I fasted for 3 days | Lex Fridman

i'm doing a 72 hour fast three days only water coffee and electrolytes sodium potassium magnesium the video is brought to you by cash app thanks a lot to them for being a long time supporter of this channel also athletic greens for being a long time supporter of my diet electrolytes are coming from a few sources including element one packet of which has one gram of sodium 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium i also have these in uh pill form one gram of sodium and uh 120 milligrams of magnesium that's good especially when i'm doing a lot of running i'm currently 25 hours into the fast i'm tracking it with the xero app they used to be a sponsor of the podcast i'm not sure if they're sponsored anymore anyway i love using them i don't care if they're spawns or not that's actually true for all the sponsors i'm still doing light exercise like i just did a slow pace run for about four miles and then i also did about 100 push-ups and about 50 or 60 pull-ups and i'm hoping to do the same tomorrow and the day after why am i doing the fast that's an important question i think first and foremost is to reflect on life i know perhaps you don't need it but i personally like to create forcing functions for myself to pause and reflect on all the things that i'm grateful for in this life and really i'm talking about just simple things the fact that i'm alive at all the fact that i have food the fact that i have shelter the fact that i have people who i love and that bring joy to my life and the fact that i love basically everything about this life all the things i get to do i really enjoy in fact i enjoy basically anything i do so that i'm deeply grateful for i'm not exactly sure why but there's something about fasting that forces you to really appreciate how short this ride is like the fact that you need food to run this thing somehow as a reminder that this is a a thing with an expiration date quickly approaching one i'm just a hamster briefly stepping out of the hamster wheel to reflect on how awesome it is to be in this one particular cage we call earth i intermittent fast 16 8 or 24 hours very often it always makes me feel great so the second reason i'm doing the fast is for the health benefits you can look into the science there's a lot of writing out there about it but i tend to prefer to be a scientist of n of one of myself and every time i do the 16 8 intermittent or the one meal a day 24 hour fast i just feel great the way my mind feels the way my body feels so i want to try out what 72 hours feels like because i heard great things people throw all kinds of medical terms around like autophagy from a robotics perspective i tend to uh think of it as a hard drive defrag maybe maybe like a software update so for the hardware layer it's uh in the cells it's like a defrag and the software layer it's uh like a software update let's think of it that way finally the third reason i'm doing the fast is to uh reset the body in mind i've uh relaxed the last couple months or two a little bit too much brisket a little bit too much whiskey with some really kind beautiful texan people but i have a lot of really difficult tasks coming up they've been piling up and i need to get the stuff done so it's time to get back to work time to get uh focused again time to make the best of my days my hours and minutes i should probably say that i currently feel great my mind is focused my body feels great after the run the run felt great everything feels great but this is uh charted territory i am now going into uncharted territory 48 hours towards the 72 hour mark so let's see how that uh goes but so far it's a beautiful thing let's see how i feel tomorrow quick check in at the end of uh day two 49 hours and 57 minutes in it says uh 69 of the way in 69. i got a pretty good run in actually about six miles and i'm now gonna do about 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups i'm feeling pretty good it's been a crazy busy day i got a chance to do a four-hour podcast today i did my usual mumbling and incohesive conversational skills but not worse than usual so it's at the same level and my mind is actually sharper than ever it's really able to focus on the main task i have to do and there's a liberating aspect to not having to think about food even though i eat rarely throughout the day and i eat the same thing there's still a kind of anticipation towards uh what you're gonna eat later in the day as i mentioned in the podcast actually it feels like thinking about food is kind of like when you talk about the weather it's like the easy thought to have and when you don't have a chance to have the easy thoughts you can now focus on the more difficult thoughts like i can anticipate the exciting thing i'm doing later tonight i'm actually going to read the hunger artist again by kafka as was mentioned in the podcast i used to love that book and i used to read it a lot before i even discovered even intermittent fasting this many many years ago i was captivated by the madness and the artistry of what the main character was doing i recommend that i think it's a short story i remember correctly the hunger artist anyway i feel great i gotten a chance to kind of breathe in and appreciate the hell out of life especially the conversation i had today was on uh the self-destruction of human civilization via the man-made engineering of viruses so the fasting combined with pondering all the ways in which human civilization will destroy itself made me really appreciate the hell out of being alive after the past couple of months of eating a whole lot of brisket and drinking a whole lot of whiskey with a lot of amazing people i definitely have some reserves to basically fast for a very long time so i'll be okay i'm feeling really good it's actually kind of exciting how this particular biological system is able to store fat for uh when you actually need to fast not this like first world i'm gonna choose to fast but more like i have to fast because there's no food so it's kind of amazing how biology works like that but i definitely have a bunch of fat to lose so i need to harden the body harden the mind and this is a good reset for that in the summer i'm doing some difficult projects in my work and gonna have some fun with some difficult projects in the grappling world and uh and i do some running with a man mr david goggins so i can't be full of uh brisket and whiskey for that or at least if i am i need to make sure i'm doing some running and exercise anyway that's way too much talking for the day i'm gonna go do some uh push-ups and pull-ups take a shower and get back to work i'll see you tomorrow i'm uh 69 in i have uh 31 left and i'm looking forward to uh breaking the fast tomorrow responsibly probably with some uh bone broth and just a little bit of chicken breast i'm not gonna do the crazy break the fast with the giant steak although i'm very tempted to even the thought of that is making me hungry my stomach just actually woke up it's like wait we're gonna have some steak no sometimes it feels like there's not enough hours in the day but at the same time when you're running and there's like a little bit of hunger and you haven't eaten a long time and you breathe in it feels like there's so many seconds in the day it's just the day is so long and so full of amazing experiences so that duality is so real when you're fasting that i have so much to do i don't know how i'm gonna get it done and at the same time every second is full of an eternity that um that i'm just grateful for so see you tomorrow all right here we are at the end of this fun little journey day three 75 hours and 44 minutes in i just weighed myself and i'm 170 on the dot actually the first time i stepped on the scale it said 169.9 and then i couldn't believe it so i stepped on again and it was 170. that's why i took the picture and it was never 169.9 again i also weighed myself right after eating three days ago and i was just a little bit over 180. so it's about 10 pounds of water weight that i lost maybe i would estimate about like one pound of actual fat that's not why i did it i did it to challenge myself i did it to reset the mind i did to take pause and reflect on all the things i'm grateful for maybe if i can give a few takeaways usually when i do a 16 hour fast or 24 hour fast one of the biggest benefits is uh the laser focus that i'm able to attain and maintain at rhymes clearly have not lost my sense of humor but it hasn't improved at all either so it's at that low bar of dad jokes plus a little extra loopy but it is what it is i think for day two and day three there's a bit of an up and down on the focus but mostly i've been able to get even an extra level of focus that i really enjoyed the little bit of a downside there's a bit of a darkness to the way i saw the world like i was a little bit sadder i would say or maybe i was just acknowledging the suffering that is life maybe i was more honest i'm not sure what kind of experience people usually have with sleep but i had excellent sleep i slept over eight hours on all the nights it was i woke up refreshed i was feeling great plus i was doing the running so i ran today again four miles i did push ups and pull ups feeling great i was taking the element potassium magnesium sodium plus the salt pills i every time i took that stuff maybe as placebo but it made me feel really great so a lot of water i did drink tea unsweetened obviously just green tea with mint and actually two things helped with hunger it was a hot tea or really cold water i don't know how that works i'm sure there's an explanation for it but i did feel hungry in unpleasant ways like like a hunger ache earlier on in the process but i kind of reframed that as an opportunity to sort of pause and think and and then the hunger kind of uh faded away because when you realize it's not that big of a deal i have a lot of fat i'm gonna be okay the body's naturally gonna go to the fat stores i'm talking way too much i may have mentioned this before but one of the big things i noticed is just the experience of being free of having to think about what i'm going to eat today even though i eat the same exact thing still the experience was that i felt free to sort of focus and think about the things i have going on outside of food like the problems i'm working on the things i have on my schedule even just like small stuff as i'm saying it now doesn't really make sense but i really did feel like i gained a lot of hours in the day by not having to think about food at all one of the tougher experiences actually was about an hour ago when i went to the grocery store to get the chicken breast and the chicken bone broth which is what i'm going to break the fast with i don't know if it was difficult or just like meditative and beautiful of an experience of just walking through especially the fresh produce part of the store and just everything looked amazing the reason i'm breaking the fast with uh just a little bit of chicken breast and a little bit of bone broth is because i hear bad stories when you just overeat which is exactly what i want to do right now i want to eat a giant steak but i'm going to be smart about this i'm going to have a little chicken broth a uh a little bit of chicken breast and then just wait three or four hours and then eat again about a thousand calories just make a steak a thousand fifteen hundred calories uh at night that's it that'd be it for the day and then return back to normal diet normal strict diet tomorrow and then continuing the running the push-ups and pull-ups again harden the body harden the mind i'm not sure if i fully conveyed this but it was actually more challenging than i expected but it's not so hard that i can't do it regularly i like the george pierre model of doing it like four times a year especially after you fall off the wagon of uh dieting i think i'll do that maybe i'll try like five seven day fast at some point okay way too much talking time to go eat i've been looking forward to this all day maybe i'll get the first couple bites on camera let's see how good this chicken and bone broth taste all right here we go no reason to wait we're at uh 76 hours and 24 minutes and i have looked forward to this very plain but very incredibly delicious looking chicken for quite a few hours now so here we go this is some good chicken i taste the caramelized part but most of all i taste the coconut oil actually and the salt the oil and the salt i think that's what my body was craving the most given my keto diet i think the fat is what i was craving even though i have plenty of fat the body still i want more again it's the salt this tastes delicious i can't it'll be hard to just eat this but that's all i'm doing for the next let's say four hours about it's just the bone broth and the chicken this is a this is a really memorable moment oh man life is made up of moments like this it doesn't take much this is the best tasting chicken breast i've ever had in my life just chicken breast some spices salt and 76 hours of fasting this is incredible damn damn it's good to be alive you

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 380,737

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Id: d8nQ2dZBR48

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/UsernamesRHard01]

I was accidentally intermittent fasting 5x a week at work for 3 years... Didn’t realize there was a name for it or that other people did the same until Joe Rogan mentioned it a while back. I’ve never tried a long fast though. Very nice video, love to hear your perspective.. And I disagree, you don’t talk too much!! You have interesting thoughts and ideas, and a unique outlook that is quite refreshing.

[u/TheGreenBean92]

doesn't this cause your body to store more fat next time you eat?

[u/stupidsexyflanders-]

Try this if you want, but please don’t develop an eating disorder in the process guys.

[u/dbugnar]

I will try it soon as well