It takes me about three days to get shaky from hunger. The only time I get pain is when I eat something I shouldn't have.

Many traditional societies have cycles of feasting and fasting. We have Fat Tuesday, Lent and Easter, not to mention the more secular Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts around harvest time, before the lean times of winter. During Ramadan, every night is a feast. The message for me is that when you eat, you should REALLY eat.

Really?? Three days? I haven't been able to do that since I was in my twenties. Wish I could go 24 hours without feeling like crap but I can't. If I make it to five hours I'm doing great. But that is sometimes stretching it....even with lowcarb. Of course I realize some of this is mind over matter....some of it.....not all.

When I was 20, I went through combat training in preparation to serve in Vietnam. As part of the training, we practiced escape & evasion for 9 days. I'm going to give a short version of what I went through. I had no food the entire time, except for about a teaspoon of honey on the 4th day, about 4 ounces of rabbit on the 6th day. I had a small amount of water each day and spent all of my waking hours walking through rugged terrain coated in mud and exposed to all the elements in nature. I averaged about 4 hours of sleep each night and had no shelter whatsoever except that I'd bury myself in leaves and branches to help keep warm (didn't work well). I lost 15 pounds in those 9 days.

In sharing my experience afterward with the other 80 men in my company who went through the same thing; we all agreed that the hunger pangs stopped on the 3rd day and there was only thoughts of conserving energy as we had not been given any idea of the exact number of days we'd be in the field, although we were told it would not exceed 3 weeks.

I ended up being about 10 pounds underweight at the end of that training phase, but gained back that 10 pounds over the next two weeks or so, but kept the other 5 pounds off for the next 3 or 4 years.

Before I started IF, I couldn't go more than 3 or 4 hours without going insane from hunger. It took two months to adjust to an 18-hour fast, but after that, I could fast for 24 or 48 hours without any great trouble.

I can go 18 hours without eating but usually I end up eating a lot more than I normally would when I do eat. I guess this is not a bad thing???? Usually by 12 hours I'm ready to kill someone. I know that it's nothing dangerous but I just feel like crap. I am really not a foodie and if there was a way to get by without eating I'd do it rather than eat. Food has never been my forte as far as the mental pleasure that it gives other people.