it, smell it, imagine it, let yourself realize that this time you really do get to eat it, unlike how you’ve suppressed this process for the past 36hrs. Chew slowly, because digestion begins in the mouth, and go slow: maybe the whole burger is too much right away.
Not normal for me at all. Break much longer fasts with more food.
BUT I always nibble on light things while cooking my first meal.
I also avoid high carbs. Depending on the veg burger, some are pretty bad. And even when not fasting they make me not feel well.
Im not vegan or vegetarian at all, but I do eat veggie burgers in wraps