A Month of Dry Fasting with the Biohacking Billions

Think you could do no food or water from dusk til dawn for 30 days every year? Here's why you might want to try.

Every year approximately 1 Billion people dry fast from dawn ‘til dusk for 1 month straight.

A regular fast where you avoid food is hard enough, but you haven’t experienced real privation until you’ve tried a dry fast, where you also avoid drinking any fluids.

Hunger tends to come and go. Your belly growls and feels empty when mealtime comes, but you can literally tighten your belt to banish hunger pangs (not just an old wives tale, I’ve tried it) and anyway they tend to disappear of their own accord after a short time. 

Even with prolonged fasting, after a day or so hunger stays gone, which is why in hospice care it is not considered inhumane to stop feeding people calories via the IV.

But thirst is a different story: it is a constant companion throughout most of every dry fasting day.

It is always present right there in your mouth and even though you can learn to ignore it off and on, it does slightly color your entire experience.

The 1.5 Billion people who do this to themselves every year come from all walks of life, every ethnicity and every country. 

They are young and old - preteens may not complete the entire period, but everyone else from puberty to death joins in unless they are unable to due to health concerns (although many patients you might expect to avoid fasting go through with it without harm and in fact show benefits).

The benefits range from the physical to the mental and spiritual.

I recently interviewed Dr Shankara Chetty from South Africa. He mentioned that he believes how much you eat is far more important than what you eat.

I have to agree. 

The best I’ve ever felt in my life was when I committed to eating the very least. 

It can lead to better sleep, increased energy, mental clarity and more overall life satisfaction. 

The experience is difficult to put into words because words can’t do it justice.

Obviously intermittent fasting often goes hand in hand with reduced overall food consumption, but not necessarily. 

The optimal way to intermittently fast is to eat once or twice a day within a 1-8 hour window, depending on the person. If you force yourself to overeat within a longer eating window that does prevent some of the benefits accruing.

Intermittent dry fasting is well known to lead to reduced fat mass almost universally, without muscle loss - the holy grail of weight loss. 

It also leads to decreased glucose levels and increased insulin sensitivity which has been shown to benefit those with Type 1 and 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

What’s happening under the hood is the up-regulation of autophagy, which is the body's garbage truck system. Old cells and cellular structures that need to be recycled get recycled, increasing overall health, vitality and youthfulness.

There is also up-regulation of the P53 tumor suppressor gene, which inhibits cancer as well as overall decreased inflammation that contributes to aging and age related disease.

Daytime dry fasting, perhaps counterintuitively has not been shown to trigger any significant dehydration - lab values remain within normal ranges during the fast, though superficial mucosal surfaces have been shown to be significantly dryer and there are swings in body hydration, which lessen over time, likely due to decreased sweating and urination as the month progresses.

Why might internal dehydration be prevented when we know there is significant loss of water from urine, sweat and even breathing?

Fat mass decreases during the fast which frees up some metabolic water: i.e. there is water trapped inside fat molecules which is released into the intracellular environment when fat is broken down. 

In fact burning 100 grams of fat produces 110 grams of water (the extra weight coming from inhaled oxygen which combines with some of the hydrogen released from the fat to make H2O). 

This is in comparison to burning carbs: every 100 grams utilized for energy only creates 50 grams of water.

So if you have a water deficit your body will automatically prefer burning fat to burning carbs, which is why fat mass diminishes without muscle loss - your body will preferentially burn fat over carbs or muscle protein. 

Two things: is it dangerous and do you have to sit in an air conditioned room all day, or soak in a tub in order to do it safely?

Well many competitive athletes have shown that top level performance can be maintained during daytime dry fasting. 

And studies confirm that aerobic power and muscle strength show little change during daytime dry fasting.

Despite the thousand plus years of experience across billions of lifetimes and the many modern studies on daytime dry fasting I know that no matter what I say, some will still be concerned that daytime dry fasting is dangerous in part because we’ve all been brainwashed into thinking we are so fragile that we have to all drink water throughout the day (by companies that sell us bottled water) if not electrolyte solutions (by companies that sell electrolyte solutions).

But there is also research on very prolonged dry fasting that may allay some of those fears.

Most of the literature is in Russian, but one study was reported here where volunteers dry fasted for 5 days straight without a break. There were no adverse effects, only positive ones like rapid fat loss and weight loss (2 lbs a day - some was water of course) and waist shrinkage - on average over 3 inches lost from the waist in 5 days!

If even 5 days is safe and even beneficial then 12-16 hours a day is even more likely to be harmless.

The proven physical benefits can provide a hint at the mental and spiritual benefits that may also accrue. 

Mental and spiritual benefits are obviously far more subjective, but what I’ve noticed after doing this for years and discussing it with others who have tried it is that completing this challenge every year can help empower you to take more control of your life. 

It teaches you that if you can put up with the constant desire to drink water all day then you can also put up with the mental aggravation of stopping bad habits, or adding good ones. 

It increases willpower and motivation. It also leaves you feeling mentally lighter. It’s a kind of mental and physical reset.

Those who fast for religious reasons actually go beyond avoiding food and water during daytime hours. 

They also avoid sexual activity of any kind, smoking, or other substance use and immorality of any kind, whether in action, speech or even thought.

But this doesn’t have to be religiously motivated or even a religious experience. I get people who object to meditation on the grounds that it's a religious practice that they don’t believe in. 

I say take what’s good from any culture and make it your own. 

I’m not a Buddhist or Taoist and yet I’ve sought them out and learned from them and made their practices my own. 

Dry fasting is something our ancestors were forced to do so it stands to reason it would be beneficial from an evolutionary biology perspective.

We’ve been on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years that we know of, and for the vast majority of that time we didn’t have running water and plastic bottles to carry it around in. 

Optimal health requires feast and famine and it’s long past time to consider the importance of rain and drought in our own gastrointestinal system and not mark the practice as off-limits just because it came from the alien “other”.

The best time to do it is when everyone else is doing it, as explained by Rupert Sheldrake in his theory of morphic resonance: the more people doing something the easier it is to do (he has proven this with live televised experiments on thousands of audience members), but that’s a topic for another day.

In traditional societies that practice the yearly month-long Ramadan fast participants literally congratulate each other when the month begins: as you might congratulate someone on landing a new job, or graduating college. 

The reason is that they well know the tremendous benefits that come in every area of their lives when this time of year rolls around. It’s not viewed as a chore or a punishment, but as a blessing.  

Ramadan is calculated via the lunar calendar so it moves about 2 weeks earlier every year and the start is based on moon sightings around the world, so some countries start 1-2 days after others. 

Here in the US we just go by the calculated moon cycles rather than a physical moon sighting - today is the first day of the month and I’m already feeling thirsty - but that’s a good thing.