My Personal experience with 5 day Water Fast

Hi, It’s Andrew from the Foolish Couple. 

We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

Today I want to talk about my personal experience with my 5 day Water fast.

It is easy coaching others to do something, but unlike some other coaches, we practice what we teach and give you our real life results and experiences!

Last week after we published our water fasting blog series, I had several friends and clients who swore that water fasting over 5 days is impossible and that I will not survive the first day on water only, let alone 5 days.

Some of the concerns that they brought up are:

• You will not have energy to do anything and would be a couch potato
• You will pass out
• You will have indigestion
• You will lose muscle tone
• You will have brain fog
• You will have headaches
• You will be irritable
• You will have no bowel movements

I LOOOVE taking challenges. I usually do water fasting for only for 2-3 days a month and have personally not done a full 5 day water fast. Minna has done it once to disprove their claims three weeks ago when I was away with family, but that wasn’t enough evidence for them. After all, maybe she can do it and other people couldn’t. 

To prove them all wrong, I decided to start my own 5-day water fast last Sunday night and ended yesterday night. To go one step further, I recorded my metrics from day one to day five along with before and after selfies. 

Here are my metrics before I started my water fast:

• Weight 161.8lbs
• Body Fat 21%
• Lean Body mass 119.2lbs
• BMI 24.5
• Waist Circumference 34 inches
• 1067 Move Calories
• Blood pressure 123/82
• Fasting Blood Glucose 101mg/dL
• Ketones 0

During my 5-day water fast, I’ve noticed a few things:

Day 1

• Relatively easy. I drank about 16 cups of water throughout the day
• I felt less energetic then usual but otherwise I didn’t have any other side effects

Day 2 is when we attended a full day, Facebook conference so we were out most of the day.

• During that day, I felt my belly growling, objecting to me not feeding my tummy
• I drank about 20 cups of water throughout the day
• I felt a slight headache in the evening that came and passed quickly, I don’t even need to take any pain killers for that.
• But mentally, I did want to put just about anything into my mouth. So it did take some willpower to stop myself from eating.
• According to Minna, I am a little bit more irritable than usual, not that I’m not irritable at all normally.
• And I did feel that I did not have much energy to do my daily exercise routines, which usually includes a mile and a half walk, an hour of tennis, swimming 20 laps and then weight training and yoga.

Day 3

• I Didn’t real feel hungry anymore
• I actually felt pretty good. I definitely felt lighter and quicker.
• I drank about 20 cups of water throughout the day
• My energy levels was close to before I fasted and I was able to do all my normal exercises and activities easily

Day 4

• I felt fantastic!!!!
• My energy level was higher than usual and was able to do more than my usual exercises and activities. Minna has told me that on day 4 that’s when she really felt like she was  a new person and now I understood what she meant.
• I drank about 24 cups of water

Day 5

• I felt great
• I still have really high energy levels
• And I drank about 20 cups of water

So after 5-days, here are my results.  The results may surprise some of you. The fact is, When your body, and your digestive system, is given time to rest and heal, your body can do amazing things and it can really heal your body like no medication or medical procedure can.

Over 5 days of water fasting:

I lost 6.9 lbs of weight, 

2.4% of body fat, 

I gained half a pound of muscles which is about 3.6% muscle mass, 

my BMI is lowered, 

I lost 1.5 inches around my waist 

and I was able to easily double the active calories for my exercise routines.

My last 2 days of exercise routines include 1.5 miles of walking every morning, tennis for an hour, swimming for 20 minutes and badminton for 3 hours. I Did all of this with consistent blood pressure readings, all on just water as my energy source!

Now you may be wondering why I measured my last two metrics, my fasting glucose and my ketone levels. 

I noticed that my body is slightly insulin intolerant and rely on carbs for energy. My initial blood fasting glucose is 101mg/Dl. Doctors would tell you that is 101 is a great number and there is nothing to worry about. 

What they don’t usually tell you is that a number of 100-125 is a sign of pre-diabetes. My usually number is 106-114 so I am usually pre-diabetic with my normal diet and my diet is pretty darn good! 

I was able to cut that number down to 101 because I took out all the simple carbs from my diet 1 week before my water fast and it still was not enough to bring the number out of the pre-diabetes range. 

The other number is Ketones which is 0. Ketones measure your body’s ability to use fat as energy. In my case I had none.

However as you see on my last day of readings, I was able to lower my fasting glucose to 69, which falls into the Normal Range of 60-99mg/Dl. Over 60% of the US population has their fasting glucose higher than the normal range. And my ketones showed 6.5 which means my body was able to burn fat as an energy source.

And that means, that my body is now a hybrid engine. It can burn both carbs as an energy source, or it can also burn fats when carbs are not available. (Tweet this)

This may explain the added boost of energy I experienced over the 4th and 5th day of my water fast and the burn of almost 2.5% of body fat without any muscle loss. In fact, I gained muscle mass!

All in all this 5 day water fast was a total success. Not only did I not die or pass out, I actually came out a brand new person and I felt better than ever!

For those who are interested, here is a before and after picture from my 5 day water fast! Not bad for a diet that gains muscle, loses weight, loses body fat that doesn’t cost a penny!

I hope this will encourage you to try a water fast yourself. I suggest you either do a day alternating fast if you don’t think you can do a full five day, or go all in for best benefits and results with a full five day water fast.

Till next time, love what you live and live what you love.

PS: We have a brand new ebook out called ‘Gut Matters’ that goes deeper into the issue of our gut and the action steps that we can take to repair our gut and bring our bodies back to an optimal, healthy state.

This ebook is free for you to download and all you have to do is follow the link below and we will send you a copy.

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