A friend is doing a 21-day fast, but starting a prep week first. Her prep week consists of drinking only cherry and apple juice for some reason. Then she says she’ll start the 21-day fast. The longest she’s done is 10 days.
I do fasts myself, but usually OMAD (the longest I’ve done is 96 hrs), and it helps me feel more energetic and keep slim. The potential problem I see is that she started following some quacks online. She wants to do 21 days of just distilled water and nothing else.
I thought she’d need vitamins and minerals (especially with distilled water…I told her about gradients and diffusion). She told me the body has enough stored vitamins and minerals for her to function normally and not be in danger. I told her fat soluble vitamins are stored in fat, but water-soluble ones dissolve in water and that she might need to replenish them, as the body usually pees out excess. She wanted to argue with an appeal-to-authority, citing some random YouTube doctor. I told her the body needs minerals, salts (low potassium levels tend to become a problem for some distilled water fasters, from what I’ve read) in addition to vitamins.
She tried to tell me that our ancient ancestors survived for long periods of time without food and supplements. I told her that they didn’t drink distilled water and that the water they had contained a lot of minerals. Then, she said that their water wasn’t as contaminated as ours. But of her argument was about how ancestors survived, then she would surely agree to add some salts and minerals into her distilled water to mimic spring water or something, right?
I told her I just wanted her to make decisions based on accurate information. She doesn’t trust most doctors, but for some reason trusts a random YouTube doctor. She also paid to be part of a fasting group online. She shared the website and it seems kinda scammy. I think she might be deep in something that’s not really about science-based fasting. I’m somewhat worried about what might happen to her, because there were some more questionable things involved.
I didn’t try to convince her to change the way she’ll do the 21-day fast, but I told her to be careful and to seek help if something doesn’t feel right. Hopefully she actually reads up on the biochem I told her about and makes a decision informed by science and not by possible scammers.
Does anyone have any advice or accessible information I can give someone who has no science background?
Dr Alan Goldhamer makes his patients fast medically supervised for 40 days on distilled water only and for the most part they are fine. If the quack in question has fasted hundreds or thousands of people in the past, they should recognise signs that something is not going right if a problem ever arises.
Ideally though she should be supervised by a doctor/health practitioner who knows about fasting to make sure she is safe.
There are criticisms of Omad and possibly they are things that over time are more worrying than occasional fasting.
I did a 21 day fast a few years, no electrolytes and just tap water, it was fine. You just have to be careful of refeeding at the end. That’s the thing that could potentially be dangerous.
Normally, I do 5 day fasts, with occasional longer ones.
However, unhealthy middle aged males in a medical study did between 21 and 102 days without electrolytes, just drinking water. The man at 102 days was, obviously, very low in various nutrients, although he felt fine. After refeeding everything was back to normal. Shorter fasts retained electrolytes measured in low normal, from what I remember.
If your friend is healthy and has enough reserves (I lost 14kg) then she should be OK, although she should read about female responses to fasting and I’d certainly get her to ask her doc to monitor her and do weekly bloods. I did and all mine remained perfect.