If you’re considering a seven-day fasting diet, you might want to check out a new simulation that shows what actually happens to your body before diving in.
Fad diets are nothing new, but some trends push the boundaries more than others. From the popular intermittent fasting methods like 18:6 — where you fast for 18 hours and eat during a 6-hour window — to the well-known 5:2 approach, where people limit their calorie intake for two days of the week, there’s no shortage of options.
Then there’s the more extreme One Meal A Day (OMAD) diet, which restricts eating to just a single meal daily. While many tout the potential benefits — like weight loss, improved focus, and metabolic health — it’s important to understand the risks, especially with longer fasts like the 7-day method.
Before you join the trend, it’s worth learning what your body really goes through — and whether it’s something you should attempt without professional guidance.
But the seven-day fast might be one of the most extreme plans out there.
Before people began to use Wegovy for weight loss, there were fasts.
Fasting for seven days causes the body to rapidly change (Getty Stock Image)
Previously, a simulator was released which shows what happens to your body when you go without food for 36 straight hours, and now there’s one to show you what happens after a full week sans food.
Created by the YouTube channel, @Health_and_Fitness-w7g, it ran through every step in the fasting process, the benefits and also some risks.
It explained: “After one to two days, all carbohydrates from your last meals are digested, and the body uses them as its last fuel.”
At this post, that’s when ‘the hunger hormone, ghrelin, will rise and you will start to feel hungry’ thanks to your lack of chowing down on your usual scrum, and the fact that your calorie intake is next to zero.
The channel then explained that ‘after two to three days, the pituitary gland increases the secretion of growth hormone, which helps significantly slow down muscle loss, more than most people think’.
It changes what energy we use (Getty Stock Image)
Then, from three to four days, the body runs out of glycogen, a form of glucose used as energy storage, and shifts to using fat as an energy source.
What’s even more interesting, is that this is around the point of where a process called autophagy is initiated.
This process cleans damaged proteins and even cancer cells in around four to five days.
You can expect to maybe reap some benefits at this mark.
This could be better mental clarity and memory beginning around this time.
At the five-to-seven-day mark, you might experience something called ‘true healing’ thanks to the autophagy stage.
This ‘cleansing’ will be at its peak, but your muscles won’t be able to preserve themselves past this time, which is when things can become tricky as you’ll soon begin to notice your muscle mass wasting away without sustenance.
For many, the whole point of fasting is to reach autophagy, where your body ‘self-cleanses’ so to speak, which can actually begin in as little as 18 hours without consuming food.
Now, you might be asking how any person could survive without sustenance for this length of time, but you can actually make exceptions when fasting.
For example, it’s acceptable to drink herbal tea, black coffee and water, as long as there is no milk or sugar added.
This can help you to feel full, gain a little number of calories, and to also not be a total zombie in the mornings.
As always, consult a doctor before making big dietary changes and make sure to stop if you begin to feel ill.