Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
Water is in so many of the foods we eat every day, but could you subsist on nothing but water? That’s the basis of a water fast, a popular type of intermittent fast. You’re gearing up for your first water fast, but before you begin, you’re curious: what kind of long-lasting benefits might you reap?
Water fasting is beneficial for your health in the long-term in a multitude of ways, including:
- May reduce your chances of getting heart disease, cancer, and diabetes
- Leptin and insulin sensitivity could go up
- Autophagy increases
- Could lower your blood pressure
- Can lessen inflammation
- Cleanses the body
- Rejuvenates the immune system
- Promotes weight loss
In this article, we’ll expand on the above eight water fasting benefits. We’ll also provide tips and advice for getting your first water fast underway, including a discussion of how long to fast. You won’t want to miss it!
The 8 Long-Lasting Benefits of Water Fasting
Lessening Chronic Disease Risk
According to the National Health Council, 133 million people in the United States live with chronic diseases every day. It’s believed that as many as 157 million people could be afflicted by 2020.
Some of the worst chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The latter has a much lower fatality rate, but it’s still a life-changing disease.
A slew of studies done on animals has introduced the idea that it may be possible to fight off chronic diseases through water fasting. While few of these studies have been replicated on humans and more data is needed, the results are still promising.
Cancer
In a 2013 study, lab mice water fasted to see how doing so could affect cancer cells. The results were twofold and both positive. First, the journal suggests that chemotherapy may be more effective when water fasting. Also, the fasting period may have prevented the body’s genes from increasing the growth of cancer cells.
Heart Disease
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC notes that heart disease kills about 647,000 people a year. In the US, more men, women, and ethnic and racial groups die of this disease than others. On a 37-second basis, one person is lost to heart disease.
If you’re worried about heart disease yourself, there’s a good chance water fasting can lower your risk of that as well.
This 2013 data found that when adults water fasted for as little as 24 hours over a week, they had fewer triglycerides and lower cholesterol blood levels. Triglycerides are blood fats that occur when you eat too many calories. Low-density lipoproteins or bad cholesterol as well as triglycerides can both increase your chances of getting heart disease.
Diabetes
What if it’s diabetes you’re concerned with? There’s evidence that water fasting could improve a diabetic’s health as well. In a classic report in the journal Autoimmunity, when rats fasted and ate intermittently, there was “reduced diabetes incidence in BB rats.” While we’ll still need human studies for further proof, this data is interesting nonetheless.
Boosting Leptin and Insulin Sensitivity
Our bodies contain both leptin and insulin. Leptin is a type of fat cell hormone that comes from adipose tissue. It tells our brain’s hypothalamus when to use energy and even to control our eating.
As we’ve discussed on this blog, insulin is yet another hormone, this time in the pancreas. It takes glucose, a sugar source found in carbs, and translates it into energy. Our insulin levels also prevent our blood pressure from dropping or increasing, which is why it’s so important for diabetics to track it.
Healthy bodies have a sensitivity to both leptin and insulin hormones. This is good, as higher sensitivity to insulin controls blood sugar better. Leptin sensitivity is beneficial too in that it reduces obesity. Also, sensitivity to leptin can also increase yours to insulin.
This 2005 study from Gerontology suggests that both insulin and leptin sensitivity can increase through water fasting, at least in rats. A decade later, Cell Metabolism found similar results in their study.
Kickstarting Autophagy
Autophagy is one of the most important functions of our body. We’ve written extensively about autophagy on this blog, but if you missed that mega-post, allow us to recap. Autophagy is sort of like your body’s way of doing spring cleaning. Instead of throwing out junk from your closet though, autophagy eats the junk cells so you’re healthier overall.
With fewer old and damaged cells in our bodies, we could ward off Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases. It’s also believed we can live longer.
While autophagy always happens in some regard, there are several ways to kickstart it even more. One of these is through a ketogenic diet, which triggers the onset of ketosis. Intermittent fasting, including water fasting, is another method.
Controlling Blood Pressure
Blood pressure can increase from age, stress, overdrinking alcohol, overeating salt, smoking, and being overweight or obese. Sometimes, high blood pressure isn’t even in our control, such as if it’s passed down genetically.
The higher your blood pressure, the greater your risk of developing metabolic syndrome, eye and kidney blood vessel damage, heart failure, aneurysms, stroke, and/or heart attack. It’s worth lowering your blood pressure, then. Could water fasting be one such way?
Indeed it can be, suggests this classic study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The 68 participants had borderline hypertension, which caused their high blood pressure. Each underwent a medically supervised water fast that lasted 13.6 days. Before that, the participants spent two days eating mostly vegetables and fruits in preparation for the fast.
After the fasting period wrapped up, the participants spent six days refeeding, in which they ate vegan, plant-based, low-sodium, low-fat food.
Most of the participants, 82 percent, lowered their blood pressure through the water fast, reducing their risk of stroke.
Reducing Inflammation
As we’ve discussed on this blog before, inflammation can be both good and bad. There are some instances in which inflammation benefits your body, such as warding off foreign invaders or substances. Inflammation can also begin the healing process, so your body does need it.
Too much inflammation may play a role in the development of diabetes, cancer, blindness, atherosclerosis, asthma, and arthritis. According to the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, inflammation could even potentially influence the development of mental illness and autism.
A 2019 report from Mount Sinai Hospital found that in both mice and people, intermittent fasting halted the duties of monocytes in the blood. These are the cells that cause inflammation. It seems to have to do with feeding your body, which also feeds the monocytes. Further, the data notes that if you have a chronic inflammatory disease, you may experience some relief through water fasting.
Cleansing the Body
Juice cleanses were the big fad for a while, but there’s something to be said for cleansing the system with fluids. In the case of a water fast, you can detox without the sugar or calories.
Our bodies contain toxic chemicals that come from exposure to free radicals and other environmental factors. Even our own metabolism can cause the creation of these chemicals with time.
Most toxic chemicals are in fat cells, so they don’t interrupt our blood circulation. A water fast forces the body to go through its glucose stores and begin burning fat for energy. These toxic fat cells are thus driven out of the body via natural elimination, starting the detoxification process.
Rejuvenating the Immune System
Your immune system wards off germs that could cause illness. That said, over time, the immune system loses efficacy, which puts our risk of getting sick higher. To prevent damage to the immune system, your body sends white blood cells to repair it.
Unfortunately, the average white blood cells live for 13 to 20 days, so it’s not exactly a long-lasting cell. By going on a water fast, the autophagy your body undergoes could help cause the generation of new white blood cells. These keep your immune system healthy so you can stay healthy as well.
Triggering Weight Loss
If you want to drop a few extra pounds quickly, a water fast is a great way to do so. For the duration of your fast, you’re consuming only water, which has no calories. Since you’re cutting out food, a water fast that lasts one to three days could lead to two pounds of weight loss daily. This weight comes from multiple resources, like muscle proteins, carbohydrates, and water weight.
By exercising during your intermittent fast, it’s possible to curtail muscle mass loss.
How to Get Started with a Water Fast
Whether you’re someone with a chronic condition or you’re overweight and would like to slim down, you’ve decided you’d like to start water fasting. What do you need to do?
Know the At-Risk Groups
Before you proceed any further, you should know there are certain groups who are ineligible to go on a water fast. They include children, pregnant women, and seniors. If you’ve had or currently do have an eating disorder, type 1 or type 2 diabetes, or gout, it’s best you don’t water fast as well.
The only exceptions would be medically supervised water fasts.
See Your Doctor
That brings us to our next point, which is to schedule an appointment with your doctor or physician. That’s doubly recommended if you’re one of the at-risk groups listed above. Your doctor can do a check-up to determine if you’re a good candidate for water fasting. If not, ask them about a medically supervised fast. Your doctor may approve.
If they don’t, you may want to consider another type of intermittent fast if you’re allowed to.
Limit Your Diet
If you get peckish after eight hours without food, imagine how you’ll feel going 24 hours or more with no calories. You need to prepare first. Shifting too quickly into a water fast could put undue shock on your system, something we’ve written about before on this blog.
The week of the fast, start with regular quantities of food and shrink them more day by day. Try to cut out how many meals you eat daily to one or two at this time. Then, about three days before the fast, you may switch to consuming fruit or vegetable juices only.
Drink the Right Amount of Water
You’re now on day one of your water fast. It’s important that today and for the rest of your fast, you consume the necessary amount of water. Too little could cause dehydration, which can evolve into a serious, even life-threatening problem.
You’ve been told you need to consume eight glasses of water a day, but now it’s time to upgrade. Women need at least nine daily glasses, which is about 2.2 liters of water. Men may have even more significant water needs and should aim for 13 glasses every day, which is roughly three liters.
Space out the amount of water you drink. You don’t need to, nor should you gulp down a whole glass in one sitting. The only exception would be if you’re really thirsty. You’re also permitted to add maybe half a glass extra a day if your hunger pangs are especially bad. Just make sure you’re not overdrinking too much. You may disrupt your mineral and salt balances.
As we talked about before, if you want to exercise on your water fast, you can. This is a good way to preserve muscle mass, so if you’re up for it, please do it. Otherwise, it can always wait until the next water fast.
Ease into Post-Fast Eating
When the time comes to break your water fast, you need to go slow, just as you did when preparing for your fast. Diving right back into consuming huge quantities of food can make you look and feel awful.
Not only that, but you could develop refeeding syndrome. This is a condition caused after a period of starvation, fasting, or malnourishment. Without food, your nutrient metabolism changes. You’re mostly relying on fat for energy, which is referred to as fat metabolism.
Now, suddenly, you’re eating full meals again, switching to carbohydrate metabolism. Your insulin spikes as a result.
With refeeding syndrome, you may have lowered potassium, known as hypokalemia. Your magnesium can deplete, which is called hypomagnesemia. It’s also possible to develop a deficiency of thiamine, affect your fluid and sodium levels, and alter your protein and glucose metabolisms. Hypophosphatemia, which is when your body lacks the phosphate to make energy from glucose, is another major side effect.
The symptoms of refeeding syndrome include heart arrhythmias, seizures, an increase in blood pressure, breathing troubles, confusion, weakness, and fatigue. Heart failure is also likely, as is coma and even death. For your own health then, please don’t rush right back into eating.
Instead, you may start with fruit or vegetable juices just like you drank before your water fast. Smoothies are also good to sip on right now.
That same day, you might feel like eating something. If you do, then make sure the quantities are small. Then, the next day, you should safely be able to eat larger meals again. If this takes upwards of three days and you had an especially long water fast, know that’s normal.
How Long to Water Fast for Results?
Most water fasts last 24 to 72 hours, but on-off water fasts can go longer. We’ve spoken on this blog about a man who spent 382 days on a water fast, surviving on supplements and H2O. That was back in 1971.
How long should you water fast? While you may want results, it’s better to do multiple shorter fasts first before working your way up to a longer one. Try water fasting for half the day, like 12 or 16 hours before moving on to a fast for 24 hours. Then you can start fasting for 48 hours, 72 hours, and even longer if you please.
If you’re looking to lose weight on your water fast, then drinking only water for 24 to 72 hours is recommended. As we wrote earlier, you can expect about two pounds of weight loss each day, give or take. That could lead to two to six pounds lost on a single water fast.
If you’d like to water fast to trigger autophagy, how long it’d take will depend on your glucose stores. If you ease into a water fast like we recommended, then you may not have as much glucose in your system to burn through. The same is true if you’re a relatively experienced intermittent faster. In those situations, you may have to wait only 12 to 16 hours for autophagy to really start. In other cases, it can take longer, such as a day or more.
What if you’d like to give your immune system a boost through water fasting? That can take upwards of three days to happen, says friction training company FLOWIN.
Conclusion
Water fasting, in which you only consume water, comes with a whole host of benefits. From a lower weight to a healthier immune system, less risk of chronic diseases, reduced inflammation, and better blood pressure, there are lots of reasons to water fast.
With the information in this article, you can go on your first water fast safely. Best of luck!