How much weight can I lose by fasting for a week?
Suppose you decide not to eat for a whole week and drink only water. What would happen to your body in such a case and how many pounds could you lose?
In short: sitting for a day without food is not harmful, as long as you come out of starvation with vegetable smoothies and mashed potatoes.
But not eating anything for an entire week in hopes of losing weight is a bad idea.
Why you can’t last for 7 days, briefly.
After sitting on the water for a day or two, you will lose weight and probably reduce your appetite afterward. It will be much easier for your body to maintain a healthy body weight.
But what happens if you fast for an entire week? Scientific evidence shows that people who do these extreme diets lose a lot of weight, become emaciated, and simply die.
Prolonged hunger strikes, among other things, seriously compromise health, lead to chronic diseases and shorten lifespan.
What happens to the body if there is nothing?
In the short term, not much will happen. You may experience mood swings (irritation, fatigue) because your blood sugar has dropped.
- But as long as you drink enough water, you will feel fine. Of course, you will lose some weight - and this will happen by the end of the first day.
- But more importantly, your endocrine, digestive and nervous systems will be reset and function better. A person can generally go without food for a long time, but not without water.
- Therefore, dehydration is much more dangerous than starvation because it paves the way for many chronic diseases.
- So, if you decide to go a day without eating, avoid caffeine and alcohol because they have diuretic properties.
What happens if there is no day?
Interval fasting, or intermittent fasting, involves avoiding food for 24 hours. this period, you can only drink water, and then for another 24 hours,
You must eat purees and soft, easily digestible foods (mashed vegetables, smoothies, soups, etc.)
Intermittent fasting is beneficial
- it normalizes blood pressure and has a beneficial effect on metabolism. One intermittent fast per week is generally considered safe if you do not have metabolic disorders.
- (e.g. diabetes) or chronic gastrointestinal diseases (pancreatitis, gastritis, Crohn's disease, etc.).
What will happen to your body at this point?
After 24 hours, it probably won't even notice that you've gone without food.
The specific hormone ghrelin will stimulate the hunger center in your hypothalamus, sending nerve impulses to your stomach, resulting in rumbling in your stomach and an unpleasant sucking sensation under the spoon.
This is a normal physiological phenomenon.
The last meal will be digested in about eight hours, then for some time the body will spend the accumulated glucose, and the rest of the 24 hours of fasting will be spent on glycogen and fat reserves.
But if you fast for more than a day, the body will understand:
something is wrong, it's time to save resources. So, instead of adipose tissue begin to convert protein reserves into energy.
That is, in fact getting rid of the muscles, since they are the parts of the body that consume the most energy and are not needed in conditions of hunger.
The harm of long fasting on the water
In general, the first 24 hours without food will be painless for your body. However, by the end of the second day, you will begin to feel some discomfort.
- First, you will begin to feel dizzy and tired.
- second, you will begin to feel weakness in major muscle groups (quite small at first).
- third, you may begin to feel hypotension or just unexplained spikes in blood pressure.
How much water should I drink per day?
Even if you're young and perfectly healthy (which is unlikely), by the end of the first week your body will start to malfunction. And acquired health problems can become chronic:
- thyroid disorders.
- increased intra-abdominal pressure.
- decreased potassium levels (hypokalemia).
- thermoregulation problems (temperature swings).
- increased stress levels, depression, persistent weakness, and cognitive problems.
- bouts of tachycardia.
- hypotension.
- Water-salt imbalance.
How much weight do you lose by fasting for a week?
Certainly, you will lose weight if you give up food for seven days. But how many pounds you ultimately lose is a very individual thing.
It depends on your baseline BMI, your metabolic rate, and several other parameters.
An average person can lose 7-10 kilograms of weight by fasting for a week, as long as they move moderately and don't exert themselves too much physically.
Sounds stimulating, right But there's a catch?
you'll lose mostly lean muscle mass, not fat.
Your bones will gradually lose calcium and your internal organs will become smaller, from which your body will draw energy when processing protein.
Endocrine disruption will follow the chain, as your body lacks the nutrients to produce the necessary hormones.
By the way, the weight loss process depends largely on your body type. Determining a woman's body type is easy we have a free online calculator for this purpose.
- You will find a detailed description of how to use it on the page and the results are available in a separate field.
- Incidentally, most of those who starve themselves die of acute heart failure because the heart simply can't cope anymore due to general protein depletion.
- And the best part: your metabolism slows down while you're forced to fast. So when you return from such an extreme diet to a normal diet, you will quickly regain all the pounds you lost.
- And the best part is your metabolism and losing weight again will be much more difficult. It's called the yo-yo effect and it's not good for your health.
- And yes, don't forget that you should also be very careful when coming out of a fast (especially a week-long fast), ideally under the supervision of a doctor.
Otherwise, nothing good awaits you except intestinal congestion. The biggest danger after a long fast is refeeding syndrome.
This is known as a powerful metabolic failure, in which blood sugar rises seriously and insulin does not have enough time to be produced in the right amount to absorb it.
The body lacks the ionic compounds calcium, magnesium, and phosphate. The result is that the emaciated person can die suddenly from acute heart failure.
Read also: Getting out of a one-day fast: basic rules and foods.
How much can I lose in 3 days of water fasting?
Water is a natural "limiter" of calories. So it's no wonder you lose weight quickly.
Studies show that after sitting on the water for three days, you lose an average of 0.9 kg per day. But again, almost all are at the expense of muscle mass, fluids, and stored glucose molecules.
Is it possible to gain weight with water?
Drinking plenty of water helps you lose weight because it limits your calorie intake. But an interesting effect arises: the body cannot recycle it indefinitely.
Eventually, the excess water will begin to accumulate, as the kidneys simply don't have enough time to filter it. The bloating will naturally lead to weight gain. This is a paradox.
It is, therefore, necessary to drink properly to lose weight.
Wellness resource WebMD recommends drinking a glass of water before each meal. by doing so, you can cut your intake by an average of 75 calories, which is about 27,000 fewer calories per year.
A simple calculation shows that you can lose almost 10 pounds with this simple trick!
How long can I live on water alone?
- In general, a person can normally go without food for up to 3 days on water alone.
- There are reports that some have survived up to 10 days and also supposedly without health consequences. However, this claim seems doubtful.
- Left without food, the body will naturally begin to devour itself. And how long this will last is unknown.
- For example, Irish Republican Army activist Bobby Sands was a healthy young man when he began his famous hunger strike in a British prison in 1981.
- He lasted 66 days (just over two months) before dying of exhaustion.
Outcome
The human body is resilient enough to go without food for days or even weeks but it definitely won't go away without leaving a trace of your health.
Of course, if you don't eat for a week you will lose 5 or 7 or even 10 pounds but the weight loss will be at the expense of muscle and bone and then at the expense of fat.
You will most likely exhaust yourself, completely undermining your cardiovascular, endocrine or nervous system so we strongly advise against these experiments.
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