Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
Inflammation can make your day-to-day life quite painful, especially if this pain is caused by inflammatory diseases such as hepatitis, celiac disease, or inflammatory bowel disease. If you’re looking into holistic treatments for your inflammation, one such treatment you might feel enthusiastic to try is water fasting. Can water fasting reduce your inflammation?
Water fasting, as a type of intermittent fast, has been proven to lessen levels of inflammation in the body. When you fast, your body reduces the number of monocytes, or white blood cells, through autophagy. The white blood cells that remain are less inflammatory.
In this article, we’ll explain more about inflammation, its symptoms, and its causes. We’ll also delve further into why water fasting could help with your inflammation and how to fast for fewer inflammatory symptoms. You’re not going to want to miss it!
What Is Inflammation and What Causes It?
Understanding Inflammation
Inflammation is another word for swelling. When a part of your body becomes inflamed, it’s a reaction from your white blood cells. By launching this reaction, the white blood cells can safeguard the body from viruses, bacteria, and other things that can make you sick.
Thus, normal levels of inflammation within the body are no risk to your health, as your immune system relies on this signal, so to speak, to tell it to fight off foreign invaders. It’s only when the body goes through the inflammation process when there are no invaders to combat that your health is at risk. Your immune system might begin attacking otherwise healthy tissue because the inflammation told it something needs to be fought.
Inflammation can be acute or chronic. With chronic inflammation, your pain persists for months at a time, even years, whereas with acute inflammation, the symptoms last for only days at a time, if that. Having diseases and/or conditions such as Alzheimer’s, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer puts you at a higher risk of developing chronic inflammation.
With inflammation, you may experience a range of symptoms. Sometimes, these feel like you’ve come down with a case of the flu, as you’ll have stiff muscles, no appetite, a headache, exhaustion, chills, and a fever. Outside of those symptoms, you could also develop stiff and painful joints, joint swelling that radiates warmth, and redness around the affected area.
Inflammation Causes
Let’s dive deeper into the process of inflammation so you can understand what can cause that very process to go wrong.
Your body has many white blood cells, also known as monocytes. For each microliter of blood in your body, there’s 4,000 to 11,000 monocytes. However, these white blood cells die off all the time, as their lifespan is 13 to 20 days, so about three weeks.
The white blood cells release a chemical as your body becomes inflamed. The chemical travels to your tissue or bloodstream, increasing the amount of blood in that area to ward off infection or injury. The tissue can get full of fluid from the release of the chemicals, which is what causes the swelling associated with inflammation. This is also when you tend to feel pain and other symptoms.
The more white blood cells in the body at any one time, the more inflammation symptoms you may have. These symptoms can include cartilage loss in the long-term, joint lining swelling, and other irritation.
If you have an autoimmune disorder, then it’s possible for the inflammation to reach your organs. With nephritis, or kidney inflammation, you could develop kidney failure and/or high blood pressure. Lung tube inflammation causes a feeling like you can’t breathe while myocarditis or heart inflammation can contribute to a buildup of fluid as well as those breathing troubles.
Inflammation can be treated through surgeries like joint replacement, arthrodesis, synovectomy, osteotomy, or an arthroscopy. Medications such as biologic drugs, disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs or DMARDs, antimalarial medications, corticosteroids, and NSAIDs can also lessen inflammation depending on its severity.
Does Water Fasting Reduce Inflammation?
If you’re more interested in natural treatments, some patients with chronic inflammation will go on an anti-inflammatory diet. You may take things one step further with a fast. After all, many foods can worsen inflammatory symptoms, among them processed meat, too much alcohol, refined carbohydrates, seed and vegetable oils, artificial trans fats, and high-fructose corn syrup and other forms of sugar.
By avoiding all food with a water diet, is it possible to lessen your inflammatory symptoms? According to the research, yes, it is.
The first bit of data comes from a 2019 article in the journal Cell. This study discovered that “calorie restriction is known to improve inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.” Further, the Cell researchers noted that in both mice and human trials, the circulating monocytes within the body lessened through fasting.
You may wonder how this is a good thing, and to answer that, we point you to an internal process that occurs during fasting that’s called autophagy. If you haven’t read about it prior on this blog, autophagy is a type of cell recycling. Your healthy cells take the old and damaged parts of older cells–in this case, monocytes–and eat them so the remaining cell is healthier. If the cell is unsalvageable, then the whole thing gets consumed.
Remember, the average lifespan of a white blood cell is about three weeks. As its life gets closer to ending, that monocyte becomes less effective. The likelihood of the monocyte launching an unnecessary inflammatory response is higher.
Thus, fewer monocytes from autophagy means the ones that are left are healthier. More monocytes will be regenerated to prevent unnecessary immune system responses.
The results of this study seem applicable to all types of intermittent fasting, a category that water fasting falls under.
Other Benefits of Water Fasting
Besides reducing inflammation, water fasting has a slew of other benefits. Let’s discuss these now.
Could Ward off Heart Disease, Cancer, and Diabetes
Fasting and its effects on cancer have long been proven, and the same goes for water fasting. According to a 2012 report in Science Translational Medicine, through fasting in cycles, it’s possible to restrict tumor cell growth, at least in mice. The researchers do note that the same result doesn’t necessarily apply to humans.
Also, the same study says that “short-term starvation (or fasting) protects normal cells…from the harmful side effects of chemotherapy drugs.” Those who have already been diagnosed with cancer and are on chemo could find the harrowing experience easier if they water fast or engage in other forms of intermittent fasting, as they’ll experience fewer symptoms.
As for your heart health, free radicals can wreak havoc here. These atoms, which are electron duos, look for more electrons to pair off with, causing severe damage as they do. In the journal Circulation, a 2005 report found that when animal participants went on an intermittent fast for three months and then the researchers did myocardial infarction on the participants, these rats had less inflammation and fewer apoptotic monocytes.
Also, by lessening inflammation, it’s possible to prevent the onset of diseases and conditions associated with swelling. These include inflammatory bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and even diabetes. This is according to the aforementioned study in Cell.
Might Boost Sensitivity to Leptin and Insulin
Through a water fast, you can also change how sensitive your body is to leptin and insulin. Leptin, a hormone, is produced in your small intestine via enterocytes and adipose cells. It prevents unnecessary hunger so the body can better control energy levels. Insulin, which is another hormone, comes from pancreatic islets’ beta cells. It regulates your protein, fat, and carb metabolism through determining the glucose absorption speed, which ensures your bloodstream gets the nutrients it needs.
When you’re more sensitive to hormones such as leptin and insulin, they work better. That means you’ll feel less hungry from leptin and have a more regulated blood sugar thanks to insulin, says a 2005 report in Gerontology.
Could Reduce Your Blood Pressure
Having high blood pressure puts you at an elevated risk of stroke and heart disease. Instead of exclusively taking medication to lower your blood pressure, consider a water fast instead.
In 2001, a report in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics that involved 174 participants published some interesting findings.
All the participants had high blood pressure that was at or higher than 140/90. The participants went on short diets that were two to three days long in which they consumed only vegetables and fruits. Next, they water fasted for 10 to 11 days with medical supervision. After the water fast wrapped up, the participants were carefully refed for up to a week, following a vegan, low-sodium, and low-fat diet.
So what happened? Nearly 90 percent of those involved in the study had reduced their blood pressure. Almost none had a 140/90 blood pressure after fasting and dieting. Also, the participants who were on antihypertensive medications, which included 6.3 percent in all, were able to stop taking the medication because their blood pressure was actively being regulated.
How to Begin Water Fasting for Less Inflammation
You’ve decided that you’d like to reduce your inflammation through water fasting. More than likely, no matter what’s causing your inflammation, fasting can be an effective natural treatment. That said, before you proceed, you always want to speak to your doctor.
Schedule an appointment to determine if you’re a viable candidate for a water fast. You may even ask about whether your doctor can help you with a medically-supervised water fast, which no, isn’t only an option for study participants.
Water fasting is considered a more extreme form of intermittent fasting. It takes great patience and dedication to do a water fast since you’re going for days without any food. You can feel ravenous, tired, and weak from the lack of glucose or energy when drinking nothing but fluids.
If you do go on a medically-supervised water fast, it’s possible you can extend the length of the fast. The results of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics study do seem to suggest that it would take a longer fast to reduce very high blood pressure, as the participants water fasted for well over a week. However, the study doesn’t say in any official terms whether such a long fasting period is necessary or was just part of the experiment.
Should you decide to do a water fast on your own at home, you should never try to fast for 10 days at a clip, at least not until you’re a much more experienced faster. Instead, you want to start with a shorter water fast, maybe one that’s 12 to 16 hours. Then you can continue extending the length of your fast, first to 24 hours, then to 48 hours, and even 72 hours.
As you prepare for your first water fast, adjust your diet. Start by cutting down on your meal sizes, then go from three meals a day to two. Several days before your water fast is to begin, consume more foods in liquid form, such as fruit and veggie juices, smoothies, and plenty of water.
When your water fast ends, refrain from eating solid foods immediately. You want to begin ingesting calories in liquid form, sipping on the same beverages you did to prepare you for your water fast. Within that same day or into the next day, you can introduce your first solid meal. Keep the quantities small, and don’t eat more than you can stomach. Your appetite should return to normal within a few days, but don’t push it until then.
Conclusion
Water fasting can treat inflammation as it reduces white blood cell counts in the body. This autophagic activity ensures only the healthiest monocytes survive. The ones that do stick around are less inflammatory as well, which can reduce your painful joint symptoms.
Always see your doctor before starting a water fast, as it’s a stricter type of intermittent fasting compared to others. You also don’t want to fast for long periods without medical supervision, as water fasting can lead to severe dizziness, exhaustion, and weakness.
Now that you know how water fasting can help with your inflammation, you’re all set to begin reducing your pain naturally!