People try to create a cushion to be able to fast longer. Right? We assume that this is the correct way of going about it. I mean scientifically it makes sense. The bigger the cushion, the safer the fast. But is this what we should be doing if we're truly looking to heal a deep-seated illness?
You'll be surprised by the answer. In fact, usually trying to bulk is not the right answer. Let me go deeper on this topic and advise you on why you should approach this a little differently.
[I will be expanding on this topic in the near future]
Problem 1: Pesticides in nutrient-dense food
Most people eat junk to put on weight. Cooked starches, nuts, seeds, -> acid-ash-forming foods, and HIGH levels of pesticides. This is why it's good to get away from grains from your diet. Even though grains have been a nice staple and cheap food for thousands of years.
The problem is that they are too high in pesticides nowadays. Crops are sprayed with pesticides to serve as a desiccant, which also preserves them for longer. It dries out the crop. In this sense they are always oversprayed because it makes sense financially, it's not even about the pests anymore. Rice has arsenic too. The reason I don't include meat in this is that meat as a secondary layer of pesticide degradation has less.
There's a lot of debate on meat and its acid-forming metabolism of protein, but personally, I think that eggs are a fantastic source of food. I will never tell people not to eat eggs as a lot of fruitarians would.
All these pesticides and chemicals just create a whole new toxin load that your body will have to deal with as you dry fast again and again. Falling into a never-ending loop that simply causes more pain than it is worth.
Problem 2: Weight stabilizes, but you keep setting yourself backward
Weight eventually stabilizes during a dry fast. Naturally, from what we assume scientifically, the body requires a set amount of energy and water throughout the day, even when sedentary.
However, if we observe what happens with extreme dry fasters who push the envelope, we start to realize that the body actually slows down quite significantly and you almost stop losing weight on the deep end of the dry fast. Muscle memory, or the fasting muscle that I usually talk about. The body learns to preserve nutrients. This is similar to the way an animal hibernates, where the body really slows down.
Does this mean you might not be able to do as much as you could on the first day of the fast? Absolutely. But you're here for health and not for bodybuilding, right? If you're here to look good or to get swole, then you don't really care about the food you ingest to bulk, and this doesn't necessarily relate to you.
But for most of us, we're here to heal. And healing requires great sacrifice and an understanding of how to push our bodies to the depths of the healing abyss. In this case, it means not putting on too much weight, because it will also affect the level of healing. Think of it like this, if you constantly put on a cushion of weight, you will always have to fight through that before reaching into deeper healing.
Problem 3: The more fat you have the less likely the body will go after the damaged and mutated cells.
The less fat you have, the more need the body has to go after damaged and mutated cells with chaperone-mediated autophagy. For healing, you actually want the body to target some more proteins.
In dry fasting, it's so aggressive towards fat in the early days, that your proteins get spared. It's only on the first days during the post-absorptive stage that protein gets converted with gluconeogenesis to supplement the body's dropping glucose stores.
Once the body quickly enters into the gluconeogenetic phase, it starts chopping up proteins and fat to supply glucose and water.
During water fasting this process is heavily slowed down, and fat and protein are both taken apart. During dry fasting, the fat is aggressively attacked. This releases massive amounts of ketones that quickly acidify the body, forcing homeostasis mechanisms to activate.
