My usual pattern is only to eat one meal, in the evening. No breakfast, no lunch. I’ve been doing this for decades now, no prob.
One time, many years ago, my doctor wanted a blood test, and said, “Don’t eat anything for eight hours.” I misheard that as “forty-eight hours.” So I went 48 hours without any calories, just water. Didn’t hardly bother me at all: I was just fine with it.
(My doctor was appalled!)
OK.
As some of you know I am a gym rat / pseudo-bodybuilder.
A few years ago my training partner suggested we should try I.F - 16 hours fasting / 8 hours feeding, which basically meant all eating was to be between 10AM and 6PM, and training fasted. So, I tried it, and I did notice a decrease in BF %, without any decrease in strength. The hardest part was not eating for several hours after working out (at that time we were lifting at 5AM, so that was a long time period to go until breakfast).
My take-away was that the system had some small but significant benefits, but it was unlikely to be due to any of the bio-chemical mumbo-jumbo that I.F. fans posit. I just think it’s really hard to consume an entire day’s worth of calories in two meals.
So - try it. Maybe it will work for you.
If all I could eat was poached chicken breast, hard boiled eggs and steamed vegetables, I probably would give up eating altogether. 
I’ve done it as part of weight loss and as part of meditation or mind expansion. My longest was four days. I mean, water only. But it’s been decades.
I’m quite curious about that combination. Could you go on about it?
When I was a ballerina I didn’t eat on Fridays. It was part religious and part calorie savings. It certainly helped to keep my appetite small.
When I really needed to lose weight, I would go down to one meal per day at dinner time. During those times Friday dinner time was miserable, and I’d be seriously hungry. But otherwise it was just the first few days or missed meals that were hard.
I always felt more clear and energetic when I wasn’t eating. But be careful, that can become a “high” and I always thought it’s what the anorexic girls were addicted to.
You start slow. So many people start a ketogenic diet with some magic number of carbs, usually 20. I did this and I suffered through it and it sucked. I’ve heard drinking pickle juice or upping your magnesium/potassium/sodium helps. I lost 100 lbs in the past two years, 50 of it on a keto diet, 50 on Atkins (I think it’s called OWL). I had a few times where I fell off the wagon, and I learned the keto “flu” doesn’t hit if I ease my way in, like I cut down to 50 grams or so, mostly from green veggies and flax/almond flour. I do that a few weeks, knowing I won’t get in to ketosis, but I’m preparing for ketosis so when I do get down to around 20 it doesn’t hurt so much.
I would never attempt fasting if I hadn’t been in ketosis for a couple months. I don’t do it much now on purpose but I find when I’m in ketosis I forget to eat for a long time. I’ve found that instead of feeling hangry I’m euphoric, almost too giddy for comfort.
Some people swear by MCT oil to combat keto flu too, but it needs to be started before, it’s not a remedy once you’ve found yourself hangry. I’ve never tried it, I just see the suggestion a lot in my keto groups.
I initially misread the thread title, and I can tell you that the thread is intermittently amusing if you replace “fasting” with “farting” throughout.
When I was a kid we did it a fair bit; we called it being poor and sometimes hungry. Since then I have done it a few times along with a course of meditation and reflection and I didn’t mind it; I just didn’t see where it enhanced the experience.
That’s a good idea. The easing will be over a week rather than months, though.
Could you go on about the effects of ketosis? Does it affect your focus or energy in addition to your mood?
I see that coconut oil and cheese are good sources of MCT and they contain little/no carbs so I’ll try that, thanks.
I’m curious if I can get most of the benefits of fasting with 16/8 I.F. and ketosis. That would allow for longer stretches and enough protein for strength training.
How many days of fasting until you got that high? Did it go away even if you didn’t eat?
It’s equally amusing if you replace another letter.
Weight loss and meditation or mind expansion – well, the weight loss part is pretty typical. But weight loss can be a sort of punctuation in life, marking a transition from one theme in living to another theme. Like a bigger version of how sleeping nights divides the days into separate experiences. Or like moving from one city to another while starting a new job makes the switch more complete and more of a new start. I first heard of the idea of fasting punctuating life that way from a therapist friend, during a time when I was doing various kinds of meditation and mind expansion. The mind expansion I was doing was mostly through specialized breathing, not so much through drugs.
And it turns out that consuming zero calories for several days changes how the mind works, too. It makes it easier to drift into various levels of consciousness we usually ignore with our thoughts. Moving between levels can be especially rewarding when one is changing things about life and about habits.
I remember one beautiful moment, when several days into a total fast. I was walking along a small country road and a motorcycle went by. I could hear the motorcycle receding into the distance, and it seemed to go on forever – which was true in a certain limited sense, as there was no final “putt putt” sound, they just kept getting fainter. I could grok how the decaying “putt putt” was as true as anything else was, and how it would have been differently true and not decaying from the point of view of the motorcyclist, and how I could really feel the continuing existence of the motorcycle even though eventually I couldn’t really hear it.
These things are great to have, sometimes. Having just this holiday eaten myself full, and remembering that we should all know feast and famine, reminds me of the beauty of the famine part. Of course, for me during these adventures, famine is something I opted into on my terms, not something imposed on me - it’s hardly authentic to talk about knowing imposed famine when all I did was dabble in fasting.