The effect of a 24-hour fast

Before we begin, and because people who read the internet are mostly mental, I need to start off by mentioning that I am not a medical expert, far from it in fact. I’m just a regular girl carrying a little quarantine weight who decided to do a fast and then tell my friends, and anyone who will listen, all about it – my tube carriage, the girl who makes my smoothie, my therapist, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square - the list is endless really. 

In case anyone does decide to copy me and like, their head falls off or whatever, I must stress I didn’t encourage anyone to do it. None of this is my fault. If you go on to do a 24-hour fast, please do seek professional medical advice. Having said that, I just did it tbh.

You know those times when you’re not actually fasting, but you’ve been busy so skip a couple of meals? Or when you’re out somewhere and you can’t eat anything because the only establishment with vague food options is a Shell garage? You will usually say stuff like “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!” Weird this one, because when horses were turning up in lasagne ready meals everyone did the MOST on the fake outrage. The point is, if you’re not purposely starving yourself it’s really hard and you feel like visiting some equestrian stables with a portable disposable instant bbq. However, when you are doing it on purpose for health benefits or for weight loss, my experience was that it was super easy!

The benefits

Although there is the potential to lose weight if committing to the intermittent 24-hour fast over an extended period, I decided to do it not so much for weight purposes, but mostly to give my body a boost. During a fast your body kicks in and does cool stuff like replacing old cells with new ones. I understand this as good. In fact, when researching the 24-hour fast online, everything I read suggested it’s good for you. There was a lot of words that I think you can only understand if you have a PhD, but I just moved past those or gave them my own meaning. According to various sources, the main benefits of 24-hour fasting are listed below:

• Improves your immune system

• Weight loss

• Enhanced brain function

• Speeds up metabolism

• Living longer

• Clearer skin

These are some bold claims, admittedly, but unlike spending £245 on a magical mystery bottle of some potion that does nothing, a 24-hour fast comes for free! In fact, it actually saves you money. So when considering whether it’s worth it to try, it’s hard to argue against.  

How often?

24-hour fasting should be done intermittently - once a week seems to be the most popular. 

But really, you can do it to whatever regime you see fit. If it’s weight loss you’re after, then once a week or maybe even twice a week is apparently advisable. I’ve often done a 16-hour fast, so I’ll have dinner and when that’s done at 6pm I’ll have zero except herbal tea until 16 hours later, and I’ve mostly slept through all that so I don’t even notice it’s happened, plus “break” “fast” isn’t something I ever really have, so it’s not remotely challenging. Actually it is hugely challenging because obviously you can’t drink alcohol either, so there aren’t many days where it can happen. 

So with my limited experience of 16 hours, could I go the extra eight and reach the magical 24? 

24 hours of nothing

0 hours

I just finished my last meal for 24 hours. It was a salad. I probably should have gone for something a bit more substantial, but it’s probably fine. 

3 hours

I did a few other non-food related things and then went to bed. 

12 hours

A lot of the 24 hours are taken up by sleeping, it turns out. I don’t eat (food) in bed, or when I’m sleeping, so I’m golden. I woke up and had three green teas and one lemon tea (yes, drinking water, green/lemon tea or black coffee is allowed) over the course of my morning, and then left for work. 

It’s important to note that I leave for work around midday, I wasn’t just chain-drinking random tea mixes from 7 am to 7:30 am.

15 hours

Some people say that 24-hour fasting can give you headaches, so I managed to convince myself I had a headache on the train. I don’t think I did, I was just conscious of documenting how I felt for this blog. I sipped water for my whole commute into work anyway.

16 hours

Once at work I was fully distracted from the 24-hour fast. I forgot I had an imaginary headache (this is how I knew I’d made it up).

I felt a bit hungry but not to the level of “OMG I’m starving I could eat a horse”. I’m vegetarian so maybe I was craving some kind of plant-based snack. Not too sure.

20 hours

At around 3pm, I treated myself to a coffee. It was a treat for me because I don’t usually drink much coffee. It makes me bonkers, but it’s an appetite suppressant. I was feeling a bit weak at this point but I got a real boost from the coffee.

After that I was totally fine actually. I forgot that I was even doing a fast and suddenly I was at home and dinner time was coming around. I knew that the worst thing to do after a fast is to stress-eat a burger or a whole pizza, and that you should break it with something sensible. 

24 hours

I broke my fast with a smoothie. It was good, but I was still hungry so I thought maybe in a few hours I’d have a proper dinner. I was super happy with my plan. But after my smoothie my friend rang me and three hours later I was drunk eating chips and dancing to Glastonbury reloads on the BBC.

I’m not sure that’s really how you’re meant to behave after a fast and any good work I did do was probably immediately wiped out, but I’m going to go ahead and convince myself that overall it was an excellent way to break it and now I’m a lot thinner and will live much longer. 

To conclude 

24 hours is easy, but I’m pretty convinced by the internet that most of the good stuff happens at around 12 hours into a fast so that’s maybe a better one to do. I also think that upon ending your fasting maybe your first meal shouldn’t be four pints of lager and a packet of chips. But I would definitely say it was easy for me to do. I knew I was doing it as an experiment and I can be surprisingly disciplined (until someone rings me and invites me to a pub). I never got that starving feeling.

For me, maybe once a month I will do a 24-hour fast and once a week I’ll do the 16 hours no food or 12 hours no food, which I was doing anyway and definitely believe in. I wasn’t really doing it for weight purposes, more general health, and the way I see it, it can’t be bad to give your body a rest from working so hard digesting all the chips I’m persistently masticating. But I don’t know that for sure, because, like I said, I’m not a medical expert.