Dry Fasting — health maintenance protocol
Started with a hormetism article 5–6 years ago, that convinced me through sheer logic (body adapting to “poison”) to try it out. So did cold showers, it was a great timing, mid of winter, there was this DOTA championship i wanted to watch so i woke up 4–5am jumped into cold shower doing light movement while staring at the open window and pouring cold water on my head.
This had a huge impact personality wise, mental attributes wise, leading also to a change in philosophy, but i’ll address that in a different post.
So, since then ran into WIM HOF, ran into HEAD STRONG, JACK KRUSE, ran into many virtual sources that offered more and more insight into this physical tweaking path.
I naturally swung to low carb, then keto, then zero carb with fruit fasts, then i wanted to integrate fasting as i had this gut feeling of inefficiency.. but i got distracted with the philosophy part of things (which is just as essential) and didnt push it further.
Down to earlier this year, after the most consistent winter of cold baths (i have this great bathtub right next to a low wide window), i dont know where i read it first, but i found something about dry fasting that clicked, because again, LOGIC, theres no animal constantly drowning in water like humans do.
This lead me to integrate my normal way of eating which became practicaly zero carb OMAD, to be zero carb Dry OMAD. probably went like this for a few months.
[assumption] Dryfasting can get you into ketosis in 12–24h, while water/juice fasting 36–48h.
I was in this Principia Lenta facebook group for a while now, and someone mentioned Snake Diet guy on youtube, and him having bad language. It stuck in my head, didnt go right to it, but it stuck.
After a few weeks i actually looked him up, I was already (again) deep into autophagy studies, so this complemented it well, with the added practical, experimental side of diet. The man, Cole, is an ISTP, so experimenting is in his blood, it was a feast binging on his videos while multitasking. Eventually my intuition got fed sufficient information — i was convinced and motivated, just had to wait to finish my prepped food.
Im currently 66h into an ongoing dry fast. there were lower moments, but essentially I sit at 1–2 / 10 hunger and 3–7 / thirst (after sleep im at the lowest values). And again, i found recently the information to support resilience and LOGIC. Your fat cells have a ton of water, but the process of burning them is as fast as your fat storage size. I’m lean, probably 10% bodyfat, so it was normal that i would run out of energy as the funnel didnt output enough. That lead me to take a rest, wait it out, and thats what happened, the funnel pulled through.
note: there are hard and soft dry fasts
soft — water/skin contact, hard — no such contact.
im not convinced by the difference, but im doing a hard one.
I forgot to mention, what did i learn from COLE? — besides a positive example (7 day dry fast) and positive attitude — well he did a lot of experiments with Salts, which i was unaware of, i mean i knew ketosis needed some salt, but never found too much information into it. So Cole talked about Na K balance, K, wow never tried that. Bottom line was, water fasting would flush out these minerals, these electrolytes making you malfunction. So its either Dry or Salts; water fasting (which i did 7days of) was the worse idea — and by my experience i can only agree.
I’m thinking, why not rely on the body to balance everything, why add salts, Im all about efficiency, so lets test the limit of this dry fast. In my head 7 day dry fast should be easy, maybe even 20 days, but i need to work my way towards it.
Another thing, breaking your fast, this is also dependent on your salts [assumption by Cole] which again makes a lot of sense, as i never had any issues with breaking a fast directly with meat, even when i water fasted which was the worst case scenario.
this are the priorities ive come up with intuitively: top to bottom, what has the greatest healing / growth potential.
functionality failsafe system (healing)
5.0 low frequency feeding (1/few days, snake diet)
4.5 temperature therapy (cold bath, cold shower, face dunks // sauna, hot baths)
3.5 sleep quality (not quantity, circadian rhythm, EMF)
3.5 emotional efficiency/stability (philosophy, mental attributes, selfesteem)
3.1 sun and grounding (morning sun, sungaze)
3.0 nutrient quality (hygienic, organic, cooked/raw)
3.0 physical activity (calithenics, tai chi, HIIT)
2.5 nutrient macros (zerocarb, keto)