This is the final post regarding my 4 day fast experiment. If you caught my last blog series, on how I got epically sick for the first time in 8 years, you’ll know how important sleep is for health.

During this fast my sleep was normal for the first two days, as well as my HRV (Heart Rate variability), until day three when it started to plummet. My body was starting to feel the stress of this extended fast.

I was having so much liquid that I awoke in the middle of the night on two occasions to go to the bathroom. To anyone that has experienced this (probably all of us) you know how difficult it can be sometimes to get back to a restful sleep. I had the added complication of having my stomach grumbling a bit. I ended up cutting liquids 2 hours before bed.

So what was the aftermath, I was extra tired for a few days after the fast, but my sleep was normal within a few days and it only took one day of refeeding to get my HRV and other sleep metrics back to normal.

I’ll remind everyone that time in bed doesn’t equate to time asleep or even to the quality of that sleep. If you are not focusing on optimizing your sleep, you are missing out on one of the biggest factors you can control for your health and longevity.

A few final thoughts on this 4 day fast… I will never know if I positively affected my body, mind or spirit over this experiment, I believe I did, but I know that I have the resilience and fortitude to go a number of days without any real subsistence if I need to for whatever reason. And that is good for me. Will I do it again? Maybe. I need to ponder some more. Perhaps it will be a weekly 24 hour or maybe a quarterly two or three day fast or maybe this will become an annual ritual. Not sure, but I do know that I will uphold my usual daily intermittent fasting protocol go forward. If you would like to discuss how to incorporate fasting or how to optimize your sleep, let’s talk.