The fasting journal · matched to fast day 32
Day 32. Back Down to Zero
Day 32. Tuesday, same gazebo, same gnome, same glass raised at the end. The difference this morning is the strip. For 23 days it sat at the dark end of the chart. Today it is blank.
192.6 pounds. Up 0.6 from yesterday and 36.0 pounds below the 228.6 he weighed on August 1. BMI is holding at 29.1, muscle reads 37.0 percent and the day burned 2008 calories. Two mornings in a row the number went up. That has never happened in this journal.
How am I feeling? I am feeling good. I am feeling okay.
Okay is a new word for him. He knows why.
Three things
Back to the avocado incident, he said. Still sticking with me two days later.
He laid it out as a list. Three things basically happened when I ate the avocado and I had the broth. And it was a quarter of avocado. It was not even that much actually.
The first is the scale. In the last two days I have gained almost two pounds. The exact figure is 2.4, from 190.2 on day 30 to 192.6 today. He is not pretending it is nothing. I am not really happy about that. Probably all water pounds. It should not be happening though. I am trying to lose weight, not gain it.
He is very likely right about the water. A broth carries sodium and the body holds water alongside it. The avocado brings a little carbohydrate back in and that gets stored with water attached too. Two days of a rising scale after one small meal is water finding its way back, not a month of fat returning overnight.
The strip
The second thing is the one that bothers him more.
Basically I am not burning any fat, he said. That is according to the ketone strips that I am taking. I am back down to zero on the fat burning level.
The chart on the bottle runs from a pale tan square marked zero up to a deep purple marked 16. From day 8 through day 30 his strip matched the purple. Yesterday it read 4. This morning it matched the tan. The last time a strip of his read this low was before he was officially in ketosis in the first week.
A urine strip measures what the body is spilling rather than exactly what it is burning. A zero after food is what you would expect. The body got an easier fuel and stopped making ketones it did not need. What the strip cannot tell him is how long the pause lasts. His guess is short. It is going to take a day or so to get that back up there.
The part he is upset about
The third thing is the reason he is doing this at all.
The thing that I am really upset about is that I stopped the whole autophagy process. The body is not cleaning itself out the way it was before.
He has said since day 27 that the cellular cleanup is the point of going 90 days and not 30. Autophagy is a real recycling process inside cells. No strip and no scale can show him what his cells did over the weekend, so this one is a belief about his own body rather than a number on a chart. It is a reasonable belief. Food is the signal that tells the body to stop scavenging and start digesting. He felt it switch off and he wants it back.
Water and wait
The plan is the same plan as yesterday. Currently what I am doing is just drinking water, trying to get back to that level. So we are just going to keep going and see what happens.
No tricks, no supplements, no extra walks to force it. Water, a strip every morning and patience. The broth experiment is still on the calendar for later in the week, broth by itself this time so he can tell which of the two foods did the damage. He will not try it until the strip is dark again.
Fifty eight to go
August is fully crossed out and September has its first X. One box into the second month, 58 days left.
We are going to keep going, he said. Just hang in there with me and we will get you better numbers.
Then the glass came up. You guys have a nice day and cheers.
Quick answers
What does a zero on a urine ketone strip mean during a water fast?
John's strip matched the lightest square on the keto mojo chart, the one marked zero. A urine strip picks up the ketones the body is spilling into urine. When it reads zero the body is not spilling any, which is what you expect after food arrives and the body has an easier fuel to use. Two days ago the same strip read 16. The strip does not say how much fat was burned or how quickly the number climbs back. His own read was that he is back down to zero on the fat burning level and that it will take a day or so to recover. The strip will tell him each morning whether that guess was right.
Does one small meal undo a month of water fasting?
The scale says no. John is still 36.0 pounds below where he started on August 1 and the two day gain of 2.4 pounds is small next to that. He calls it probably all water pounds. Food brings carbohydrate and sodium back in and both hold water, so the number on the scale moves faster than any real fat could return. What the meal did undo was his ketone level and, in his view, the cellular cleanup he is chasing. That is why he is treating it as a setback worth talking about rather than shrugging it off.
Should you restart the day count after eating during a long fast?
John kept counting. Day 30 had broth and avocado, day 31 was water only and today is day 32. A strict definition of a water fast ends the moment calories come in, so a purist would call this a 30 day fast followed by a new one. John is running a 90 day experiment with a doctor watching his bloodwork and he cares about the whole arc, so he logs the food, shows the numbers and keeps the calendar going. Either way of counting is honest as long as the food is on the record. His is.
What is John doing to get his ketones back up?
Nothing clever. He went straight back to water only and he checks a strip every morning. His expectation is that the color returns within a day or so, which is his guess rather than a rule. Ketone production climbs again once the body has used up the incoming food and goes back to running on stored fat. How long that takes varies from person to person. He is not adding anything to speed it up and he is not exercising it away. He is drinking water and waiting, with monthly bloodwork and a doctor who knows exactly what he is doing.