“How can you go 7 days without eating anything?!?” “Weren’t you hungry?”
I get it. Fasting sounds miserable to most people. Maybe a day or two, but how does anyone go without food for 7 days in a row?
Note: For starters, I do not recommend that anyone try to do a multi-day fast without some guidance or adequate preparation.
It’s not as bad as one may think, but it is definitely a mental game. One thing that helps me get through a multi-day fast is the mental commitment. I had already made a decision at the beginning of the fast that eating is simply not an option for the intended time period. Simple . . . 7 days, no food. That leaves no room for bargaining with myself whether I’m going to eat something or how much.
“100% is easier than 98%”
That firm decision actually makes the process much easier for me. In fact, I had planned for 2-3 weeks to do this most recent fast, deliberately timing it for a period in my calendar that wasn’t interrupted by social outings or other events that would have posed a challenge.
When doing a water fast, it’s an all-or-nothing prospect. I chose to eat nothing. That level of commitment is a whole lot easier to comply with than if I were to attempt to eat only a small amount of food each day. If one allows a small amount of food daily, then one has to plan and decide when to eat and how much to eat in order to make the best use of such rations. This phenomenon is sometimes stated as “100% is easier than 98%”. ‘All-in’ is easier than ‘almost-all-in’.
By knowing
ahead of time what is allowed (e.g. water with electrolyte drops), that frees up bandwidth to focus on other things. This concept explains why Steve Jobs wore the same outfit (blue jeans and black turtleneck) every day – he was eliminating ‘decision fatigue’ so that he could direct his energy towards bigger and better things.
Eating takes up a significant amount of the average person’s day – about 1 hour spent primarily focused on eating, along with another 15-20 minutes spent eating while performing some other activity (ref).
I was more aware of that void in my schedule during this most recent 7-day fast than during previous fasts, perhaps because this fast did not include any bone broth. Usually, if my family is eating dinner, I’ll sip on bone broth to feel like I’m participating in the meal. In a sense, I missed the activity of eating more than the food itself.
Anti-inflammatory effects of fasting
One of the reasons that I chose to do this 7-day fast at this time was to tap into the anti-inflammatory nature of fasting, hopefully to change the trajectory of my miserable shoulder. I injured it 6 months ago due to an awkward motion while setting up a car roof rack, and it caused mild issues initially. For some reason, that ultimately escalated in the past couple months to cause ‘frozen shoulder’, aka adhesive capsulitis. It’s a miserable condition and is poorly understood, causing surprising jolts of pain and many sleepless nights. There are a multitude of treatment options that have been attempted to treat it – a clear sign that nothing actually works.
Since we have some (emphasis on some) evidence that fasting is anti-inflammatory (ref, ref, ref) and I had encountered an anecdote of an individual appreciating significant improvement in both pain and mobility with frozen shoulder from a prolonged fast, I wanted to put it to a test for myself.
Effect on my shoulder
Ultimately, there was mild improvement in both pain and mobility after 7 days of fasting. I’m not making any grand claims about its effectiveness, but I suspect that the fast did in fact alter the trajectory of my frozen shoulder. Overall, my level of pain decreased. In regard to mobility, there was a definite, albeit small, improvement, as I was able to pass my belt through the center belt loop on my pants, a feat that was not possible for the previous month.
Regardless of the limited benefit to my shoulder, the fast was good for shredding some body fat and also presumably for the autophagy benefit.
