What happens if you don't EAT for 44 days_ (Fasting)

What is going on IF warriors? So today we're going to talk about an interesting story. What happens when you don't eat for 44 days? Now this has been done by many people and I have studies here of people doing 20 day fasts and of course we're going to talk about the person who holds the fasting record for the longest fast. I've done a video on him years ago. I thought but right now we're looking at a street performer called David Blaine. He stayed suspended in this box for over 44 days. Exactly 44 days. Three studies were done based off of his stunt and he legitimately didn't eat for the time that he was there. He only drank water throughout the day. Now you can see him here just by looking here you can see that he is a bit overweight. When he went into the box that was suspended over London he weighed about 200 I think I wrote it down here he weighed 211.4 pounds. When he got out of the box after 44 days he weighed 156.52 pounds. So he lost a lot of weight and if you want to see how he looked after this is how he looked after. So this is him in the box you can see fat accumulation in the face you can see that there's fat around the abdominal region around the torso he's carrying a lot of fat there you can see there's some fat in the arms but once you get to and even if you look at this picture here you can see that there's a significant amount of body fat just visually speaking even around his face around the belly region around his chest area but once we get into here you can see a significant reduction in the face a significant reduction in the body even in the arms as compared you know to how it looks here you can see that there's a significant reduction after the 44 days. Now one thing that is important to understand is that David Blaine only drank water and did not consume vitamins. A lot of people try to compare his performance or his stunt with other studies for example they'll look at this study here right this study was between 4 to 21 days of fasting and people use this to say well this is a group a big group because it's over a thousand people so it's a better sample size than just David Blaine. Unfortunately a sample size of n equals 1 is not a good sample size it's not going to tell you what the majority of the it's not a good thing to take to give that data to the majority of people and give them a recommendation of what to do. However there wasn't anything different or out of the ordinary that David Blaine experienced that most people wouldn't experience if they fasted. However looking at this study this study allowed the participants to eat almost about 300 calories in terms of like honey and stuff like that they could consume per day so this isn't exactly the same thing as what David Blaine experienced. David Blaine had nothing he had no vitamins or anything at all he simply drank water. Now for people that are like oh look it's so perfect he drank water he lost all of that weight. Yes he did but there's a certain point where the body the brain can work off of ketone bodies which is what takes place during a fast of this length. The brain could deal with ketone bodies for about 72 percent of its energy but it still requires for that other percentage it still requires glucose and what happens is that the body will start to self create glucose and the unfortunate thing is that they normally pull that from the muscles. So the body is not going to continuously in a linear fashion just chop at the body fat chop at the body fat chop at the body fat. What will end up happening is that there will be a period where it's called glucose neogenesis where the body will start to look at proteins that it can break down muscle tissue even organs can be shrunk can shrink because the body is trying to extrapolate glucose from that. Glucose neogenesis is trying to turn that into glucose to provide that additional benefit that additional percentage to your brain. So if we look at David Blaine's breakdown and how what what were the percentages of his body his body mass reduction which was massive I mean he lost a lot of pounds he lost 54 pounds during that study but he lost 22.02 pounds of muscle. This is the breakdown of the the the body fat that that was that was lost. 26.1% of his mass reduction was fat the smallest percent of everything else then muscle get muscular tissue was 42.4% which is the most of all the stuff then non-muscular fat-free tissue was 31.4% now what is that that's like water weights you know glycogen everything that's not muscle and not fat basically going down muscular tissue so basically fat-free body was 73.9% of what he lost 26.1% was only was body fat so this goes to show you that there is this cut off period for for people when it comes to just fasting and expecting this linear loss of fat. Now is it better for somebody who's extremely overweight or will this process be much more much different for someone who's extremely obese because he was considered overweight he went in there at 211 pounds at at six feet tall that is overweight and if you look at him if you look at David Blaine he looks to be overweight now does he look to be morbidly obese nope but he does appear to be overweight and here here he appears to look like he's underweight which he was because he was 156.52 pounds coming off of that fast he was a vitamin deficient and a lot of different vitamins obviously because he wasn't consuming some of the vitamins I'm sure vitamin D wasn't a problem since he was getting you know some sun while he was in a plexiglass suspended above you above London around London or in London but he had a lot of nutrient deficiency one curious thing that happened to both David Blaine and all these people in the study is that hunger was completely controlled after a certain amount of time so around day four or day five he was incredibly hungry in day two and three but around day four and five he no longer felt any hunger the hunger though as he mentally prepared himself to to exit the the plexiglass started to come back so the hunger like your body wants to survive but your body also ghrelin for example one of the hunger hormone is just going to reduce because of your pattern if you're not eating it's just going to reduce it's going to try to fight you to eat but once you kind of control it or stop or don't you force it to not you force yourself to not you know listen to ghrelin ghrelin is going to reduce and your hunger overall is going to reduce um however David Blaine is not the person who holds the record obviously for fasting that goes to this gentleman Angus Barberry who fasted for 382 days consecutively but he did take multivitamins and stuff like that but he consumed zero calories throughout now he also lost muscle mass but he also lost body fat as well his um his entire setup was not as detailed in terms of the study design it wasn't as detailed this happened back in i as detailed as David Blaine's as David Blaine had three studies done for his um above the below where he he was fasting but you can see a massive difference and he survived it however because of the ethics of doing this this was never ever allowed again in in the scientific community and you cannot break his record because Guinness won't even acknowledge you considering the fact that this is incredibly uh an incredibly dangerous feat and he did this under the guise of uh medical supervision right and the thing that's super dangerous is not even the fast itself guys the fast is not the dangerous thing this is not the thing that that's dangerous what's super dangerous about this guys is the re-feeding portion you could survive this fast for you the human body is very resourceful you can survive a fast but the problem is what happens to your body when you consume food for the first time after not eating for such a long time and all of these triggers are going to happen in in an intense way insulin is going to shoot up where insulin was so low for such a long period of time blood sugar is going to move you know leptin is going to shoot up all of these different hormonal activities and metabolic activities are going to go haywire crazy and that can literally cause your body to shut down so for the refeeding poor David Blaine couldn't even eat on his day one uh for his refeeding uh if we look at the refeeding portion here uh this is the refeeding strategy um day zero he had two cartons of water more water he couldn't have they just gave him more water than than what he normally uh what he normally takes in uh that two cartons of water again uh for day one uh five cartons of water so they're increasing the water intake six cartons of water and then finally on day four he was finally able to eat a light diet of 1500 calories and then day five they finally allowed him to eat whatever uh he wanted to eat so you have to understand like it's a crazy dangerous thing because so many things are dropping um you know ghrelin is going down uh your glucagon is going down there's so many things that that are like literally in a completely different flipped state than what it normally is and then in one fell swoop when eating it all comes back powerfully and intensely so this is the dangers of fasting for so long are you going to lose body fat yes is it going to be mostly body fat no believe it or not it isn't it's going to be a lot of muscle this is one of the reasons why i'm i'm even with normal daily intraday fasting like 16 eight or one meal a day i always ask you guys i'm sponsored by lumen but this tool even if people want to say oh no but you know i use it and i don't think it it works guys because it is a respiratory exchange ratio device a respiratory exchange ratio uses your breath to determine how much carbohydrate is in there or which is fats or i'm sorry which is uh carbs or glucose and then how much fats are in the molecules of your breath because that's literally when you when when you're burning fat guys you breathe it out most of it comes from your breathing that energy gets gets uh released through through breath through breathing so the device is a rer device it's not a some make-believe scientific or magic thing that they just said hey let's pretend no that that's a real device that exists it's called a respiratory exchange ratio device only thing that's unique about lumen is that they were able to make it portable because usually respiratory exchange ratio devices are are uh used that uh in in labs right where they put that mask on on on you that is used in labs but they were able to make it a portable device that works with with your phone i implore a lot of people to have a device like this this is the only device that exists um in in a portable way so i implore you guys to have a device like this lumen because you need to know what your cut off moment is somebody's cut off could be different your cut off might be 16 hours your cut off might be 17 hours your cut off might be 20 hours of fasting you don't know so when you take that device if you say this device doesn't work because i've been fasting for 30 hours and it's telling me that i'm burning carbohydrates it's because your body has already gone through the process of glucose neogenesis and is breaking down muscle tissue and protein and turning it into glucose it's not burning fat anymore it's transitioned over and this can happen once you eat then you go until you fast you're going to be burning fat and at a certain point is going to flip over so the lumen lets you know what your specific cutoff is it lets you know what your your starting point is when do you start burning fat because every body is different even with studies that show us when the cutoffs are for large groups of people there are outliers or non-responding groups in the study even if 87 percent of the experience one thing that's a good indicator for us to say well okay this is a good recommendation for you guys based on the multiple studies of like 87 percent of people experiencing this but what's going on with the other percentage it's smaller yes but it's still a group of people that are not responding to the intervention the way the other 87 percent are responding so you need to have something like a lumen device to help you understand when your cutoff is so if you're like oh yes i'm gonna go into this and i'm going to try to you know eat or fast for for 44 days or whatever it is you're going to probably burn through more of your muscle tissue than your fat mass and the issue with that is when you start eating again it's going to be much more difficult for you to keep the weight off not because oh your metabolism whatever it's simply because the less the least amount the less muscle tissue you have the less metabolically active your body is your body has become now less metabolically active and it's going to be much easier to put on weight plus you're going to feel this ravaged hunger that happens when you start eating again so if i look at what david blaine was saying um he at day five when he was eating ad libitum after day four of a light diet of 1500 calories he literally said my hunger grew out of proportion and i was eating almost a double portion of all meals because everything has come back everything has come back intensively since he fasted for so long so if you guys want to just do these types of fasts i implore you to be incredibly careful and pay attention to the data you're not going to be losing body fat specifically you're going to be losing more muscle than anything else and free free fat free body uh mass which is glycogen water weight etc organ shrinkage those are the things that's going to take place and those things can be very very dangerous hopefully this video has helped you guys understand um a little bit about what happens when you fast for 44 days i am not a proponent for prolonged fasting i always say that you need to fast within the what your biology is for you where is your specific cutoff you need and you need to work with that so that you can be as effective as possible so that you're predominantly burning fat and you're retaining as much muscle as you can so i'm a proponent for intraday fasting like 16 hours 20 hours 23 hours stuff like that but once you start getting a little bit further than that you can start getting in to these waters where you're burning muscle tissue simply because you're flipping over to glucose neogenesis hopefully this video has helped you guys if you like the video please hit the like button that tells me you like the video and it helps the algorithm and hit the subscribe button if you have not i 100 appreciate that we're doing a video every single day and happy new years to everybody it is today is new year's eve happy new years and we'll see you next year with another video which will be tomorrow peace out guys oh wait i always forget gotta press this button peace