this is what my belly looks like in a ct scan these are my abs and this is my belly button and this is a scan after seven days without any food the purple stuff is all fat and after seven days without food a massive amount about 26 of this fat was apparently burned off recently my buddy abraham and i did a seven day fast and tracked several dramatic changes to our body we jabbed a glucose sensor into our arms to track our blood sugar we had our different wearable devices track in our sleep we used a scale to track her weight we both got a ct scan before and after and we used a fasting app to log the huge fluctuations in our energy productivity and especially mood throughout the seven long days without any food i wanted to do this fast because i had been quite stressed out at the time so i was hoping to get some of the mental benefits from fasting i had been reading about and abraham was looking to get a jump start on his weight loss and fitness goals we learned a couple things about hunger and losing weight we experienced plenty of unexpected challenges but also unexpected benefits and saw some interesting differences in our results to be honest we really didn't prepare in the best way so i just finished my last meal which was a bunch of ice cream two scoops here two make it three we had an all you can eat korean barbecue for dinner on friday abraham's last bit of food was oreos and a sparkling water at 9 pm and i finished my ice creams at 9 30. my huge last meal led to an unsurprising spike in my blood sugar what you're actually supposed to do is lower your blood sugar before fast because the benefits from fasting don't really start until you've burned off your body's sugar stores okay so i've been fasting about 20 hours i feel pretty good even though the first day is usually the hardest i think the trick is to just stay really busy i was onto something here because i was actually surprised at how easy the first day was until i sat down to wait for a table at a chinese restaurant with abraham and her girlfriends i was suddenly feeling really hungry fatigued and was extra pissed off that we had to wait a perfectly reasonable amount of time while it wasn't ideal watching them eat all kinds of delicious looking food while i just drank tea and salt the issue was more that i finally had some down time i stopped moving after doing my taxes working and walking around all day for the fast by the way we only consumed water tea and black coffee since fasting can deplete salt and electrolytes leaving you feeling drained and tired we were also taking salt and electrolytes in our water in fact it's thought that hunger is sometimes the body simply craving salt as you'll see later i was surprisingly able to cure my fasting fatigue and hunger with extra salt many times throughout the fast looking at abraham's mood journal i don't think he was initially too satisfied with his tea at the chinese restaurant plenty of tea salt and chatting lifted my spirits and it looks like abraham ended the day not feeling too bad either unfortunately by 2 pm the next day things started to go downhill for him pretty exhausted it's hitting me kind of hard trying to stay positive obviously but it's like i feel like my head is a little like lightheaded tired so about 41 hours into the fast at this point today was pretty easy the morning was easy but then when noon rolled around that's when things got hard because that's my usual eating time when i have to do anything complicated and get pissed off like i had to set up this dump before shot now i feel way better now that i'm just out and walking about 42 hours in i just logged a frowny face on my fasting app feeling pretty drained so we're about 44 hours and 20 minutes in feeling a lot better i had a little bit of sparkling water with some salt and now i've upgraded my journal to a slightly smiling smiley face what was interesting about sunday was that near the end of the day i experienced a huge drop in blood sugar late afternoon which coincided with a big drop in how i was feeling same with abraham around the time there was a big dip in blood sugar he was feeling pretty bad you might have heard that all the energy your body uses comes from the carbohydrate or sugar in your blood but when the body is low on carbs it can produce ketone bodies from fat that the brain and body can use for energy however even after you deplete your stored sugar it takes a while for the body to start burning fat and producing these ketones so at this point we were probably experiencing the very unpleasant state of low blood sugar and low ketones however later in the night it seems i was in light ketosis as my ketones hit 0. 8 millimole and now that my body finally had some ketones to use for energy this is probably why my mood started to improve third day on the fast woke up not hungry and uh feeling actually pretty good so that's the first then the keto test strip and uh and definitely almost purple which is a great not too hungry all up but obviously if you put some food in front of me i definitely would want to eat it i feel like i'm in like that flow kind of feeling because my thoughts are just making sense best way i could explain it's like focus really well on my thoughts rather than being all scattered like where i am most of the time on this day i woke up feeling not very refreshed and had a gnawing in my stomach my sleep data didn't show that my sleep was terrible but i slept less than usual and in particular was getting less rem sleep while i wouldn't say this day was super difficult i was getting a little frustrated and discouraged i wanted to do this fast because in march i had been reading several studies talking about the various alleged mental benefits from fasting like significant reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms one study found significant improvements in emotional well-being for over a thousand people doing multiple day fasts my usual background hum of anxiety had been a bit stronger than usual so i wanted to see if fasting would actually improve my mood but by the end of the third day if anything i was more anxious because i had a ton of work to do and the fasting was just making me less productive abraham ended day three feeling pretty crappy and started day four tuesday with fatigue and muscle cramps i'm pretty pretty exhausted um i'm not hungry but it was hard to actually take the shower felt like i have really low energy abraham's usually full of energy and is the kind of guy to light up in social situations so it stood out to me when he said he wasn't particularly energetic or even smiling for his sales job on top of his work being affected by low energy and brain fog he continued to feel bad pretty much the whole day he was nauseous and dizzy which are very good reasons to stop fasting so i suggested he should probably just throw in the towel [Music] the next day we met up to talk about the fast okay so what happened yesterday yesterday day four um i kind of woke up feeling the crappiest i've had in this whole fasting experience woke up with like a headache body aches i also was not able to focus i had really low energy throughout the whole day so i was definitely not myself and that was really detrimental my work after my work i took a three hour nap and essentially that didn't help at all i woke up feeling dehydrated i felt body aches and i had a slight headache so why was abraham feeling so bad well blood sugar is normally expected to be between 70 and 100 milligram per deciliter however this day was when his blood sugar was the lowest dipping several times under 70 and it briefly went as low as 54.
so some of his symptoms were probably low blood sugar however as blood sugar drops while fasting the body tends to secrete a bunch of sodium the sodium insult has a bad reputation but sodium is actually really important for the body the symptoms of not having enough are pretty much what abraham had fatigue weakness headache nausea and muscle cramps so it made sense that he felt a little better when he had some salt but it didn't entirely do the trick for him so he took a long nap but still continued to feel bad now the electrolyzed potassium and magnesium are thought to get depleted during fasting and symptoms of low magnesium are weakness and nausea also i remember several years back when i did my first and only other seven day fast it was actually pretty terrible way harder than this one i felt weak and fatigued for most of it and i happened to be drinking loads of black coffee during that fast now abraham had been taking one of these per day to supplement the electrolyte sodium magnesium and potassium but he was also drinking two to three cups of black coffee a day not only does fasting itself deplete electrolytes but to make things worse caffeine depletes sodium and it makes it hard to absorb magnesium and when your magnesium levels are low the body excretes more potassium so if i had to take an unqualified guess i would say that abraham was probably low on sodium and maybe magnesium and potassium due to the one-two punch from fasting and coffee now one thing i didn't mention yet was that abraham was doing all this despite the most ridiculous sleep and work schedule he had just moved to japan so his work was still an american time meaning he was waking up at 3 am every morning to do sales calls for 8 hours straight all while doing the fast despite this intense schedule abraham decided to push through and continue the fast now there are plenty benefits of fast of a few days or even just 16 hours so if you're feeling ill on a fast it's probably better to celebrate your gains and restart your fast another time abraham had some salty broth that night which helped at least for a little while and he went to bed not feeling terrible but not great either luckily my day 4 tuesday wasn't too bad today was pretty easy yesterday i had some low points around the times that i would usually eat and today i had low points again around the times that are usually eat but it's about half as rough as yesterday and then sometime around the afternoon i had some a couple boosts in mood i was feeling really good like i had a cup of coffee or something this is when i finally started to feel like i was experiencing benefits to mood i often carry a lot of tension in my shoulders and neck but on this day as i was walking around i noticed that tension was no longer there in fact while honestly i was thinking about food a lot my mind was free of the usual worries and anxious chatter about things i need to or should do i wasn't euphoric but i was being much more calm and content than usual i went for a run after taking this video log and while i felt pretty much normal i didn't quite have my usual endurance so today day five i actually was feeling really good energetic no brain fog really at all i was hitting all the key points i actually felt like myself right so i was crushing it there and then throughout the day i mean i pretty much had the same amount of energy as if it wasn't normal like before day one before this fast and then today we've just been like hanging out and playing like games like ddr and like really active out here and i'm not feeling exhausted you know so we're still going you know we have i have a lot of energy and honestly today is a thousand times better than yesterday we just did 30 minutes of a pretty intense uh aerobic video game how do you feel i was winded during but i feel fantastic now i feel like i'm energized and i can still take on the world so you're not gonna pass out or anything no i don't think so not yet i mean i've gotten like my electrolytes and stuff so as for me this morning was pretty bad i woke up really early about an hour and a half then earlier than usual i was feeling pretty crap kind of low blood pressure i was up for another two hours or so and then i went back to bed and got another hour and a half of sleep felt a lot better but then i still had this really like drained feeling so i took a bunch of salt and then i had my caffeine and then now ever since then i feel great like i'm not even hungry i just feel a little bit more focused on things than usual a little bit more in the moment and not so scatterbrained compared to usual so i just kind of feel like myself not hungry feel good i can focus on things i can do the work that i need to i had several moments in this day when i felt even better than my normal self my mind felt even more quiet and calm than the day before and it wasn't so much that i was amped up like i took a stimulant but that i could really focus and enjoy the present moment as if i had just done a super long meditation session so i took a bunch of salt let me comment real quick on this i mean quite a bit of salt about nine grams or one and a half teaspoons of salt dissolved in a bunch of water looking at my mood journal there were eight entries over five different days that said something like i was feeling bad and hungry then i took salt and felt better whenever i felt weak fatigued or too hungry i would take some electrolytes with however much salt it took to feel better and it almost always worked what's interesting is that despite having more than 20 grams of salt on this day and the day before my blood pressure was on the low end makes you wonder if it's not the salt that gives people high blood pressure but whatever they're eating with the salt now let me warn you that nine grams is kind of a huge amount of salt to take at once i don't recommend starting out with that much i suspect my body is adapted to a high salt intake as i've been eating a ton of salt since i made a couple videos about it in 2017. doing a fast i'd recommend you introduce salt slowly maybe two to three grams at a time dissolved in a cup of water on day one at the chinese restaurant i offered abraham some tea with a bit too much salt and it made him nauseous for the record you can successfully do a water fast without any extra salt or electrolytes people do that all the time however i simply feel fats are much easier when i do add them especially in the first couple days i was noticing just about an hour ago i had this real nice lift and mood kind of like i get when i drink some caffeine i noticed that i was just real positive didn't have any of that monkey mind anxious worrying about things that i needed to do or should have done or whatever it might be and i just was reaching out to all my friends felt really chatty really sociable that's usually how i feel on caffeine but this was happening even though i hadn't had any caffeine so so as you can see the rest of day five and day six was pretty great for both of us interesting how the days got easier the longer we went without food at this point let me comment on hunger the almost unexpectedly difficult part of the fast was definitely the amount of hunger i had i did not expect for that majority of time how extremely hungry i would get i definitely know what that feels like as that's how i felt on my first couple fasts however i feel like your perception of hunger changes the more fast you do i feel hunger can appear as either bad or neutral like the neutral is more like maybe you feel a bit of gnawing at your stomach and eating food sounds really fun but you can go about your day no problem the bad is when it feels like there's a hole in your stomach sucking out all your energy and you're irritated and struggling to be productive i did have that on this fast but it was only around my normal eating times and it only lasted about 45 minutes to an hour the first three days i got hungry at lunch and dinner times days four and five i only got a little hungry at lunch time in days six and seven i pretty much didn't have any hunger i guess the easiest part of the fast was when i got over the hunger need or the need to eat which was like around day five or six this one paper said that hunger disappeared for 93 of people doing four to 21 day fasts this morning i'd actually felt i woke up at our usual around three ish and i didn't feel too good i didn't have the same amount of energy as day six or day five um i started working and after once starting like eight or nine i started feeling similar to what was like day four like a train wreck except for like the muscle aches um i really it was really difficult for me to actually focus or even want to do anything because i just didn't have any energy i was feeling really weak so i took a nap and stuff but that didn't help and then afterwards i actually made it over here to you know joseph's place and then he was like hey have some coffee and then finally at around like 1ish or 1 30 i started feeling normal but most of the day i'm not feeling good so on this morning i woke up way too early at 4 50 with a huge stomach ache and low energy but decided to just stay up and work after taking about 8 grams of salt i was feeling better and surprisingly alert and focused and got a lot of work done later i took a nap to recoup my lost sleep and i went to the gym and did pull-ups and squats for about 30 minutes without any issues by the way i did get my muscle mass checked but the best thing i could find was the in-body device which apparently is the best bio-impedance device for measuring body fat and muscle mass however i've heard that it's still not that reliable and when my results said my body fat percentage was six percent almost on par with chris bumsteads i knew these results were garbage so unfortunately i can't really say what happened to my muscle on this fast no of course it's not accurate so the rest of the day went pretty good for me and abraham was back to his old self after some coffee there's still a lot to break down about this fast so let's jump to my before and after footage i think there's a noticeable difference in my body and particularly my face and hands by the way i forgot to take it before picture so this is actually 20 hours into my fast for weight loss i lost 6 kilograms or 13. 2 pounds and abraham lost 5 kilograms or 11 pounds after the weigh-in with 2 hours to go on the fast i decided to do 250 push-ups not that 250 is particularly impressive but i think the average person who's never done a fast would assume that after 166 hours without food you would barely have the energy to go about your day much less do push-ups for 30 minutes straight so anyways the point is uh it's been seven days haven't eaten i'm not falling down i can do a push-up and abraham was okay to exercise too as mentioned on day five we did some pretty heavy cardio and it's not like we had better endurance or anything but we didn't collapse either but for the record i don't recommend ending a seven day fast with a bunch of exercise before we get to our other data and the realities of fasting let's talk about eating so what was it like finally getting to eat after all that time to be honest it was a little anti-climactic it's definitely relieving and enjoyable to eat and while i felt i could taste things very clearly it wasn't like it was abnormally pleasurable i was surprised at how full i got from this since it was only about 500 calories oh [ __ ] oh my god i'm pretty full yeah abraham said he also got full really easily after breaking as fast now while i was physiologically full after my small meal i was satiated psychologically i was really excited that i could eat again and i went ahead and ate another thousand calories of meat kimchi and sweet potatoes the next day was similar i would eat and my body would quickly tell me i was full on a small amount of calories but i kept eating until i hit my usual 2 300 calories or so because eating is fun and i could finally eat so pretty quickly i was back to my usual eating habits but if you're trying to lose weight i expect you could maintain some of this post-fast reduced hunger for a while if you just eat to satiety maybe the first day but what about the preceding days would you say it was really easy to get full for sure like i any little thing i would eat i would be full in my last video about fasting i talked about a paper where people fasted for two weeks then were quote perfectly satisfied with an 800 calorie diet that they ate for another two weeks now that's pretty drastic but if i had to recommend something i would say commit to a period of time where you eat just healthy foods and a set number of calories after your fast in my experience it really does seem like fasting resets your appetite and your cravings so if you're doing a fast to fix your diet habits you can use that period right after fast to make eating healthy and eating only to satiety your default earlier that afternoon around 5 pm on friday we went and got our ct scan results the way a ct scan works is like slicing a ham it takes snapshots of little slices of your body so here you're basically looking down into my torso from above now this test isn't measuring overall body fat percentage but it's measuring the area of fat in a midsection slice as shown at the start of the video it seems like i lost 26 percent of the area of fat near my belly and abraham lost about seven percent i'd expect there to be discrepancies in how the before and after pictures were taken so maybe my fat loss wasn't so high and maybe abraham's was higher the reason for the big difference in fat loss might be due to so-called fat adaptation i've been experimenting with fasting ever since 2016 or so i did one meal a day for almost two years i was eating every other day for a couple weeks at one point and i've done tons of two or three day fasts so my body and liver may be more adapted to the process of switching from relying on glucose or sugar for energy over to using fat and ketones for energy so the silver lining is that fasting should get easier the more you do it also sleep is very important for fat loss and abraham definitely did not have the luxury of a nice sleep schedule as for my sleep data what was interesting was after 24 hours of fasting this night i slept much longer and my sleep was apparently better than the three days before the fast when i was eating normally the app gave me my best sleep score yet 85 and the percentage of my sleep that was rem sleep was way higher 27 percent however you can see that there was a bit of a decline in the amount of sleep i got as i progressed in the fast and the percentage of my sleep that was rim declined noticeably abraham's rem sleep was declining throughout the fast then it jumped up after five days of fasting dropped down after the sixth day and then shot back up after you ate some food on the seventh day if you're still curious about what happened on this fast drop a comment below as i mentioned already i was taking a bunch of salt and electrolytes to curb my fatigue and hunger throughout the fast that's where this video sponsor element comes in i was drinking a bunch of these during the fast on some days i was having four or five the phenomenon where your body excretes more sodium and electrolytes is essentially due to drastically reducing your carbohydrate intake so as someone who's been playing with fasting low carb and keto diets for a while i was really happy to find out about element also i find they give me more energy for my workouts regardless if i'm doing low carb or high carb element tastes great and my favorite thing is there's no junk in it it's just a well-balanced mix of electrolytes sodium potassium and magnesium a bit of flavoring and some stevia if you prefer there's also a raw unflavored type with no sweetness or 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