I didn't eat food for 3 days, here's what happened

Morning! I'm about 13 or so hours into a 3-day fast. Check that out there. I just weighed in at 76.4 kilos, and the reason why I'm doing it is because my friend messaged me the other day and was like, "We're doing a 3-day fast, do you want to join in?" And I was like, "Sure, why not?" So we have the power of the crowd. I'm about to go for a long walk, probably about 2 or so hours with some water and salt. The rules of the fast is water only. Well, for me personally, water only. Salt is okay. For electrolytes and whatnot. So no coffee, no tea, no nothing, just a water fast. So I'm going to film what happens, how I feel, but the reason of the walk is to try and kickstart my body into ketosis. So I've done a 5-day and a 4-day fast, and usually when you do that, you get into ketosis, your blood ketones go up, things start feeling good. So I'm going to chill out for the next 3 days or so, and we'll see what happens. Morning. Heads up on the angle to Port Catwalk, lifting troubleshooters. I just got back from that huge walk that I was telling you about. It's nearly 17 hours in, so apparently we're in the fat burning stage. That's what it's saying on the Zero Fasting App. So 17 hours since my last meal. My last meal, by the way, was just something simple, steak and onions. The walk I did was about 12,500 steps. I'll just take a screenshot of this so I can put it on. 12,500 steps, 2 hours 15. Now I'm going to measure my blood ketones. Let's, uh, I did a measurement this morning around 9 AM, so it is about 3 hours since then. It was too low for the, for the reader. So when the reader has no value, it just puts up the letters LO for low. You gotta get a good draw, need a little bit of blood. On the pinky. It's a little bit cold outside, so my hands are quite cold. So getting blood out a little bit difficult. And if you don't get enough, the machine, well, it gets angry at you. Oh, 0.3 millimole. I'm going to take a photo of that. Boom. 0.3 millimole. I don't think that's quite yet ketosis. I have to look this up every time. I think it might be 0.5. I'll correct myself if I'm wrong. But yeah, I should be starting to remove the stores of glycogen because that was quite a long walk, and then shifting into ketosis. So I'm feeling pretty fine. I'm just going to keep drinking water and salt, no different to how I'd usually feel. I know some people— I don't have a headache. I know some people get headaches when they, uh, stop drinking caffeine or don't have coffee or whatnot. I haven't had any of that, of course. Yeah, I'm just feeling chilled out. I think that's, that's the big thing that I notice when whenever I do an extended fast is I'm just chilled. It's very zen. You start to feel really, it's hard to explain. I mean, when I have a cup of coffee in the morning, sometimes I just feel like I need to do, do, do, do, do to satisfy something. But right now I'm just, I'm chilled out. Like there's some pretty birds flying around. I'm gonna do some reading, probably clean out my closet. Who knows? The sky. Very pretty colors. Beautiful afternoon. Can you hear the birdies? We have an update time. It is 21 hours, 29 minutes, and 15, 16, 17 seconds into the fast. That's probably not gonna focus. It doesn't matter. I'm going to measure my blood ketones. It's been a very chilled day. I went for the long walk this morning and then cleaned my closet out a little bit. Did all those little things of, you put off for a while and you just, I've just been chilling out, really, all day. I did a little bit of computer work, otherwise just on my couch doing some reading. Now let's see where my ketones are at. Oh, and I'm rugged up at the moment. I've got a hoodie on, I've got track pants and some thick socks because I find usually after 16 to 18 hours into a fast, I I'll just get this on. I start to get quite cold. And so, it's a strange coldness. It's hard to explain. Oh, we are at 0.7 millimoles of ketones. Again, not sure if that focused, so I'll just take a photo of that. 0.7 millimoles per liter of ketones, so not quite fully into a deep state of nutritional ketosis. That is the goal, that's when things start to cruise. But back to the feeling cold part, Yeah, I find I typically start to feel cold basically after 18 hours and I rug up, but it's like a deep cold. It's— and from what I've read and from what I've heard, it's from a lack of thyroid activity. So, the metabolism is slowing down. So, if the metabolism slows down, you produce less body heat. Hence why I'm rugged up in Australian weather. It is winter, though. Essentially, the reason we're feeling cold is because the fat that would normally generate heat is getting turned into a fat that is getting burned for fuel instead. So pick your poison. Would you rather have some fat that makes you feel a little bit warm, or would you rather have some fat that allows you to feel cold but goes away faster? I've got jiu-jitsu training this afternoon. I was contemplating whether I was going to go. I probably will, just because I have so much time. When you, when you're not eating, you just have— it's amazing how much time throughout the day gets dedicated towards eating. I'm reminded of this every time I fast. It's a new appreciation for food every time. I'll go to jiu-jitsu training after that. By the time that's finished, I will be about 24 hours done. Not hungry at all. Of course, I would like— there's a big car going past. Not hungry at all. Of course, I've been thinking about food, but not in the sense of like, "Oh, I need food." It's more like I just enjoy eating food during the day. You have those times, those rituals. It gets to a certain time, it's fun to eat food. So we'll check back in later. A little update on the fast. Just, uh, pretty sure it's 8:07, so I'm just about half an hour, 45 minutes or so, uh, over the 24-hour mark with no food. Just finished, uh, Brazilian jiu-jitsu training, and I would say I went about 50%. So I had a chilled out day, and usually I'm pretty— like, I like to train fairly intense. I'm pretty fit. But today I just wasn't, um, I think if I like pushed myself I could have done it, but I wasn't— it wasn't like I'm trying to push myself. I just took it easy, trained, did the techniques, uh, had a bit of a flow roll with my friend, which is basically like just, uh, practicing what you learned during class. Nothing too extreme or intense. We'll see how the next couple of days goes. I've got training on tomorrow and Saturday. Not sure if I'll do that yet, but who knows. I'd like to. I like training. Um, now just going home, shower up, some soft salt and water for dinner. Yum, yum, yum. And then, uh, we'll go to sleep. The good news is you wake up on the morning of day 2 of a 3-day fast, and if you started after dinner on day 0, well, the morning of day 2 is 36 hours in or thereabouts, and you're halfway through. So we'll check in then. Well, hello there. It's morning, day 2, morning of day 2. It's actually like 10:21. I've been up for about an hour and a half, but I just woke up. I was pretty busted up, not gonna lie. Weighed in at 75.2 kilos, which is down like 1.3 or something kilos on yesterday. I think it is mostly water though. So maybe everything's a bit tightened up or whatever. But it's 38 hours 40 minutes, 30 seconds into the fast. Now, why do I think it's dehydration? Well, because my urine this morning was a shade that you don't really want. As for the other event that you do in the toilet, it was pretty uneventful. So I've been sipping on salt and water again all this morning. Now I'm feeling a little bit perky. Now it's a beautiful rainy day outside. I'm interested to see what my ketones are, my blood ketones. So I'm going to measure that, and today is going to be very similar to yesterday, a lot of chilling out. Alexa, stop. Big, big, big tip on how to feel better when you're fasting Just start dancing. Now I'm kind of looking at myself there. I can't play that music on YouTube because it's 50 Cent, Window Shopper. So I'll probably just put a little something else on there to groove. Let's— very exciting. I'm feeling a lot better now that I did some dancing and that I've had some salt and water. Tick, tick, tick. Oh, my winter, winter tan is very much showing. It's raining. It's not that cold today. I'll probably start feeling cold again in the afternoon though. Let's do a little testy test on the right pinky this time. My fingers are probably too cold, maybe. What are we at? Oh, 2.4 millimoles per liter ketones. That's very exciting. We're going to take a little photo of this. Boom. So that means I am in nutritional ketosis, but that would be representative of what the Zero app is saying. So if we go into the Zero app, it's saying that we're at ketosis. Again, you probably can't see that, but that's alright, I'm going to record this. We click on ketosis. So from 24 to 72 hours, you're in ketosis. 0 to 4 hours anabolic, catabolic, fat burning, now ketosis. 72+ hours is deep ketosis. So what's happening? Here we go. Liver glycogen stops being a source of glucose. Gluconeogenesis reaches its peak. Gluconeogenesis is making glucose out of different types of molecules. Reaches its peak and begins to drop off. Blood ketones increase. BHB is usually 0.5 to 2 millimoles. Well, that's, That's about where I am. Total ghrelin output decreases. So, ghrelin is a hunger hormone. So, hence why the deeper you get into a fast, the less hungry you get because ghrelin is not triggered. So, that's another thing. I woke up this morning, I don't feel hungry at all. I am excited for food though. I do miss having, I'm missing, I think I'm missing milk the most. I do like having a glass of milk in the morning. And then diminish growth signals and increase AMPK activity further promoting promote autophagy. Autophagy, I believe, is cells, old cells clearing themselves out. But I've got a few little things that I want to do today. Again, it's just like I don't have much on because I'm just going to be chilling out. I'll do some reading, clean out the, my other closet, and we'll check back in soon. Sipping on a nice lemonade. I'm kidding, it's sparkling water, San Pellegrino to be specific. But Little update, it's been about 6 hours or so since the last update. Uh, 41 or 45, I don't know why I said 41, 45 and a half, thereabouts, hours in. So 45 hours, 21 minutes, 18, 19, 20 seconds. It's been another relatively chilled day. I went for quite a large walk this afternoon, not as big as yesterday morning's because it was a little bit rainy today. But now I'm reading the Lindy newsletter, which I would highly recommend, by the way. The Lindy effect is if something's been around for a long time, chances are it will stay around for a long time. And there's a specific paragraph here on fasting from the issue On Diet Part 1: Feasting and Fasting. I'm going to read this out because it says what it needs to say better than I could. Say it. So when we look at most ancient religions, we tend to see one commonality: fasting, refraining from food for a certain period of time. If something is in almost every religion, it is probably a signal. Before the modern era, food availability was unpredictable and highly irregular. Famine, war, insect infestations— that's a little bit of a tongue twister— and disease all played a part in restricting food, sometimes to the point of starvation. So did the seasons. During the summer and fall, fruits and vegetables were plentiful, but during the winter and spring, they were scarce. Periods without food could last weeks. There's a reason that one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is famine. As human societies developed in agriculture, these periods of famines were gradually reduced and eliminated. However, ancient civilizations recognized something deeply, intrinsically beneficial to periodic fasting. As periods of involuntary starvation faded, ancient cultures replaced them with periods of voluntary fasting, kind of like what I'm doing now. These were often called times of cleansing, detoxification, or purification. Um, so there's another point here. Religions do a lot of things, And one of them is to be a vehicle for activities that help humans survive. So again, the Lindy Effect. If something's been around for a fairly long time, religions, chances are it will stay around for a long time. And if something's strange but been around for a long time, chances are there's a little bit of truth in there somewhere. And so this is a great tweet by Lindyman who, or Paul Scalase, who's the author of the Lindy Newsletter. When it comes to things like diet, architecture, and health, Tradition is smarter than you. So, this is really big and there's another paragraph down below. I'll let you read it. I'll link it below. What fasting does. So, what happens when we fast? Insulin goes down, adrenaline increases, and metabolism speeds up, which is contrary to what I would have thought. Growth hormone goes up. So, there's some beautiful links. It's a beautiful article. I'll let you check it out. I'm going to keep chilling out this afternoon, do some more reading. And I guess it's time for another ketone measurement check. Alright! How about the left thumb this time? Oh, we got a bleeder! 2.4 millimoles, so not— I don't think that's too different to what it was before. I can't remember exactly what it was. I'll take a photo of that. So still in nutritional ketosis. I'm feeling, feeling fine. I'm interested to see how tonight's sleep would go. Usually the deeper you get into the fast, the worst— well, for me, the worse your sleep gets. But the benefit is I haven't had any caffeine for at least the last 48 hours or whatever it is. Probably a little bit more because I didn't have it before the night. I'm gonna go to jiu-jitsu training later. And before then, gonna keep reading. End of day 2. It is 9:05 PM. I am driving home from the family, went over for dinner. Of course, I didn't eat anything. I just kind of went over and said hello after jiu-jitsu training. Today was a lot better at jiu-jitsu training. Me and my brother had a great tussle, so shout out to Josh, thank you for that. I found I was a lot more stronger, I had a lot more energy. Maybe because my body's now fully kicked over into ketosis, whereas yesterday afternoon I have a feeling that it was kind of on the halfway point. It wasn't, uh, it was in between using glycogen and ketones as fuel. Um, at the moment I'm not feeling hungry at all. I've been sipping plenty of— because I've been training, I've been sweating a lot— been sipping plenty of water and salt. When I go home, probably going to have a magnesium tablet before bed just to generic a magnesium tablet to bring back the electrolytes and whatnot. I am excited for food though. So we were talking, there's a group of us doing this fast, and we were talking in a group chat today saying there's a restaurant booked for tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow evening. So we're just over, just under 24 hours left. Very exciting. So we'll see how the sleep goes. I'll check in the morning. 48 hours, no food. Just got tired. Good morning! Super excited for today. It is day 3 of the fast. I woke up about an hour ago. I did the same as yesterday, stay in bed chilling, a little slow to get going, but drinking lots of, uh, salt and water. Very excited because it is 60 or almost 62 hours through the fast. So that means I do get to break it tonight. So last night's sleep was, was pretty good. I woke up, I think, about 3 times and it was a kind of a strange feeling, like I was alert but not tired when I was going to bed. I think it could have been because of jiu-jitsu before. I woke up about quarter to 6 because the garbage truck arrived and whatnot. And, but then I just sort of went back to sleep, slept another few hours. I've been in bed for probably the last hour or so. Again, it's, uh, I wouldn't say my sleep was restless, but I did wake up and I was a little slower to get going. I weighed in this morning at 74.4 kilos, which is by far the lightest across the whole fast. I think it's down almost a kilo from yesterday and probably 2 kilos from the start. So that's pretty cool. It is a beautiful sunny day today, very windy, as you might be able to hear. But today is going to be much the same as yesterday, chilling out, and I get to break the fast tonight. I was going to sleep like a little kid before their birthday last night. I was like, yes, I get food tomorrow. So very excited for that. Again, I can't stress this enough, major key if you want to feel better. Every morning we begin with dancing. It is time to measure the ketones according to the Zero Fasting App. I am still in ketosis. So current fasting zone is ketosis, 24 to 72 hours, which makes sense. I've been fasting for about 62 hours. And we read that yesterday. So the summary is that the primary fuel source is fatty acids and ketone bodies, plus glucose from gluconeogenesis, which again, gluconeogenesis is the process of the body breaking other types of non-glucose molecules into glucose to use as food fuel. You are now entering a multi-day fast. Between 24 and 72 hours, you rely more and more on fat and ketone bodies for fuel. Your body will prioritize burning fatty acids. Yes, we can get more shredded. And sparing ketone bodies to be used in the brain. Any remaining liver glycogen will be fully used up. Glucose production from the gluconeogenesis peaks shortly after the 24-hour mark at around 150 grams per day. I'm not sure what the day is. And then drops off, settling around 80 grams per day after 48 hours. As ketosis gets underway, levels of ketone bodies in your blood will begin to elevate, indicating you're in a state of fasting ketosis, which is somewhere down here. It says BHB levels to rise somewhere between between 0.5 and 2 millimoles safely in the fasting ketosis range. I think that's a different— BHB is beta-hydroxybutyrate. I'm not sure if this measures the exact same thing, but let's, uh, measure the ketones. I forgot to mention this last night, but my sense of smell, or my senses in general, have gone weapons hot. What I mean by that is I walked out of jiu-jitsu last night and just finished training, and there's a Woodfire Pizza store just across the road. It smelled good, real good. Okay, we got a good bit of blood. 2.8 millimoles. Maybe you can see that, maybe you can't. A little bit of glare coming in off the ocean. Bright. Have a look at this, it's so bright. Look at that. We zoom in. Bright. It looks darker on the camera, but that's alright. 2.8 millimoles. I'm going to chill out today, do some more reading. We'll check back in soon. Let's do a final update, shall we? It has been a big day on tour. Let me just readjust this. How's my face look in the candlelight? Let's move this over to here. You might be wondering why I get a candle, and I thought, well, since my sense of smell is elevated through the roof, why not buy a scented candle? And enjoy the smell twofold. This is a bergamot, cedar, and tobacco candle. My apartment smells of rich mahogany. I can recommend it. I'm enjoying the smell. Also, I like to light a fire while I'm writing, so I wrote down some thoughts. Currently 69 hours, 28 minutes, and 31, 32, 33 seconds into the fast. You're not going to be able to see that, but very excited. We've got a dinner booked in about an hour or so, so it probably won't be exactly 72 hours, but give or take, whatever. Today has been a massive day on tour. I've done some reading, sat on the balcony in the sun because I was feeling a little bit cold. Check out the name of the chapter I just read. Hunger was good discipline. A Moveable Feast by Hemingway goes on to talk about how your senses get turned up when you're hungry. I think I can attest to that. After the reading, I came back inside. It's very windy here today, so because I was feeling cold, I had quite an extended long hot shower. That warmed me up a bit. Then I did basically nothing and sat around on the couch, went for a long walk, had a nap on some grass. I mean, this is, this is what happens when you fast. You just, you don't eat. So you have so much time to just do whatever. I did some writing, which is what, what I basically just finished then. And it's just clear my thoughts to sort of align everything. But I did note down that I'm ready to finish. I'm excited for dinner. I'm excited to eat food with people. That is probably my number one favorite activity in life, is to eat food with friends and family, or just eat food with loved ones. I've been sipping plenty of salt and water, having a magnesium tablet here and there. I had one last night, I had one this afternoon, because I did feel as though I might get a cramp in my leg if I go for a long walk. But let's do a blood ketone check. And I was asking when I was writing down Why fast? Why not fast? And so, of course, I found it's not hard to find all of the beneficial points of fasting, but I wanted to do— as a scientist, I wanted to explore what are the arguments against fasting. And of course, we saw in a previous clip that all religions have some component of fasting. So chances are, if it's been around for a long time, it has some benefits. You can read up on all the other benefits. I'm not here to preach fasting to you. I'm more here to preach and take your health into your own hands. Think about it. And that was one of the things that I came up with is why fast, why not fast. One of them is why fast, why not fast stress. What is stress? Where does stress come from? How do you even define stress? You read a lot of articles on good stress and bad stress. What is good stress? What is bad stress? How do you For me, if you categorize stress as a lack of energy, I can't get any blood out of this finger, then I would have had a highly stressful last 3 days because my energy hasn't been rock bottom, but it hasn't also been, I haven't had the urge to really do anything except chill out, which is good or bad. The only stress I've really felt, I mean, as I've said before, I haven't, even till right now, 3 days in without any food, just water and salt, I don't feel hungry at all. 3 millimoles! We cracked it! We cracked the 3 millimoles. This is very intimate, by the way, the candlelight here. I'm enjoying this. For me, the stress hasn't really come from the fasting itself, it's come from what I've not been doing because of the fast in terms of not spending time with family and friends, because typically the most time I spend with family and friends is during mealtime. And of course, I went to visit my family last night, but I didn't eat. And so when you're not— it's not the same. It's not the same, right? When you're not partaking in it. Then of course, why fast? Become proactive about a health situation. If you've got something going on with your health, fasting has a lot of health benefits. One of them is it can help with weight loss. Of course, everyone's going to be different, but it also can help with if you have gut troubles. So, just give your gut a break from food so it can repair itself. There is the concept, a very— I like this concept, the concept of, well, I don't like its effects, but I like knowing about it, is iatrogenics. And I may be saying that wrong, but it's the way I understand it is is if you go to seek help from someone or health help from someone and they've, they introduced something worse to your health because they're introducing something at all. It's the adding any kind of, like it's a doctor, going for a surgery and the doctor, the surgeon leaves scissors inside your stomach and then zips you back up. So that's iatrogenics. Your health situation was probably, might have been minor, but is now quite major because you have scissors inside your gut. And so fasting is kind of the preventative way of that, is that if you have some sort of gut trouble or gut problem, one way to approach it would be improval by removal. And is improval a word? I tried to type it, but it kept telling me that it wasn't a word. It doesn't really matter. So there are my notes on why fast, why not fast, I'm probably going to write an article on something, why fast, why not fast. That's going to be the last update. I'll probably update after dinner, after I break the fast. See how I'm feeling. Maybe tomorrow as well. We'll see. Boy, do I feel good. On the way home from the fast dinner. The 3-day fast has officially been broken. I had ribs and coleslaw as a first meal. It was absolutely delicious. The ribs were like pull-off-the-bone. Beautiful, beautiful way to end it. And up until, even up until the point where I started eating, I never felt hungry. Like in the last couple hours, I haven't felt hungry at all. I knew I wanted to eat, but I wasn't ravenously hungry. I mean, that was the opposite of one of my friends who was at the dinner. He was ravenously hungry for day 3, whereas yesterday, so day 2, he had plenty of energy. Kind of like the opposite of me. Today I had— I felt like I had plenty more energy than the second day. And so, I mean, that's what you're going to get with different people and their different experiences. And I know some people commented on previous videos saying you should break the fast with something simple. To me, it's like, bring it down to the individual. If you're fasting because of some sort of digestive issue, yes, it would probably be a smart idea to break the fast with something simple. For me, I've never had any issues in the past, so— you can define simple as what you want, by the way— so I was fine to take down some ribs and some coleslaw. And of course, we got ice cream afterwards. I had a double scoop, so I'm 100% probably out of ketosis by now. But I'm going to check that in the morning. Also be interested to see what I weigh in at. So 3-day fast done, 72 hours in the books, feeling amazing. Let's see how I feel in the morning. Welcome back to Grand Old Day. It seems like I'm checking in every single time. It is about 12 or so hours after the fast. I just woke up and I weighed in at 74.9 kilos, which is 500 grams or so, half a kilo up. So I'm still down 1.5 kilos, uh, from when I started. Not that weight loss was a goal, um, or anything. For me, fasting— the goal of fasting is just to have a break from the normal way of doing things, to relax, to chill, and to develop a new appreciation for food. And I've Of course, as you can see, I'm very happy that I can eat again. So this is what I look like 3 days fasting plus a meal last night. I think, um, might have tightened up a little bit. So not a dramatic difference, but a little bit of a difference. Now let's do one last blood ketone measurement and then— What? Just because I can eat doesn't mean, uh, I'm not gonna begin the morning without dancing. I think I'm gonna make that a new habit. Let's, uh, check the blood ketones and wrap this up. What's it gonna be? Am I out of ketosis? I think I am. Oh, 0.9 millimoles. So could still be quite in ketosis, a very light ketosis, let's say that. But that is a wrap. It's been a fun 3 days. It's quite a long 3 days. I mean, time just feels a little longer because you've got all that extra time in the day. There wasn't too many points where I felt dramatically terrible. I felt quite good most of the time. And breaking a fast feels like the opposite of a hangover. And speaking of which, I've got to go to breakfast with my family. See you next time. Window shopper mad at me. I think I know why.