I Did a 3-Day Water Fast. It Was Horrible, but I'd Do It Again

When the body runs out of nutrients, the body’s cells consume harmful bacteria, viruses, and junk cells to survive. This process is called autophagy, and it may start anywhere from 24 to 48 hours during a fast. Alter-ego/Shutterstock
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My friend Lynn texted me an Epoch Times article about how fasting helps people heal from long COVID and COVID-vaccine injury. I texted her back that my co-author, molecular geneticist Dr. Joe Wang, and I were also researching and writing about fasting as a way to induce autophagy, which is a cellular process to clear waste and toxins from inside your cells.
So when Lynn called the same day to say she wanted to do a water-only fast, I decided to join her.

Health Benefits of Fasting

Lynn, who struggles with her weight, has done multi-day fasts in the past. I fast for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, but I’ve never done a fast that lasted more than a day and a half. Still, I’ve read about the health benefits of fasting for years.
Among other things, studies show that fasting slows the growth of cancer cells, can help reverse diabetes and other lifestyle-induced health disorders, is especially helpful for patients struggling with obesity, has cognitive benefits, and even increases a healthy lifespan.

Since my husband and daughter were traveling, I didn’t have to cook for anyone. So I was excited to try it. I talked to Lynn on Oct. 29, and I ate my last meal on Oct. 30 at 2 p.m.

To do a three-day water-only fast, I would have to eat nothing and drink only water until the afternoon of Nov. 1.

Jennifer Margulis recounts her experience of going 72 hours without food, with only water and a bit of fasting salts for sustenance. (Ronda Snyder)
Jennifer Margulis recounts her experience of going 72 hours without food, with only water and a bit of fasting salts for sustenance. Ronda Snyder

The 1st Day

Skipping dinner on Oct. 30 was easy. The first 24 hours, which were so hard on Lynn that she caved and ate dinner, were a piece of cake (if you’ll permit me the expression). Probably because I’ve done my own version of intermittent fasting-lite for several years. I don’t usually eat breakfast. When I feel like I’m over-eating or eating too many unhealthy foods, I'll sometimes skip dinner, breakfast, or both.
I actually got into this healthy habit of allowing longer intervals between meals after embarking on a weight loss journey in September 2015. Back then, it took me 10 months to lose 15 pounds.
I’m an omnivore. I’ve eaten everything from chicken feet to fried crickets (a delicacy in Niger, West Africa, where my family and I spent a year in 2006). But I credit the weight loss mostly to dietary changes.
For me, switching to a more plant-based diet (I still eat meat, but in small amounts and not every day), made the difference. I slowly lost an additional 20 pounds. I’m 5’5” (and shrinking) and weigh about 130 pounds, although that fluctuates.

Monday Misery

But I’m sorry to report that the feeling of ease and heightened energy that I woke up with early on Oct. 31 changed abruptly after I had done three hours of writing.

“I’m hungry,” I texted Lynn at 8:35 a.m.

She wrote back, “Good grief, it’s been five minutes.”

I wrote, “Starving, wasting away.”

She replied, “I’ll call the coroner.”

Lynn gave me a stern pep talk. She told me to take off my baby pants, put on a GI Jane cape, and drink as much water as I could every time my stomach rumbled.

Inspiration From Dr. Jason Fung

I spent the morning at the office but started to feel very grouchy at about 11 a.m., 19 hours into the fast. I submitted my articles at roughly 1 p.m.

Feeling good again, I bicycled 10 miles to Lynn’s house, which took me about an hour. Lynn (whose husband was also out of town) and I spent the rest of the day watching lectures by Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who champions fasting (both intermittent and long-term) for weight loss and diabetes. We binge-watched, chugged filtered water with fasting salts in them, and rested. I’m not a napper, but I dozed off a couple of times.

As Fung pointed out in a 2019 lecture that has been viewed by 7.7 million people, most conventionally trained medical doctors (whose “anti-logic” approach to human health never ceases to astound him) know very little about fasting. Sadly, many allopathic physicians usually aren’t interested in educating themselves.
But, he argued, despite this institutional close-mindedness, fasting is an effective weight loss technique and good for the body in many other ways as well. It works much better than the conventional advice to reduce calories and increase exercise, which leads to more weight gain over time, according to Fung. The Biggest Loser contestants don’t hold reunions because most have gained back all of the weight they lost, he pointed out in the 2019 lecture.
Fung also mentioned that some elite athletes—who have no weight to lose—also fast because it gives them a competitive edge. Would you rather be a hungry wolf or a sated lion, he asked the audience rhetorically.

Benefits to Fasting

Fung has written several books about fasting, including the bestselling “The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternative Day, and Extended Fasting.”
According to Fung, there are many benefits to a multi-day fast:
  • It’s free
  • It’s convenient
  • It adds time to your day (because you aren’t cooking, eating, or cleaning up after meals)
  • It’s not predicated on making dietary changes
  • It helps you lose weight
  • It lowers your blood glucose levels
  • It reduces your dependence on medication
  • It has positive cognitive benefits, making you feel more aware and clearer-headed

Tuesday Feels Worse

All this theory sounded great, but after I heaved my bicycle into the back of Lynn’s car and she drove me home, I realized that my legs were aching and that I was exhausted.

“I’m so flicking hungry,” I text Lynn at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 1.

Despite another productive and energetic early morning, I finally have the caffeine-withdrawal headache I thought I had dodged, and honestly, I hurt all over.

“Why is today harder?” I wrote.

Lynn texted back, “Because it’s not tomorrow yet.”

I responded, “When will it be tomorrow?”

Lynn called me.

“Focus on the autophagy,” she scolded. “Your body is currently busy doing a miracle. It’s taking apart old broken things, like the rusty components of a car, and building it back shiny and new. It’s magic.”

Autophagy is how cells deal with broken parts or a lack of food. Each cell contains organelles, which are like a cell’s organs. When a cell runs out of food or when one of these organelles stops functioning properly, the cell breaks it down and turns it into essential nutrients to build new organelles or to create energy for the cell to keep living. When we eat food, cells need to process it and do various other jobs, so they can only engage in autophagy properly when we don’t eat. If cells are little factories, autophagy is how they keep all the machinery in top shape and running smoothly.

Unfortunately, thinking of autophagy didn’t make me feel better.

Even though I still had work that was incomplete, I was really and truly miserable. I gave up trying to write, and instead, I sat outside on a wicker chair in a patch of sunlight. It felt healing and restorative, like my body was eating the sun’s rays. I stayed outside until the sun dropped below the roofline.

Things went from miserable to disconsolate. I started feeling nauseous. I went to the bathroom a thousand times, I had been sweating on and off, and my head still ached. It was so bad that I could no longer drink water because even a small sip made me feel sick. By then, all I could do was lie on the couch. I was too miserable even to check Facebook.

I video-called Rick Kirschner, a naturopathic doctor based in Sandpoint, Idaho, who has done many fasts in his life, to ask him if I was going to die. He and his wife are both in their 70s, hale, thin, and energetic.

If the proof of good health is in pudding, Ricky and Lindea are walking talking testaments to the benefits of fasting and healthy eating. Lindea even once did a fast for 20 days, Ricky told me, something he doesn’t recommend.

Ricky scolded me for biking, popping a dried pear in his mouth. Watching him eat made my stomach roar.

“You need to rest,” he said. “A slow walk is fine but a 10-mile bike ride? That was stupid, kid.”

Tuesday Night

As soon as it was dark, I headed upstairs to bed. I fell asleep right away but woke up to stumble to the bathroom. My head was still pounding, and I had new aches to add to my list of woes: a tooth that was once cracked but healed itself in my lower jaw was throbbing, and my psoas muscle in my left hip was also killing me—a basketball injury from ages ago.
Earlier that day, Lynn read me something that explained that once your body is engaging in autophagy and you’ve put no food in your system for a while, your cells will revisit and repair old wounds. The medical literature confirms that this is true for skin and eye wounds, although scientists writing in the journal Biomedicines said that the “mechanism is not yet clearly understood.”
There must have been some serious healing going on in the left side of my skull. Every time I woke up, I talked to my headache. Still, despite all the discomfort, I felt oddly relaxed and at peace. I had no desire to read or look at my phone, and I wasn’t stressed out about not sleeping. It’s like I had entered a Zen state. I just existed, there in the dark. In fact, I was so calm and centered that I fell back asleep each time. So even though I must have woken up nine times on Nov. 1, in the morning, I felt much better. And the nausea, blissfully, was completely gone.

Day 3

When you tell people that you’re water fasting, you find out that many others do it, too. My friend Dan, who owns a construction company in the East Bay, California, texted me that he has been fasting a few times each year for two to three days each time. And Dan’s even done a seven-day fast a couple of times.

“Hunger goes away, and you develop superhuman senses,” Dan said. “Sight, smell just get super intense. You don’t sleep, and you have more energy than you’ve ever had.”

But, he noted, “Day 3 is the worst. By a lot.”

Everyone’s experience is different. Although my biking legs were still aching and I wasn’t getting any of the promised benefits of mental clarity or extra energy, there was something empowering about knowing that I was in the home stretch. Day 3, with its reward of food in the afternoon, proved to be a thousand times easier than Day 2.

I made a big pot of organic vegetable broth, and the house was filled with the cozy tangy smell of onions, carrots, garlic, and scallion tips simmering on the stove. I fantasized about drinking a cup of broth—which Ricky suggested I do when I was feeling so sick the day before. All I could think about was eating the potato I had cooked in it, along with an organic salad. I kept looking at my watch and counting how many hours were left on my fingers.

A friend once told me that she wasn’t afraid of the pain of natural childbirth. She knew it was finite, and she knew she could withstand it because it would end. But even though I was fantasizing about food, the hunger was miraculously gone. I felt obnoxiously proud of myself. A small part of me was grateful to be alive. When I first heard about long-term fasting, I thought it sounded deadly and potentially lethal.

Lynn checked in to confess that she had broken her fast again—she also ate dinner on Day 2. But, she said, she didn’t have any sugar, which is something she struggles with. The inflammation in one of her legs had gone down so much that it no longer hurt her, and she was starting to feel good.

The church bells chimed at 2 p.m., which meant that I was allowed to eat. But I waited a little longer anyway. The food was delicious, every bite a burst of flavor. I was so grateful—to Mother Nature, God, and the universe—that I was practically in tears. Dan was right: The sun looked more radiant, and the neighbors I passed on the street more looked kindly.

Lessons Learned

Later I learned that I made several mistakes with this fast. One metabolic specialist told me that I should’ve had water with fasting salts all three days, not just at Lynn’s.

Another medical doctor who’s a proponent of fasting said I should’ve taken activated charcoal when I started to feel really sick. The theory there is that toxins are being released and the charcoal helps absorb them and flush them out of your system.

I also shouldn’t have been so physically active right at the beginning. And I probably should’ve taken Ricky’s advice and had some bone broth instead of suffering so stubbornly.

The fast was miserable. A day later, I felt like a million bucks. It’s too soon to know if I reaped any long-term health benefits. Still, I can’t wait to do it again.

Jennifer Margulis
Author
Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning journalist and author of “Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family.” A Fulbright awardee and mother of four, she has worked on a child survival campaign in West Africa, advocated for an end to child slavery in Pakistan on prime-time TV in France, and taught post-colonial literature to nontraditional students in inner-city Atlanta. Learn more about her at JenniferMargulis.net
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