Re: Health concerns when beginning extended water fast.

Sorry for spamming your thread but I have some other thoughts that may worth mentioning.

Your friend told that fasting is unhealthy. What about eating? Look at your body, what eating has done to it? So is eating unhealthy? Eating kills!!! Don't eat anymore! :-)

Anything can be unhealthy if used unproperly including eating and fasting. A remedy becomes poison if used unproperly.

Long fasts (3 or more weeks) are difficult to perform and can put heavy mental and physical stress on you. People do this usually to heal searious problems (like my terrible hormonal imbalances). If your goal is only losing weight than you can choose much lighter alternatives. Anyway, a long fast can not be sustained forever and it is good to lose at most about 15-20kgs.

Weigh loss is fastest in the first two weeks of the fast, I would take advantage of that. On the other hand you can make extremely long fasts and lose weigh by drinking juices. Of course low calorie, mostly veggie juices, not the full-of-sugar fruit juices. Using some apples and carrots sometimes to add a bit of sweetness is ok. You can alternate fasting and juicing periods to make weigh loss even faster if you want but you can go just with pure green veggie juicing. By juicing you can avoid the extreme fatigue that is involved with long fasts, you can fast for a very long period to lose a lot of weight, and you can even do some light exercises to keep yourself fit.

After losing weigh: If you return to your previous diet you gain back your bacon in no time. Eating less or not eating is obviously not a sustainable solution. Here is how to change your diet: Look for foods that have high volume/calorie ratio. These foods stuff your belly, you can eat any amount from them, still add little calories. Look for veggie dishes, salads, roasted veggies (yummm). You would be surprised how many ways you can combine and season/flavour/prepare them.Replace most of your refined Sugar based sweets with fruit based snacks. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking you to become vegan. I'm just asking you to replace at least 50-80% of your food intake to healthy stuff and eat whatever you want in the rest of your diet. Go and eat a McDonald's menu sometimes. Go to the cinema and crunch buttery popcorn with cola. Go to a sweet shop and eat candies. Eat a fatty pizza. But not all the time. A rule of thumb for me is eating 0 or 1 crappy meal per day. On top of that I'm moderately active (2-3 light training per week and several kilometres of walk per day). This way I haven't gained back the terrible fat mass I had and still, I can eat any amount - of course from the right foods. Tweet