Dry-Fasting 101

What is dry-fasting?

Before getting started, I thought it would be a good idea to give you my definition of dry-fasting. When I dry-fast, I don’t eat any food nor I drink any liquid. In addition, I don’t brush my teeth, and try to reduce as much as I can the number of time I wash my hands and take showers. Even though dry-fasting can sound as something extreme, I personally find it way easier than water or juice-fasting.

Can dry-fasting be dangerous?

The only danger I can see in dry-fasting is to fear it. If you are not 100% confident going into a dry-fast, it would probably be best to hold on until you fully have faith in the actual practice. My main argument in thinking that dry-fasting isn’t dangerous, relies on the fact that we are all dry-fasting on a daily basis already.  Uninterrupted sleep time by the intake of any food or liquid, is dry-fasting. Therefore, I do believe that we all have some existing capacity to dry-fast built in to our system.

For any dry-fasting period outside of sleep, It would be preferable to do the first dry-fasting experience in a safe and stress-free environment. This first experience then can serve as reference for the next ones. Each individual has different levels of toxicity, and nervous energy capital. Therefore, it can be difficult to foresee how much of a challenge the first dry-fasting experience is going to put on each individual.  My first dry-fasting experience happened to be the most challenging one. From there on, it became an easier, and later on a pleasurable experience.

My Perception of Dry-Fasting

I see dry-fasting as a sport that I need to practice regularly in order to get the maximum amount of positive results from it. To me, it’s very similar to working out. I believe that the first goal of the game should consist of extending  the eight hour daily dry-fasting capital that we all already have.

Once I started to dry-fast on a regular basis, I could observe that my progress was rather rapid . Not only the speed of the progress was noticeable, but I could also witness that the progress was occurring at different levels.

• Length: Very quickly I was be able to extend the amount of dry-fasting time. This is a great motivator in itself, and it only gets better as dry-fasting is practiced.
• Ease:The more I dry-fast, easier it gets to handle the healing crises.  A new fast is never a repeat of the previous one. It is almost as if there’s a continuity from one fast to the next. To exemplify: the second time of being at the 12th hour mark of a dry-fast, will most likely feel very different than the first time being at the 12th hour mark. This is one of the reasons why I often on this blog refer to dry-fasting as if it was a journey.
• Self Awareness: Dry fasting developed my ability to listen to my body. It allowed me to rely less on my intellectual abilities to make decisions, but rather use my instincts as a compass first, then bring the intellectual layer of reflection on top of my instinctive decision making mechanism.
• Physical Benefits: During, and short after each dry-fasting period,  I can notice physical improvements with my digestion, sleep, and overall endurance. I have lost about 20 kg / 44 lbs. since I started dry-fasting. I used to weight 85 kg / 187 lbs. in April 2016, and as of November 2017 I weight 64 kg / 141 lbs. I’m not sure if 64 kg /141 lbs is my ideal weight, but I think that it was beneficial for me to eliminate all the nasty things that had been accumulating over the years inside of my body. If I start to build muscle mass and gain weight again, at least I know that I’ll be building on a cleaner base.
• Mental Benefits:This is something that I overlooked at the beginning, and then it caught me by surprise . Today I can say that the major change with dry-fasting occurs at the mental level. I will probably write an entire post on this, because I think it is phenomenal what started to occur on the mental level, once I incorporated dry-fasting into my life. Not only my cognition, concentration and creative abilities improved tremendously, but more has happened. I was able to purify my mind from the reminiscent memories of past negative events that were constantly resurfacing to spoil the present moment. In addition, and this is maybe the best gift of all the gifts  dry-fasting has given me so far. I started seeing the naked truth of my environment. By dry-fasting regularly, I started to be able to distinguish all the threats to a healthier living in my environment. I am now more aware of the negative aspect of work related stress, social media, excessive use of electronic devices,  the noise and pollution levels. I am now able to spot a toxic person or situation faster than before. This ability to see what could be harmful to me, is helping me to build a life that respects my well-being. Ultimately, if I am able to make more good decisions and eliminate as much as possible negative elements from my environment , I will be able to make progress towards a better tomorrow . Today, I consider dry-fasting to be my main tool to navigate through life.

How to get started then?

I think the easiest way to get started, as I mentioned earlier in this post, would be to build on the existing dry-fasting capital, and extend fasting time by small increments. Since we don’t drink or eat during our sleep, the easiest way would be to gradually delay breakfast time.

Lets imagine a person who goes to bed at 11:30PM, wakes up at 7:30AM and has her breakfast at 8:00AM during week days. By just moving breakfast time to 8:30AM, that person would gain 2.5 hours of extra dry-fasting time a week. Now lets imagine that she does the same with her brunch time on the weekend. That sums up to a total of 3.5 hours a week. Lets go a little bit further and multiply the 3.5 weekly hours by 4.5 to represent a full month. We then end up with 15.75 hours of extra dry-fasting a month. That’s more than half of a day. 15.75 hours of extra time for the person’s body to detoxify and heal itself. The best part is that this could be done quasi effortlessly.

An other way we could look at it with some basic math, is add the 15.75 hours to our existing dry-fasting capital. 8.0 hours of sleep, times 7 will give us 56 hours. Once we add our 15.75 we gained by delaying breakfast by 30 minutes, we end up with 71.75 hours. If we consider that a week is made of 168 hours, then 71.75 hours represent 42.7% of a full week.  We could then fix ourselves the goal to increase the percentage of dry-fasting period versus the eating window period.

Even when  such small increments are introduced  to extend our existing dry-fasting time, usually the body’s response is to say: – “Thank you for allowing me some extra time to take care of myself.”  This is how the dry-fasting adventure usually begins. At each increment, at each iterations, your body will thank and then reward you.  This is how I personally got the the dry-fasting bug. Each time I would stick to a fasting pattern, my body would thank and reward me. This situation would motivate me to do more the next time around.

Starting by delaying breakfast is in my opinion the easiest and most effective way to incorporate dry-fasting into our lives. By delaying breakfast, we directly extend our existent capital of dry-fasting time. The body does its detoxification tasks in the morning. Leaving it alone by delaying the introduction of liquids or solid food, will help it tremendously at doing it’s daily cleaning job.

A different approach to getting started could consist of picking a stress-free day. After waking up, lets try to dry-fast as long as we can. The moment dry-fasting starts becoming unbearable, lets break it. This will allow us to get an idea of our limits in terms of number of hours that we can already dry-fast without any training. The goal then, would be to improve our personal record by repeated fasts. Weekends can be great moments for such experimentation. We can pick a Sunday, write down our threshold time, and give it an other try the following Sunday, to see if we can naturally dry-fast any longer. As with most things that require some discipline, getting started is the most difficult part. Once we get into the grove of dry-fasting and reaping its benefits, it very quickly becomes a part of our life.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more to say about dry-fasting. I already have several posts on this topic, and I will be adding more as I progress in my own dry-fasting journey. Dry-fasting has changed the way I feel in spectacular ways. I can only recommend it. That said, I always recommend to be careful as with any change. Even though I personally don’t think that dry-fasting is dangerous by any means, I am not you. So please be responsible and take your safety precautions. As far as I know, the only population who should avoid dry-fasting are the breastfeeding mothers. Always try to adapt any change or new practice to your own reality

I AM NOT A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL. I would like to make it very clear that I am only sharing my own experience on this website, and have no intention to give any specific advice on health. Please read the disclaimer section for more information.