A bit of advice from my own experience with fasting.
Hunger is strongest roughly between hours 6 and 12 after you stop eating. There’s some variation here, but my vague understanding is this has to do with something about blood sugar and insulin response cycles.
Generally once I make it to 12 hours the rest is smooth sailing, at least in so far as hunger becomes a background annoyance rather than a strong urge.
At around 20 hours or so I find mental changes start to happen due to what I presume is low blood sugar. It’s nothing insurmountable, just something like mental fuzziness that makes it hard to do mental activities at the limit of my ability.
I’m not sure what happens past 24 hours; never gone longer than that.
24h is not enough time to produce the physiological changes typical for fasting. That requires ~72h. I’m not saying that skipping a meal or two, doing intermittent “fasting” and so on aren’t good things, you just shouldn’t confuse them with an actual fast.
It takes around 12 hours until your stomach is empty (depending on what you ate before obviously). At ~24h, your body’s glycogen reserves deplete, but the fat burning process is just beginning in earnest. This is the hardest point IME. At ~72h, you’re in full starvation mode and symptoms should start to decrease. I’ve never gone longer than 72h though.
W.r.t. blood sugar, you usually have a dip around expected mealtimes (your body adapts to your habits and secretes insulin in anticipation of eating), but the truly hard period is between hours 24 and 72.
Yes my experience matches closely to yours. If I’m fasting I’ll typically stop eating after 10am breakfast and I’ll be most hungry around 6pm the next day. So a bit more than 24 hours. After that there’s clear hunger, but it’s a different sort, not as immediate.
My personal experience agrees with the phases, but I’d triple all durations. Hunger is stronger for me the first 2 to 3 days. Then it’s smooth sailing. The fuzziness appears at the same time, 2 to 3 days.
A bit of advice from my own experience with fasting.
Hunger is strongest roughly between hours 6 and 12 after you stop eating. There’s some variation here, but my vague understanding is this has to do with something about blood sugar and insulin response cycles.
Generally once I make it to 12 hours the rest is smooth sailing, at least in so far as hunger becomes a background annoyance rather than a strong urge.
At around 20 hours or so I find mental changes start to happen due to what I presume is low blood sugar. It’s nothing insurmountable, just something like mental fuzziness that makes it hard to do mental activities at the limit of my ability.
I’m not sure what happens past 24 hours; never gone longer than that.
24h is not enough time to produce the physiological changes typical for fasting. That requires ~72h. I’m not saying that skipping a meal or two, doing intermittent “fasting” and so on aren’t good things, you just shouldn’t confuse them with an actual fast.
It takes around 12 hours until your stomach is empty (depending on what you ate before obviously). At ~24h, your body’s glycogen reserves deplete, but the fat burning process is just beginning in earnest. This is the hardest point IME. At ~72h, you’re in full starvation mode and symptoms should start to decrease. I’ve never gone longer than 72h though.
W.r.t. blood sugar, you usually have a dip around expected mealtimes (your body adapts to your habits and secretes insulin in anticipation of eating), but the truly hard period is between hours 24 and 72.
Yes my experience matches closely to yours. If I’m fasting I’ll typically stop eating after 10am breakfast and I’ll be most hungry around 6pm the next day. So a bit more than 24 hours. After that there’s clear hunger, but it’s a different sort, not as immediate.
My personal experience agrees with the phases, but I’d triple all durations. Hunger is stronger for me the first 2 to 3 days. Then it’s smooth sailing. The fuzziness appears at the same time, 2 to 3 days.