We’ve been told by the lying establishment and the Rockefeller pseudoscience of ‘modern medicine’ that fasting is starvation and therefore bad. Of course, anyone who have looked into it know that fasting is the best and quickest way to detoxify and heal pretty much anything, and most importantly, a way to extend your lifespan. However, among those who know this, we still have people telling us that ‘dry fasting’ is bad and dangerous. This false idea most likely comes from mixing real science with the accepted false pseudoscience, as I know of people doing dry fasts for 5 to 7 days and swear by it. And then we have the old Russian protocols of dry fasting as a rapid healing therapy used in medical care before it got too corrupted. For example, Dr. Shchennikov who patented his method of dry fasting in 1993 and performed 7 to 10 days of dry fasting with fantastic results with thousands of patients. He actually did a 21-day dry fast himself. He claimed that 11-days are the perfect length of a dry fast for curing virtually anything.
Actually, I’m two and a half days into one of my dry fasts as I write this – and I walk 3 to 4 hours a day with my dogs and I feel a lot better than I do on a water fast. According to pseudoscience and propaganda, people have been convinced that it’s impossible to go without water for longer than three days. That’s just ridiculous, and if that were true, I should be half-dead by now and suffering — and anyone making it 7 to 10 days or longer should be long dead. But they are not, and I’m thriving.
Before we dive into the physiology, let’s define ‘dry fasting.’ There are two ways to go about it, we have regular ‘soft’ dry fasting which is self-imposed abstinence from food and water, but where you still can have contact with water, as in washing, bathing, and showering. Then you have the extreme ‘hard’ dry fasting where you simply abstain from any contact at all with water. This ‘hard’ fast is not recommended, and I’ll explain why in a few minutes.
Autophagy
As a way to survive starvation, humans developed an ability called autophagy, an ability that is turned on as soon as we have gone without food for a while. For most people autophagy is turned on after about 8 hours without food, for others with a damaged metabolism, it can take 16 hours. It usually reaches its peak at about 48 to 72 hours without food. In other words, if you do it right and do not eat close to bedtime, sleeping will be a short dry fast, as it was designed to be. A rest period for the digestive system and a reset for the hormonal system. However, in today’s polluted world full of stress and very bad and lacking food sources (especially all plant-based toxic crap), perfectly managed sleep is not enough to keep you clean. Planned dry fasts a couple of times a year is a must if one is to remain healthy and avoid detoxification phases (symptoms that pseudoscientists call disease, cold or flu.)
To be perfectly honest, there are actually three forms of autophagy. The most basic ‘macroautophagy’ and ‘microautophagy’ is activated as early as 30 minutes into starvation (after all food has been digested.) This is usually what takes place during night. After 10 hours the cells switch to chaperone mediated autophagy. This is the demolition and rebuild crew. This is why real fasting is necessary for really restoring health. Just doing intermittent fasting won’t cut it.
Also, extending the time in autophagy is needed for more complex cellular repair. For example, old dysfunctional cells that have build-ups of protein because they can’t digest it, scarred tissue from injuries, excess or injured skin, cysts, and tumors. For that, at least 2 to 3 days of dry fasting is needed, or 5 to 7 days of water fasting. And most likely it will need to be repeated several times to fix everything. Remember, autophagy is a cleaning- and recycling system that clean out years of stored inner-cellular trash and age markers to restore youthful cellular function. Depending on your age and lifestyle, that work is not done in a few days. And with that being said, the most complex cellular repair will only be possible during dry fasting as it’s the optimal milieu for the body to heal.
The word autophagy is from the ancient Greek; ‘auto’ means self and ‘phagy’ means to eat. The literal meaning of autophagy is ‘self-eating.’ It’s the body’s self-correcting system that operates when digestion has been halted for a period of time.
In other words, autophagy is a life-critical survival trait in more ways than one. It also activates the bodily systems that protect the brain and muscle. It also cleans the cells, restores metabolic function, it turns back our aging-clock, and provides building materials for new cells. Activating autophagy keeps us healthy and free of toxins, and it makes it easier for us to survive future challenges.
Dry fasting, why it’s better
The main thing about dry fasting that separates it from regular ‘water fasting’ is that you deliberately pause the digestive function. When external water is taken into the body it’s treated as food. Drinking water stimulates gastric juices and hinders the transition to endogenous nutrition, i.e., using body fat effectively as fuel. Drinking water during a fast also prevents the blood from becoming concentrated which then can’t stimulate the hypothalamus to start endogenous water production. In other words, every time you drink water, energy production from body fat is halted for a short period of time and your body’s ability to manufacture the pure and beneficial metabolic water is hindered as it is not needed due to you consuming water. In more technical terms it functions like this; when you drink water, the total dissolved solids in the blood are low and the osmoreceptors in the hypothalamus are not stimulated to signal the pituitary gland to release ADH. Without ADH the adrenal medulla isn’t stimulated to release epinephrine to stimulate Iipolysis (breaking down fat for fuel.) Without epinephrine, lipase isn’t activated to unlock glycerol and fatty acids stored in fat. This reduces the utilization of stored fat for fuel. When there’s no signal to stimulate epinephrine to use fat stores (since you’re fully hydrated) glucose is then temporarily produced from glycogen stored in skeletal muscle cells. Then, with glycogen exhausted and glycerol mostly unavailable from fat cells, hepatocytes in the liver start synthesizing glucose through gluconeogenesis using pyruvate, lactate and glucogenic amino acids taken from skeletal muscle tissue. In other words, ‘fat burning’ is not as effective while you are drinking water and your body will have to compensate for its energy need by breaking down muscle tissue. However, during dry fasting everything works at optimum levels and your muscle tissue, including heart muscle tissue and organ tissue, is protected. This is why dry fasting is so much safer than water fasting. And since dry fasting is more than double as effective, you only need to fast a few days to reap amazing benefits.
The protective mechanisms of fasting
Brain, heart, organs and muscle mass is protected during dry fasting by drawing on the energy stored in fat cells to maintain blood glucose, and by the fact that growth hormone production more than doubles. Fat cells contain triglycerides that are a combination of fatty acids and glycerol, and although fatty acids can’t be converted into glucose, glycerol can. Although glycerol and fatty acids can turn into fuel by your cells throughout the body, they are not used as energy by the brain. To meet the energy demand of your brain, the freed glycerol and free fatty acids are converted in the liver into glucose and ketones in a process called ketogenesis. Ketones are actually the preferred fuel of the brain, and that is why you feel more mentally alert when you are in ketosis.
Gluconeogenesis
Then we have gluconeogenesis, which means ‘making new glucose,’ as in ‘sugar.’ Being able to convert amino acids, fatty acids, glycerol and lactate into sugar and ketones are all the safeguards needed to meet the glucose needs of the body and brain during fasting. And keep in mind that on a dry fast, where autophagy is running high and not being interfered, there will be a lot of amino acids available from all the damaged and malfunctioning cells that are being broken down and recycled.
This is why fasting is said to be muscle sparing, because of autophagy. And this is why people starving and people on ‘survival shows’ lose so much weight and muscle mass – because they are still eating whatever they can find. They never get into real fasting and they never activate autophagy to its full potential. Remember, as soon as you eat, autophagy is terminated and then it takes 8 to 16 hours before it kicks in again. And if you go without food for more than those hours but still drink water, you hinder the processes of energy production and metabolic water production. That is why people who are starving are miserable and lose weight as quickly as they do. A smarter way in a starvation scenario would be to dry fast and gather food, then have a big meal or two, and then fast again – going in such cycles.
In the next part we will go deeper into the body’s ability to manufacture its own endogenous metabolic water and also look at detoxification and how dry fasting makes it all so much easier.
Part 2 is here:
Dry Fasting – The Best way to Fast? Part 2 of 2