ex_dryfast report: 48h of no food, no water

Surprisingly easy, but still ended as abruptly as water fasts

I alluded to this recently: I was finally going to dry fast. In retrospect I was probably way too careful & scared by all the online discussion about it: don’t do it in the summer! Don’t exercise at all! It’s so hard! Your pee will turn black and you’ll dehydrate into a piece of jerky!

None of that happened, and it was in fact quite easy to go for 48h.

Goal

I didn’t have a real target in mind. I recently water fasted 2x for 5 days each. Dry fasting is supposed to be 2-3x more difficult, but also 2-3x more effective than water fasting.

For fat loss, I think the idea is that the lack of water forces your body to break down fat cells to get at the water inside of them. That way, you will apparently lose fat at a significantly faster rate than when water fasting.

By that logic, I thought, I could expect to last 1-3 days.

I ended up doing exactly 2 days, right in the middle.

I had tried reading a book by a famous Russian dry fasting guru. But it became so esoteric and weird (auras, crystals, no brushing teeth/showering, ..) that I ended up skimming most of it.

Overall I just wanted to try it. Amber O’Hearn recently posted Why Dy Fasting? and that helped inspire me. Bart Kay has also talked about it at length.

Maybe a side goal: I felt that I had initiated the rice diet wrong. I’d done a 3-day protein refeed, then launched straight into the rice diet.

My goal, then, was that I would already have loaded up on water weight, and wouldn’t see a rise from ex150 crossing over to ex_rice.

But, in retrospect, this might’ve prevented the rice diet from working the first week or so, or it might have been (partly) cause of me gaining fat on the rice diet. Of course I don’t know until I try it again without the protein refeed first.

In any case, this time I took a different route: the dry fast would surely rid me of all excess water weight I would’ve gained over my previous refeed, and give the honey diet, which I’m doing right now, a fresh start.

How it went

My weight went from 224.5lbs to 230.5lbs during my 3-day refeed. It went back down to just over 223lbs after 48h of dry fasting.

There’s already quite a drop from the morning of my last refeed day to the first dry-fast day. I started the dry fast at midnight, and I probably ate less on the 3rd refeed day, just because all the new exciting foods had become boring.

So I’m not sure how much of the (water?) weight loss to attribute to the dry fast exactly, but it could be 5-7.5lbs.

Most of that was lost on the first day, similar to water fasting: I was down almost exactly 4lbs after just 24h of dry fasting. The second day only provided another 1lb.

Say what you will, but it brought the refeed weight down faster than it appeared.

Gradually, then suddenly

Very similar to my recent water fasts, I felt totally fine the entire time until I suddenly got intrusive thoughts about drinking water around 10pm the second night. They briefly went away, then came back at 11pm.

I had told myself I’d only do the fast until I experienced pretty much any symptoms, so I stopped at midnight to round off the full 48h, and had some water, some tomato sauce, some cream, and some home-made pemmican leftovers. There were no refeed symptoms, possibly because of the short duration of the fast.

Interestingly, my thirst didn’t seem to increase at all during the 48h. I remember telling a friend that I was about to start the dry fast, and that I was already thirsty when I started. But the thirst never got worse than that. Even when I quit, I wasn’t particularly thirsty - I just had these weird “water thoughts” lol. (Yes, just thoughts of drinking a glass of tap water.)

Maybe a more experienced dry faster would’ve pushed through, but this was my first attempt, and 48h seemed solid.

In water fasting, which I have lots of experience with, I don’t think “pushing through” is useful. It’s a symptom that you’ve outrun the adipose flux available from your body fat, and you’re probably now starting to catabolize lean mass. Presumably, not the goal of the fast.

It was curious to see similar “intrusive food thoughts” just with water on the dry fast as I used to get back when I water fasted a lot.

Now I don’t know if this would’ve appeared had I “pushed through,” but I was never even uncomfortable doing this. No signs of dehydration. I would say I sweated about normally, and while I didn’t pee a lot, I did pee and it wasn’t particularly dark.

I suppose I should put a warning here that dehydration is bad and you should only do dry fasting at your own risk, but my own experience of it was just pretty relaxed and unspectacular I suppose.

Of course, it could also be that the magical benefits (besides water weight loss) only start appearing once you get into the Danger Zone. I don’t know.

Notes

Some notes I took during my 48h:

Not sure if I should do stuff to sweat more or less?

Day 1:
very mild headache, similar to no-caffeine so could just be caffeine withdrawal?

Day 2:
slept 11h (!), normal is ~8h

no headache

a little "empty stomach" feeling (not quite hunger pang) in the early evening

constantly low-level thirsty, but interestingly i'm not more thirsty now than on the morning of day 1

watch is very loose on wrist

late evening: got "intrusive water thoughts" similar to what I used to get about food when water fasting

went away but then came back again 1h later

decided to break the fast after midnight, 48h after I started

broke fast with some water, heavy cream, tomato sauce, a bite of pemmican, and decaf tea

Oh yea, I had forgotten about that: the first night, I slept a crazy long time. Not sure if that’s related to the dry fast?

I also obviously couldn’t drink any coffee or energy drinks, so I was coming off my normal caffeine consumption cold turkey. If anything, withdrawal was even milder than last time.

Will I dry fast again?

Probably, yes. It was way less scary or difficult than I had imagined it from all the talk on the internet.

In fact that’s a common theme. When I “came of dieting age” in the early 2000s, people talked about the keto diet like it gave you cancer. Only crazy people would even attempt it. Not only did nobody I know do it, nobody even knew anybody who’d ever tried it.

The crazy people like Tim Ferris did CKD (cyclical ketogenic diet) or other variants, but nobody I had heard of had dared go full keto.

Now, 20 years later, keto is banal and yesterday’s news. Practically everybody on Diet Twitter has done long-term keto before: some with success, others without.

Carnivore is normalized now, which would’ve given everybody in 2000 a heart attack.

A similar thing has happened with water fasting, as thousands of people fasted a lot and nothing particularly bad happened to them. (It also doesn’t seem to lead to lasting fat loss for very many people, it’s just very drastic caloric restriction.)

I suppose dry fasting is the next frontier. And I’m not particularly ahead of it, even among the people I talk to on a regular basis, several have been dry fasting for years now.