Today I have broken my first 3 day water fast (72 hrs). I started with eating 400g of veal shanks, 200g of sourdough bread with some butter and a dried tomato spread.
By the time I was done with the veal, I rushed to the bathroom. After being done with the sourdough, I sprinted to the bathroom for a second time. An hour later when I felt hungry again, I ate a bowl of cereal (200ml milk, 40g flakes) and when I was done with that, I had a MASSIVE episode of diarrhea.
I tried to google what was up, and apparently I should have broken the fast more gradually with lighter food. But what I wonder about is this - I haven’t eaten a thing for 72 hours. My meal was an hour after I woke up, so I didn’t still have the time to hydrate as much. And the stomach takes hours to digest food, especially the fatty food I have eaten.
So what was it that I “emptied”? My large intestine had 72 hours to absorb all the water in it. Did all the things I ate just flowed out of me as they came? Did I absorb any of the nutrients of what I had eaten? I’d like to get some explanation for what happened.
Dr Fung and Megan Ramos recommend using phsyllium husks, 1 tablespoon in a cup of water, mixed up 45 minutes to an hour before you break your fast. I have been fasting for years and as long as I get the physlium husks, I’ m good!! Good Luck with the fasting everyone 😊👍
Food can’t digest that quickly, but eating does signal to your digestive system to work again since it’s been sleeping. Bad idea to refeed like that after a 3 day fast, you need to ease into it and not with sourdough bread. Will just spike your insulin and start to negate the good you did during the fast.
Maybe look up “gastro colic reflex”? Bowel emptying can be a normal physiologic response to stimulating stretch receptors in the stomach. (This does not constitute medical advice, blah blah blah, etc).
I’ve only been extended fasting for a couple months, but I’ve broken everything from a 48 hour to 160 hour fast with a couple of scrambled eggs eaten very slowly and been fine. I eat strict keto when I eat though so maybe my body is more adapted to digesting higher fat foods.
When you fast your digestive system basically goes dormant. Your body knows that there’s nothing more it can get out of what you’ve consumed so it goes into something you can think of as sleep mode. It doesn’t shut down, but it’s not actively trying to digest stuff.
When you eat it powers back up and that means anything in your backlog gets jettisoned.