Breaking a 24 hour fast

#1

I just completed my first 24 hour fast and had a keto meat lasagna. My body reacted as if I ate a large bowl of pasta. My heart was racing and I got the shakes. An hour later, I feel sleepy and have a headache. I’m curious if anyone has experienced this and if it’s normal.

(KetoCowboy) #2

Sorry to hear about that. It’s certainly not normal in my experience–and I haven’t heard about it from others.

Were you thoroughly fat-adapted before the fast started, or did you go from sugar burning to fasting to keto lasagna?

#3

I’ve been keto for two years but stopped the past couple of months. Got back on the wagon two weeks ago and figured a fast would get me back on track faster.

#4

Generally speaking I break a fast with something simple like walnuts, olives, broth, etc. The idea is to gently wake your system back up not to bombard it with hard to digest foods like meat and cheese. For some people eating something small to break the fast and then eating a full meal a few hours later works ok.

I’ve experienced what you described, my though was the food I’d eaten caused an insulin spike which dropped my blood sugar before the food I was eating “kicked in”. I can get shaky and dizzy just from chewing gum while fasting sometimes, again I blame insulin.

(Ethan) #5

Sounds like my first experience breaking a 24h fast back in August! Now I do two five-day fasts a month.

Eat slower. Also, I find that breaking longer fasts gets my digestive system immediately running… keep near a bathroom.

#6

Maybe it wasn’t the fasting. Perhaps it was a reaction to the lasagna. Maybe the flour used in the pasta? That makes a lot of folks feel sluggish.

#7

That makes perfect sense. I’ll keep that in mind for my next fast. Thanks.

#8

Glad to hear it’s not uncommon. Thanks.

(Chris) #9

This is a myth. A steak dissolves in the stomach acid within about an hour- completely (unless you also ate a bunch of other things to slow that down?) and is then sent to the small intestine as liquid where it is further broken down. Unless you OD heavily on fat there won’t be much left to putrefy in the colon (and nothing to ferment).

#10

But how hard your body has to work in that hour is what’s relevant. Or how hard it has to work once the meat makes it into the intestines. We are talking about what happens very shortly after a fast is broken. You are also talking about what happens in a perfect scenario but many here have a deranged metabolism. I know a lot of people who feel sluggish and lethargic if they eat too much red meat because their bodies cannot process it as easily as something like salmon or tuna.