How a 23 Day Fast Changed My Life
By: Ella Alderson
Tags: Weight Loss, Health, Self Improvement, Fitness, Science

Of course the weight loss was dramatic and almost instantly noticeable. By the third day my face appeared — at least to me — thinner, smoother, and with more defined cheekbones compared to my usual rounder shape. It was encouraging to see the changes unfolding before me, almost like witnessing the creation of another person with my same personality and my same life but somehow prettier and…better.

The truth was that I’d never meant to begin the fast in the first place. It was early autumn and the change in season had brought along with it a debilitating spell of depression. I call them “spells” because depression sometimes seems to appear out of nowhere, malicious and magical, binding in the way it ensnares the body and mind. There are those of us who eat more when we’re depressed because food is a comfort. Not me. I lose all interest in food and feel sick soon after forcing myself to eat anything. In the past this had lasted only 2 or 3 days at most.

But on this occasion the depression was more menacing, more rooted in me than ever before. It got me through the first 10 days of the fast. During that time my only meals were old glasses of water left to gather dust on the nightstand by my bed. I toyed with gummy vitamins and eventually got 1 or 2 down. That was all, for 10 days.

By the 5th day I was cold even if nobody else around me felt the same. A nurse had once told me this was because the body becomes warmer after digesting food. A byproduct of a functioning metabolism. By day 8 I couldn’t sleep much, but neither did I feel tired during the day. I was morphing into some animal that didn’t need to sleep more than 5 hours a night. Shorter fasts on the other hand appeared, in some studies, to improve the quality of sleep for the people involved.

At the beginning of that week I’d weighed 155 lbs (70 kg). By the end of it I was 140 lbs (63.5 kg). Almost one entire dress size dropped in the course of a handful of days.

Much of this initial weight loss was water that I’d regain once I resumed eating. But after 3 days of fasting the body also enters a state of ketosis in which it begins to use fat stores as its primary source of fuel. The body doesn’t usually resort to using fat because it runs on energy from the carbohydrates we eat throughout the day. Fasting also causes the release of human growth hormone which makes it easier for the body to use fat while at the same time protecting muscle from breaking down in the process.

Once insulin is released by the pancreas, it signals the body to store energy as fat. But during periods of fasting these insulin levels decrease so that the process is reversed and fat is lost instead of gained. Close up image of fat cells in the body.

There’s also an unexpected change that comes with prolonged fasting. Studies show that after the first three days or so, a hormone called ghrelin actually decreases in the body. This hormone is responsible for stimulating appetite and promoting fat storage. I wasn’t, even after the depression had subsided and I once again had interest in food, starving and obsessing over my next meal. In fact what bothered me most wasn’t hunger. It was lack of sleep. Having been blessed — or cursed, as some might feel — with intensely rich and vivid dreams, I looked forward to immersing myself in those worlds at night. There often appeared in those dreams large ships and crowded ballrooms, jungles thick with ancient insects and the malignant threat of dinosaurs leering behind dense dark copses of trees. In one dream I met another version of myself in a parallel world. Her bedroom window was open, and her face was turned to mine.

It is important to note that there is a drastic difference between restricting calories and fasting. The body does not react the same way to these two methods of weight loss. In studies where patients are asked to restrict their calories to about 1,000 or so a day, their weight loss is not as dramatic as with fasting. They also lose more muscle mass, are hungrier, and lose strength and endurance. All this while growing increasingly fixated on food and going as far as to hoard it in great quantities. Their metabolism can drop by as much as 40%; fasting, in the short term, has been shown to increase metabolism by about 14%.

But it wasn’t all easy for me. After 2 weeks my weight loss had decreased to about 8 lbs per week and my hunger was slowly starting to return. This was still a remarkable rate when you consider most diet plans can only promise to help you lose some 5 lbs (2.2 kg) in the first week and only about 2 lbs (1 kg) per week after that. I was losing weight at 3–4x the average rate. All without exercise or miraculous pills.