I saw your original Vavilov post and thought it was a great idea. The history of cereal crops is really interesting, and Vavilov, like the other greats in the field during the 20th century (i.e. Borlaug), had a successful strategy(ies) for enhancing food production that boiled down to:
Scour the globe for the crops that grow in the harshest conditions.
Collect the seeds.
Plant elsewhere.
Utterly simple and it worked. Huge impact for the betterment of humanity. I found this to be inspiring and tickling to my sense of aesthetic, so I tried a three-day fast (25th-27th). It was difficult, though not as hard as I initially thought; the worst of it was trying to focus on my work while my coworker was eating pasta three feet away and the scents were wafting directly into my rhinencephalon. Last night I actually had a dream about eating a sandwich, and I was so disappointed in myself for breaking the fast early I snapped awake about two hours early.
Day one was pretty easy for me; in the recent past I had started a low-cal diet for breakfast and lunch, and there’s not much difference between 400 calories and 0 calories over a 12 hour period.
Day two started picking up, especially towards the end of the day, when I found myself losing concentration easier and taking noticeably longer to complete certain tasks (i.e. finding where I left off reading a document, needing to triple-check my math before moving on).
Day three saw the start of mild muscle weakness, especially in my legs. Instead of standing and stretching my legs once per hour, it was now once every three or four, simply because I stopped feeling the urge to walk around.
In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to collect various health metrics, like pulse rate, blood pressure, reaction times, cognitive tests; the simple stuff before, during, and after the fast, and track various changes. How long can you go without eating before your average reaction time resembles that of a persons with a blood/alcohol level of .08%? How long before your average time to solve an addition problem of a given difficulty doubles? Triples? How about typing rate, and the rate of mistakes made? While I’m sure many have studied this sort of thing for decades, it would have been a fun exercise in data collection and plotting.
KingSupernova, I ran virtually the exact opposite of the strategy you suggested, and now I wish I had tried, like the metaphorical smoker quit for 20 years, to keep a packet of oreos or something in my shirt pocket and see how that would have changed the situation.
Overall, a great exercise in self-discipline, not to mention a valuable history lesson. Next year I’ll shoot for a week and make sure to record some data.
Not during the fast, just plain water.
Good point to bring up here which is electrolyte shortage can produce some of the very symptoms i felt. I completely failed to consider this (or even read some Fasting-101 blog post or NIH study) before jumping feet first into a three day fast. Take this as a rule of thumb: Is there anything you’d want to know that a 5-minute google search could tell you?