
A year without food (2012) - gasull
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm
======
darrickwiebe
Harpers Magazine published a much better written article that discusses this
same Scotsman along with an American who achieved some slight fame for his
fasting around the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, the author
writes about his own fairly significant fasts.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/95722979/Starving-Your-Way-to-
Vigo...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/95722979/Starving-Your-Way-to-Vigor)

After reading that article and doing a little bit of further research online,
I tried a pair of fasts. The first was a week, followed a few months later by
one of 10 days. My experience was very similar to what the author describes.
That is, I felt good during the fast after the miserable 2nd day. Coming off
the fast was no problem, either. Food was actually not a significant
temptation during the fast and I found the discipline aspect to be much easier
than the couple of standard diets I've ever tried.

I'm tall and about 50 pounds overweight (~200 lbs would be my target weight).
In the 10 day fast I lost roughly a pound per day, but for me the weight came
back within just a few weeks. I suspect that to have the best results I'd have
to continue my fast for 5-6 weeks.

In fact, I only broke my fast because I was leaving for a road trip vacation
in which I had to drive. My focus was actually fine and I was able to write
software with no problems during my fast, but wasn't willing to experiment
with long stretches of driving.

I'm actually looking forward to my next fast which I hope I can make last at
least several weeks.

~~~
vacri
If you eat a lot and then go on a diet, remember that for the first little
while a part of your weight loss is simply a reduction of gut content. If you
go back to your old dietary volume, part of the weight you regain is simply
the gut 'filling up' again.

Of course, it also depends on the kind of foods you eat and how slowly they
move through the gut, but it's just something to keep in mind when considering
weight changes around dietary boundaries.

~~~
Expez
Another effect leading to weight fluctuations upon starting / ending a diet is
the body's usage of glycogen stores as an energy source. For every gram of
carbs the body stores as glycogen it stores around 4g of water along with it.
Thus, when you burn through all the glycogen in your liver and muscles you
will lose a lot of water weight, several kilos in fact. This weight will also
be regained when you start eating normally again.

------
alphaoverlord
There are significant risks to such an experiment, and it's a shame that there
isn't any record of what happened to him after the fact or his long term
health.

There is a significant body of literature suggests that in addition to risks
during starvation, there is significant harm and danger in trying to eat again
[1]. The GI tract atrophies (much like when we don't use a muscle or a limb
for a long time with a neurological disorder), and there are many metabolic
complications in restarting to eat.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome)

~~~
solarmist
They mention "Some five years later, he had regained only 7 kilograms", so it
seems they had a least one follow up and I assume if he were permanently
harmed by this they would've mentioned it as a caution.

~~~
spdub
Although I agree with you, this is hardly a scientistic journal.

~~~
solarmist
Of course not, but catastrophic results make exciting "news".

------
smoyer
I fasted entirely for lent one year (40 days) and after the first week, the
hardest part was indeed that I was missing the social aspect of eating meals
with friends and family. I took vitamins, and drank more water than I normally
would but was quite happy.

I should also mention that I stopped running so hard during this period and
took a multivitamin each day. I've fasted for shorter durations and it's
amazing how even 2-3 days without food seems to sharpen the mind. You'll feel
less sluggish and simply feel more alert.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
The hardest part was social?! Really?! I've done a couple five day fasts and
the hardest part is that after day three you have an effective IQ of 65. Your
body shuts your brain down and you can't think clearly.

I wonder if this has an under-explored psycho-therapeutic value, actually.
When you can't mentally ruminate at all anxieties definitely dissipate. I'd
recommend fasting as a way to clear one's head for sure. You can't get any
work done, though. You really need a week off alone.

~~~
neltnerb
Day one was mostly hard due to habit (I cut out sugar and carbohydrates four
days prior, so no withdrawal to deal with) and after day 8 or 9 I started to
feel a bit weaker. But in between I felt more energetic and was certainly no
less sharp mentally (I mean, I was still doing quite well in my coursework and
research).

What really stuck out for me was just how much time I was spending each day
either planning meals or eating them. Easily four hours a day, including
cooking, cleaning, eating, and planning meals with friends.

The social part was not so big a deal for me, but only because there were four
of us in our fraternity trying it all together. Plus, well, living in a
fraternity and being in college. I didn't need the excuse of a meal to hang
out with people.

~~~
kalms
I imagine that ones metabolism factors in as well. I was sick once, couldn't
eat anything for 14 days due to large wounds in my mouth. I felt fine if you
factored out the pain.

Lost 8-10kg (I'm an athletic, not large person) and I could barely exit a car
when I visited the doctors office. I remember being very tired, but not
feverish, so I don't think that factored in.

Regained the weight extremely fast when I started eating again. I remember how
that surprised me!

------
jey
This appears to be the corresponding academic case report:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/)

------
DanBC
I've spent some time around people with anorexia nervosa.

In my opinion (with no science to support me) it is easy to 'give yourself
anorexia' by starving yourself and making use of thinspo materials.

Although there have been campaigns to remove the worst thinspo material from
popular sites it's still easily available.

As other people say, the re-feeding is also tricky and dangerous. So, while
going hungry is probably okay for most people please be careful and get help
early if you think it's becoming a problem.

When adjusted for other factors anorexia has the highest mortality rate of the
mental illnesses, killing something like 20% of sufferers. (Although that
number is a bit old now.)

~~~
gadders
There was a documentary on the BBC a while back about the liberation of
Auschwitz, and the doctor that had to find a method of re-feeding the
survivors safely. IIRC quite a few died when being put back on "normal" food.

~~~
BSousa
During that time, Ancel Keys did a few experiments to help develop a protocol
for that exact issue:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment)

------
mingabunga
I've been eating once a day since May last year, I eat only at dinner time and
eat what I want and quite a lot. I don't get hungry until about 4pm, but then
I go and do exercise. It's helped a lot with alertness, thinking is much
clearer during the day, and I've always done a lot of sport and been quite
slim, but I've really cut up since doing this (I'm 40 now, no fat around my
middle). It's had no negative effect on my exercise or energy levels, so I'm
just going to continue. I'm not completely strict with it, if someone asks me
for breakfast or lunch then I'll go, but otherwise I've been pretty consistent
with it.

~~~
D9u
I also often eat only one meal per day, have never been overweight, have
always (until recently) been extremely active, and as I near my 50th year I am
still not carrying around a lot of extra fat.

Once in awhile, maybe every month or two, I'll go three or four days with
absolutely no food but plenty of water.

I've been in better physical condition, but my doctors are happy with my
current BMI.

That said, I've always felt better when I ate less food more often.

~~~
mingabunga
Another thing is I get to save $$ by not buying lunch and breakfast. Plus I've
not been sick (cold or flu or anything really) since starting this and I kind
of wonder if my body has more chance to fight infections because it's not
constantly processing food. Just a thought as I used to get colds/flu at least
3 times a year.

------
eupharis
Something I didn't know:

"A very small part of your energy comes from breaking down your muscles — but
you can avoid this by doing some resistance training, otherwise known as
pumping iron. The majority of your energy comes from breaking down fat."

I thought fasting would always cause your muscles to weaken. But this makes
more sense for evolution. If your muscles are being used, the body takes
energy from all other sources first. The preserved muscle could make all the
difference between eating and not eating.

~~~
vidarh
You will definitively _feel_ weaker and be unable to work out as hard. Even a
days worth of poorly timed meals and/or too little protein can mess my weight
lifting up for the following day, and fasting quickly forces my lifting volume
down substantially (though amino acids from your protein intake can stay in
your blood stream for a few days, so if you've kept protein intake high, you
can keep things normal through a couple of days of fasting).

But the main predictor of how quickly you'll _recover_ your strength
afterwards will be whether or not you keep up resistance exercise. After a
weak of lazing about during vacation, it can take me 2-3 weeks of hard
exercise to be back at my peak. After eating too little or fasting for a short
while, it's mostly just a matter of getting well fed enough again. I don't
have experience with longer fasts, so I can't say how much they'd affect me,
but it does take time to trigger substantial muscle breakdown, and even if you
do lose muscle, getting back up to the same strength is _much_ quicker.

------
cupcake-unicorn
Thanks for this article - I've often wondered how long one could live by
fasting if they were quite overweight, and this helped answer it.

I feel like a 2 year old asking this, but, "He defaecated infrequently,
roughly every 40 to 50 days."

How does that work if he wasn't eating any food?

~~~
lostlogin
Have you see what a new born baby produces? That liver is still ticking
along...

~~~
pyre
To be fair, a new born baby has a full digestive tract. They have been
'eating' and 'defecating' during the last leg of the pregnancy while in the
womb. That stuff has to empties out of their system when they are born.

------
rickdale
Been fasting everyday for 20-24 hours since June 1. Once you get used to it
theres nothing to it. I like that I can feast everyday and on top of that its
much easier to eat healthy and make a good decision about the foods for your
feast. The benefits to my focus while fasting is significant. There are
streaks almost daily where I feel like I am on adderall just pumped with
adrenaline. Also, you get a muscle pump during a fast. I don't know, not for
everyone, but it works for me.

~~~
wfunction
> Been fasting everyday

> I can feast everyday

Pardon me for asking, but which one are you doing exactly?

~~~
Scaevolus
It sounds like he's doing Intermittent Fasting (IF), where you only eat for
specific periods each day-- the precise amounts vary, from 16 hours fasting /
8 hours eating (basically 2 big meals) to 20/4 "Warrior Diet" (1 huge meal).

[http://www.leangains.com/](http://www.leangains.com/) is one of the better-
researched sites promoting it.

------
ladzoppelin
"Potassium is essential for the proper working of the heart, and when his
potassium levels got a little low around the 100-day mark, he was given
potassium tablets for about 70 days. "

This is why fasting is out of the question unless you have constant medical
supervision. You need a prescription to get potassium supplements that
actually meet the daily requirement.

~~~
VLM
"You need a prescription to get potassium supplements that actually meet the
daily requirement."

Where do you live?

Google or Amazon for sodium free table salt. Find a potassium chloride based
one. Don't pay more than a buck or two per ounce. Don't take more than a
half/quarter teaspoon and drink lots of water. If you can taste it, you didn't
add it to enough water. It tastes awful in high concentration. Chlorides are
like that.

I get leg cramps if I work my legs too hard in hot sweaty weather and don't
get enough potassium. A banana or two prevents that and is a great paleo-type
breakfast. Sometimes it would be inconvenient so I eat a little sodium free
salt. The "official" RDA for potassium is around a half to quarter teaspoon so
eat that much sodium free pure KCl table salt. Use your brain a bit... you
wouldn't dump a quarter cup of that stuff on a fried egg, so don't consume a
quarter cup of that stuff. But millions of people daily dump a fraction of a
teaspoon of it on their meals, so a fraction of a teaspoon a day probably is
similarly likely to be OK.

The stuff in K pills is laughably small almost homeopathic dosage level. Like
99 mg in a pill. What you eat 20 of those per day? Just use the sodium free
salt.

"constant medical supervision."

This is true, not just K level issues. Many people walking around with some
level of blood sugar "issue" and suddenly stopping intake is asking for
trouble. Of course, suddenly doing much of anything is usually a bad idea.

This is one of those things like drunk driving where the odds of anything bad
happening are extremely low, but when something actually happens, its really
super awful and best avoided.

This whole fasting topic is a poster child for moderation. Consuming precisely
half your normal intake would result in the same exact benefits, at half
speed, but probably only a hundredth the medical issues. So the average
goofball goes all in, of course, like health is best modeled as an extreme
sport.. Dumb idea.

------
ucha
Something is suspicious here. He lost 125kg of which roughly a third might be
fat and two thirds water. A gram of fat burns into 9 kcal. He fasted 382 days.
This means that he burned about 980 kcal per day which sounds very low even
for someone that is not doing any exercise

~~~
refurb
You'd be amazed at how much your metabolism can slow down when you fast. When
in college I saw a presentation at the medical school where they showed the
effect of low calorie diets.

It's not unusual for people on low calorie diets to see a 30-40% drop in their
basal metabolic rates. And those are diet where the person is getting _some_
food.

I agree that 980 kcal/day is pretty low, especially for someone of his size,
but it's not completely out of the question.

~~~
js2
It will apparently also go the other direction, speeding up to consume excess
calories in order to maintain your "normal" weight -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHQshbJATVQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHQshbJATVQ)
\- skip to about 49 minutes. One of the guys in this experiment, where they
doubled their caloric intake for about 6 weeks, had his metabolic rate go up
30% to compensate.

~~~
anonymous
> Once you make fat cells, they never ever go away.

Well, that's pretty depressing. Maybe the next big thing in combating obesity
would be finding some mechanism to get rid of extra fat cells?

~~~
beagle3
Seems like you can make them look for fat and burn it. Google "brown fat". It
seems that cold exposure activates this mechanism.

------
gasull
When I've tried to fast into the night, I wake up in the middle of the night
and have to eat something otherwise I can't sleep.

Does this happen to anyone else?

~~~
rickdale
This is why I eat only at night. I sleep better with some food in me and cant
sleep while hungry. Try fasting during the day if the night time fast doesnt
work for you.

~~~
gasull
Thanks. I do sometimes. But I wonder how people manage to do multi-day fasts.

------
tessierashpool
I've had good experiences with fasting and I'd recommend it to anyone. My
longest fast so far was 7 days. No food, just water. I lost about 20 pounds.

I worked from a book by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and have since undertaken a few more
fasts, with phone guidance from another doctor at Dr. Fuhrman's office.

When I fast, I rest the whole time. The first few days of my 7-day fast, I
hung out with a friend, did a bunch of reading, and watched some TV, but by
the end of the fast, my energy level was so low that even trying to watch TV
was too demanding for me.

Caveats: I am not a doctor, but the book I was working from placed a "safe
fasting" limit of around 40 days, with 30-35 being the real practical limit in
nearly all cases, iirc. The book also recommends medical supervision for
anything more than a 7-day fast. My doctor said the same thing.

~~~
manmal
Why do you fast for so long if it's such a bad experience? If you'd do a 16h
fast every day you'd be fit all year round and still have plenty of energy
(for me, more energy than without fasting). Check out leangains.

------
pilas2000
Everyone is overlooking the fact that he was fed yeast, a source of protein,
during most of the fast.

Without protein his muscles and body organs would have been consumed and he
would have died.

------
cup
Its auspicious that this post came up towards the end of Ramadan, when Muslims
fast for thirty days or so. That being said, they break their fast each night
so its not a continual solid fast. They do go without food and water though,
interesting.

------
kang
I eat one normal meal and 2 cups of tea daily for past 7 years. I do moderate
exercise thrice a week. I am healthy rather fat. My BMI is 27.

I have never fasted but am planning to soon.

I can say for myself that body doesn't even need as much as I eat.

------
Aron
In theory your red blood cells continue to get recycle correct? I always
thought a sizeable amount of your feces was from this. Yet, he pooped every
40-50 days? Wonder what that looked like.

------
Aron
I have an ongoing theory that diet matters extremely little aside from various
extreme scenarios. Things like this help me to confirm my confirmation bias.

------
edmond_dantes
I've went 6 days without eating; I was playing Halo on my PC and was really
into it. Lost eight pounds (much of it probably water weight).

------
bearpool
All of this feels like a bit of stunt-ism to me. Encouraging behavior in
humans that is fundamentally bad for us.

~~~
VLM
Depends on which archeologist or anthropologist you talk to.

What and how we eat since McDonalds was invented a couple generations ago does
not have much relationship to what and how we ate for millions/hundreds of
thousands of years.

There are some hints in how we're unable to store vitamin C, so obviously we
evolved to rely on a relatively stable source of citrus. On the other hand the
gallbladder seems optimized to digest large amounts of fatty meat every couple
days at most, rather than none ever or small amounts every meal. Our long term
iodine storage is somewhat lacking indicating a bit of coastal living /
seafood would be a good idea. Given that ethanol is a systemic poison, our
livers seem well evolved to get rid of it compared to other systemic poisons,
indicating a modest consumption is probably reasonable, although not drinking
is probably wiser. Our unimpressive long term iron storage, at least for
women, indicates a reasonable source of iron (meat?) be hunted down and
consumed at absolute minimum every month or so.

Now you can use modern high tech living to hack what your body was evolved to
do, for moral or ethical or profitable reasons. We've got a ridiculously
complicated world wide food production infrastructure, and a pharma
infrastructure, and lots of scientific knowledge, so why not hack the system
and go vegetarian even if its un-natural. Or occasional weird processed stuff.
But the modern ability to hack it, doesn't mean the body doesn't have an
inherent set of design constraints WRT nutrition. And occasional fasting does
seem biologically part of the design. Otherwise we'd simply keel over and die
once the initial blood sugar dropped too low, because it would be
evolutionarily simpler to insta-pee out as ketones any fat or excess carbs
consumed at the time of consumption... Aside from the obvious evolutionary
positives of being lighter and faster. So we're built to pig out for a month
and starve for a month.

------
a8da6b0c91d
Starving people die from lack of protein, not low body fat. Not having read
all the details, I I don't buy the story that the guy didn't eat for a year.
You can't survive without eating protein for an extended period.

You die of starvation when your body runs out of amino acids to renew cardiac
tissue. Calories and stored fat have little to do with it. A fat person will
die of starvation before a muscular person.

~~~
jacquesc
They gave him this for 10mo
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast)
not too many calories, but enough protein to keep all the levels in check

No one should ever try this without constant medical supervison (which this
guy had).

~~~
vacri
That qualifier should be included more prominently - this wasn't a strict
fast, because he was still taking on nutrients. It's still a surprising feat,
but it solves the questions of 'how did his muscles survive?' and similar.

