Mel, have you dry fasted yourself?
That Quora page is similar to the claims I’ve seen made for dry fasting in the past - some are just general effects of fasting, period, while the implication is that dry fasting somehow does it faster or better, and/or that water fasting does not do it - and I never see any proof or even a half-decent rationale behind the belief in that.
One thing is that if there’s a limit on how much fat we can burn per day - and all in all there really does appear to be, i.e. so much per pound or kilogram of fat that we have - then most people are going to be up against that while water fasting. Not drinking water is hardly going to override that. Breaking down fat/stored adipose tissue actually consumes water as a first step, rather than producing it. The notion that the body will break fat down faster to “get more water” is just wishful-thinking, from everything I’ve ever seen.
Maybe I’m wrong, and I’d be tickled if I was. The study that was linked to says, “With weight loss of 1,390 ± 60 g/day, FWD seems to be the most effective dietary protocol, since the magnitude of weight reduction is 50-100% more than observed during juice or water fasting.”
That was partially offset by gaining some water weight back: 5 days dry fasted, then on the 3rd day of eating again they’d regained 1.8 kg, making for an average daily loss of 1.03 kg. That’s obviously well beyond what people lose when water fasting, but I wonder if there was further weight regain after the measurement on the 3rd refeeding day.
Up until now, the numbers I’ve seen for people’s weight loss when dry fasting add up pretty well, when all water loss is figured in, respiration and perspiration included. The mostly accepted maximum fat loss (at least on this forum) of usually about 0.5 lbs or ~225 grams of fat per day, with some increase as one has more fat (the ~31.5 calories per day per lb. of fat thing), has seemed to apply very well.
So now I wonder - does dry fasting make any difference; maybe I’ve got to try it myself.