Hi,
i have been taught that the intestines are the laziest organ in the body. You shouldn’t take laxatives because the intestines will get used to not working and will form a habit of needing outside stimulus to get going.
For the record, personally i love fasting. It was after reading “the complete guide to fasting” that i tried fasting and finally started to loose weight (keto alone wasn’t working). So this is not a complaint, this is just curiosity. If you do a longer fast, then you are not encouraging peristalsis, so will this effect the intestines once you start eating again? Will they get lazy, and if so what is the best way to get them working again?
Second question is about a long fast too. What are the “good” bacteria in your gut living off of if you have an extended fast? Do you need to consider a probiotic or lacto-fermented foods when you come off a fast to repopulate the gut?
I hope this isn’t TMI, but you are right in your thinking. When I do an extended fast, I have a period where everything stops moving through the intestines–usually after 24-36 hours. From 36 hours on, almost nothing moves for me. However, it may move suddenly move, which means running to the bathroom, but then its all stopped again for up to days.
However, as soon as the fast ends (within an hour), the intestines wake up with a fury. I pretty much have to use the bathroom every 15-20 minutes. This continues for 4 hours, but the frequency decreases.
Ethan,
Thank you for the reply, that is good info. If you don’t mind my asking, what is the longest time you have fasted (my longest is 5 days)?
That is awesome that your intestines start right back up. Very good to know.
5 days is my longest actually also. I do two 5-day fasts per month. However, I am currently almost 4 days into a 7-day fast right now. December was too hard to find time for two different fasts.
I’ve been pretty interested in gut bacteria/microbiome and read several books on subject recently. It’s pretty early for scientists to know exactly what is going on but there seems to be several things happening when we fast - the gut bacteria eats the musin that lines intestine as a way of feeding themselves. Also they can go dormant until you start refeeding. This happens if you are not eating one thing but otherwise eating normally - I.e. vegetarian - the gut bacteria that thrive on meat particles will go dormant but come back into play if you start eating meat again (telling us that they don’t necessarily die).
i don’t know what that means, and tried to google it without much help. Can you explain more please.
i love that you are interested in this subject, thank you for your feedback.
Dormant bacteria - i read that somewhere too but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If the bacteria were spore formers then i could understand dormancy. But regular bacteria, if they could just go dormant, than why would antibiotic be able to kill everything off? They could just go dormant and survive, or am i missing something? It feels like there is a lot more to this than i initially realized. Thank you for inspiring more questions.
I’m on my first extended fast and i’m stretching the word “fast” for exactly these reasons to avoid too much shock to the gut with re-introduction of food. My countermeasure is small quantity of something each day, like 1/2 avocado on Wednesday, three tablespoons of seasoned grounded beef on Thursdsy - and my morning coffee has 2 tablespoons of coconut oil.
Yes i’m Fasting, but not absolute zero intake.
I’ll start to increase my intake as the fast comes to an end to avoid shock to the he gut.
Sure @jaimely though you will pretty quickly realise that I am not a scientist and only partly understand it myself.
The gut is lined with a protective layer of mucus called mucin. In the absence of other sources of food some bacteria are able to degrade this layer and survive on the mucin which means they don’t have to die off.
As for antibiotics being able to kill off microbiome - I understand it to be more a matter of balance - ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria can dominate depending on the environment - SIBO is an example of all the bacteria being present but the balance being off - supporting the gut back to balance gives the good guys a chance to get their feet under them again. Antibiotics can damage this balance and allow space for the bad guys to gain ascendency. Apparently there are thousands of species of bacteria but only a few of them have been studied as most bacteria can’t survive outside the anabolic environment of the upper intestine. So this is early early days in this field and there is a lot that scientists still don’t know.
My personal experience after a recent 4-day fast was that my stools were markedly improved. It’s only day 3 after the fast, though, so that could change (although now you have me wondering about food intolerances).
Fasting seems to be healthy in lots and lots of ways, so I’m trusting that it’s unlikely to hurt the microbiome since that would be unhealthy in lots of ways. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s my logical induction.
