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Information curiosity

I’m curious about how often someone can fast without putting your body into a starvation state and hurting your metabolism, to be more specific I’m inquiring about how often you can safely do 24h fast, 48h fast, 72h + fast, I figure the shorter the time you spent fasting the lower the “cool-down” per say, I highly doubt it would be safe to fast 72h once a week but there wouldn’t be any issues with fasting 24-36h once a week, but I am ignorant on the science behind frequency, so I’m very open to personal testimony and statistics

Answer

it depends on how much fat you have to burn. how healthy you are to start

ive been fasting 3+ days a week for over two months (plus some 5 and 7 day) and my last blood test had zero issues except a little low vitamin D (thanks to it being cold and i am not get much sun)

so heath wise it had zero effect except for me to lose a bunch of weight i really needed to start losing.
and i am personally not taking much for supplements at all, few electrolytes, one a day vitamin it pretty much it.

Answer

IDK, Im doing rolling 72’s and so far, so good. That means I eat one meal, fast for 72 hours, eat one meal, fast for 72 hours. Have been going for a little over 2 weeks now having considerable fat to lose

Answer

Generally speaking, for someone at healthy weight and without an eating disorder (so will actually eat enough to maintain weight), a 1d/week is probably the max I’d recommend.

2d/week which I have done for years takes an insane amount of effort to make work. You need to eat a huge amount, and basically eat continuously on feeding days to ensure maximum nutrient uptake and protein synthesis. Otherwise just fasting 2d/week can drive healthy people to anemia in as little as 7 weeks (as in this study):

<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4143608/>

These are very high levels of restriction. 1-2d per week is like 15-30% of your eating, so you have to start eating really massive amounts to make up for it.