DISCLAIMER: We are not doctors, nor experts on fasting. We do not recommend anyone do a medically unsupervised water fast. If we had not been in Northern Spain when Lou got injured, he would have gone to True North Health Center ( in California to do his water fast with the support of their medical team. If you are under 18 years old, on medication, addicted to any substances, have currently or had a history of eating disorders, are pregnant or breastfeeding, have heart problems or any other diseases it is even more important that you seek the advice of a medical professional before attempting a water fast on your own.
It might sound really crazy to you, but Lou did a 7 DAY WATER FAST! If you’ve never heard of a water fast, it is very simple: don’t eat any food or drink anything other than pure filtered water for a specified amount of time, so for Lou that was one entire week without any food, no coffee, no tea, no lemon water, no juice, or vitamins – just plain filtered water and rest.
You might be familiar with the trendy diet called Intermittent Fasting. Here people only eat in a certain window of time (16 hr fast/9 hr feed or 14 hr fast/10 hr feed) and while this has lots of touted health benefits, Lou was in need of relief fast from a horrible back injury and decided he’d do whatever he could to get results quickly as possible. One of the main benefits of fasting is the body’s ability to reduce inflammation. Instead of spending lots of energy digesting food, the body can now work to rebuild the immune system and while there still aren’t many long term trials of fasting’s effects on humans, science is showing that fasting can be used to help treat a whole host of problems like heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, high blood pressure, and autoimmune diseases. Over 6 years ago Lou was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease where the body attacks the joints, and over the course of the last few years has been able to get off medication and manage his symptoms with the help of a low-fat oil free plant based vegan diet. However, when he does stray from a health-promoting diet his RA symptoms do begin to resurface. So while we’re not sure if his back injury had to do with his RA, either way, the autoimmune disease makes his healing process extremely slow. We live in a van, so being immobile was actually a very scary experience, and left Lou to embark on this water fasting journey. The before and after is astounding as his pain levels went from an 8 out of 10 to… well you have to watch for that!
Before we get to the video, I just wanted to say that a lot of people come to water fasting searching for a quick fix for weight loss and I really recommend that you reconsider. Water fasting is a wonderful tool to manage health conditions with the help of doctor supervision, but when it comes to weight loss it might not be your most effective tool because if post fast you continue all the same habits you will be left in the same position. If you are searching for weight loss please research a low-fat plant-based diet, but mainly I want you to really think about where the desire to lose weight is coming from. Our society tells us constantly that we are not good enough and instead of buying into this lie, this might be the time you instead embrace yourself as you are. Focus on self-love, body-acceptance, and finding self-worth outside of ascetics. Diet culture is toxic, and while I know it’s complicated for me to write about it as we are huge advocates for a low-fat vegan diet as its been an incredible tool to manage Lou’s autoimmune disease, in the end, I want people to know that they are worthy as is. No crazy lifestyle changes will change your relationship to yourself unless you do the mental work.
Thanks for being here with us and while I know water fasting might make a lot of people uncomfortable it was an incredible experience for Lou and I hope you can see how much it helped him.
For more information please check out my blog post on Lou’s 7 Day Water Fast Experience:
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