Friday, October 24, 2014

Longest fast ever

Saturday:

Still plodding along, having good days and bad days with my eating and exercise.

My sleep all week has been horrible. It is really wearing me down. The last two nights I have tried really hard to keep my CPAP on, which means lying awake (drifting briefly into sleep then waking again) for nearly four hours before giving up each time. But even without the CPAP I've found it hard to get to sleep, and of course I wake frequently and don't have restful sleep without it.

One of my problems with the CPAP is that it has warmed up here, and having plastic stuck to my face and warm humid air blowing up my nose makes my face sweat and itch. It is really unpleasant. I've turned down the humidity twice and the temperature once over the past week, I'm turning down the temp again today so we'll see how tonight goes. I can't turn the humidity down too far or I get sore dry nose and throat.

The heat has only been the last couple of days so I don't know why I've been sleeping so badly all week. Unless it is the hay fever medication? I did switch to this better antihistamine nine days ago. Supposed to be non-drowsy but the chemist said it wouldn't stop me sleeping. Don't tell me I have to choose between bad days and bad nights.

No exercise for the past couple of days. No energy.

I've often wondered if obese people would survive a fast longer than a thin person, it makes sense that they would; that is why our bodies store fat, right? I looked it up and one guy in 1965 who weighed 207 kg (455 pounds) fasted for a year and 17 days and lost more than half his bodyweight. He told hospital staff that he was going to do it anyway so they might as well monitor him. They gave him electrolytes and yeast. I'm not sure why yeast doesn't count as food in this example, it does have calories - mainly protein but some fat and carbs. I think they gave it to him for the potassium.

Fasting can be dangerous for reasons other than starvation, heart attacks and impacted bowels for example. But it can be done, this guy basically lived off his body fat for a year. The human body is a fascinating thing.

1 comment:

  1. The problem with fasting is that once the body goes into "starvation" mode, it conserves whatever fat you have and slows your metabolism down considerably. A slow metabolism is very hard to overcome.

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