The #1 Danger of Prolonged Fasting You HAVE to Know About

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you know prolonged fasting is so beneficial for your immune system or getting rid of cancer or brain health or anti-aging but there’s one aspect of prolonged fasting that is fairly dangerous okay you could potentially die and I need to make you aware of this so it’s called refeeding syndrome what is that that’s a situation where at the end of this prolonged fast let’s say you fasted for four days you eat too much too fast and the wrong Foods okay that could be the problem but before I get into this I do want to point out something this usually involves someone who has malnutrition someone who maybe has an eating disorder someone who is an alcoholic someone who maybe has been a diabetic type one for a long period of time or someone who has been starving okay which is different than a prolonged fast but if you are following my recommendations the risks of you having this problem are very very low because you’re not going into this having malnutrition I always recommend when you do fasting any type of fasting that you at least as a bare minimum take electrolytes and number two B vitamins because a lot of studies indicate people who have this syndrome um usually have really poor nutritional reserves but I don’t know your situation I don’t know how your diet has been in the past I don’t know what you’re taking so this video is very very important for everyone who is prolonged fasting other than dying you could potentially get a coma seizures convulsions but again these things are rare so here’s what happens in this situation you go into a long-term fast let’s say it’s three four five days or longer now typically if you check the blood the person is going to be fine they’re not going to have any deficiencies of minerals electrolytes or any of these things right but you have to realize that the great great majority of certain minerals like potassium magnesium phosphorus are inside the cell not in the blood so like 95 to 98 of those minerals are inside the cell so as you’re doing fasting okay the body is going to be releasing all these minerals or electrolytes from the cell into the blood to keep them at a certain level that’s your body’s stable kind of reference point always keep the blood normal despite pulling nutrients from the cells from your bone from your muscles so when you get a blood test for these electrolytes or nutrients you’re not actually testing the inside of your cells the intracellular you’re checking the extracellular nutrients right in your blood so you’re not going to really know what’s happening inside the cell unless you do a intracellular test but if you’re fasting for any period of time a lot of these nutrients don’t get stored for a long period of time a lot of them aren’t fat soluble okay they’re water soluble so you may find in a period of time they can go down pretty fast especially if when you eat your diet has been poor in the past or you don’t focus on getting nutrient dense foods then you decide you know what I hear all these great things about doing a prolonged fast I’m going to do a four or five day fast you do the fast you don’t take your electrolytes you don’t take your B vitamins and then it’s time to eat okay and you just pig out you start eating all sorts of things and lots of things like carbohydrates sugar whatever at this point you can develop What’s called the refeeding syndrome okay and what is happening is you’re very quickly raising insulin not to mention being on that four or five day fast your insulin sensitivity has become extremely sensitive those receptors are ready to pull in these nutrients from your blood very quickly and what happens is you have this this rapid shift of electrolytes specifically phosphorus that’s the big one potassium and magnesium sometimes calcium okay and all of this shifts from the blood to the inside of your cell to replace what’s missing and you end up with extremely low electrolytes in the blood and this is what puts the stress on the heart okay okay and this is what also can increase edema and swelling because you have this imbalance you see when you’re fasting you have very low insulin because when you have low insulin you actually get rid of a lot of fluid and sodium and with some people it could be 11 20 pounds 30 pounds of fluid okay that’s a lot but when you start eating okay and your insulin stress going up you start retaining sodium as well so this is where you can get some edema as well all of a sudden you’re you start holding fluid and you’re you’re like what is going on here and on top of that if you’re eating a lot of carbs these carbs are going to be converted into glycogen and glycogen needs potassium to store this sugar so you’re going to use up a lot of this potassium from the food you eat and not to mention all this shift from the blood into the cells you end up with a very low level of potassium you’re also going to be storing fat as well as protein and both of those macronutrients need vitamins and minerals as well so you deplete those and you also deplete vitamin B1 in a big way when you do carbs the metabolism of carbs requires B1 as the cofactor and so anytime you eat carbs you just deplete your B1 big time and one of the big symptoms from a B1 deficiency is memory loss okay and that can create confusion it could create anxiety and a whole host of other issues that relate from all the way over here from neurological problems to heart problems and so that’s the Simplicity of what the refeeding syndrome is so how do we prevent this problem from happening well make sure number one when you’re eating you’re doing the healthy version of the ketogenic diet you’re doing nutrient dense foods number two take electrolytes and the B vitamins as a bare minimum while you’re fasting it might also be good to take other things too like olive oil to get you fat soluble vitamins as well as your omega-3 fatty acids it might be also good to take vitamin d and vitamin K2 as well as some trace minerals and that way you’re not going to have malnutrition okay so it’s going to help you and when you introduce food you go slowly I’m talking about maybe an egg okay and you wait a couple hours and you eat something else maybe you have a a little bit of soup okay wait a couple more hours and do I don’t know some sauerkraut okay and then wait a little bit and do a little bit of nuts so that first day you don’t want to do more than like half of your normal calories okay so let’s say you’re doing a thousand calories on the first day and then you slowly increase food the next several days now this all depends on how long that you fast if you fasted for a long period of time let’s say you fasted for 21 days or 30 days well you’re going to go even slower than if you fasted for three or four days now just realize that when you’re doing intermittent fasting like say one meal a day you don’t have to worry about this okay I’m talking about when you fast for three four five days in a row so now that you know the dangers and how to prevent this refeeding syndrome the next thing to really wrap your wits around is the benefits of prolonged fasting so I put that video up right here check it out