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Optimize Me
Dry Fasting Is a Terrible Idea
It’s a recipe for dehydration and kidney problems
Optimize Me is an Elemental column exploring (and fact-checking) the weirdest self-improvement trends. It comes out every Tuesday.
Women on Instagram are not drinking water, and they’re proud of it.
For the first time I did [a] 24h dry fast, (apart from 5 sips of green tea around 11am when it got too cold) and I’m stoked… I can’t believe it took my dad one year to convince me that food is just another attachment and conditioning and that there are people living without water and food.
No water for me since 4 months now. Since I start to heal my kidneys through dry fasting, which helps them to filter more efficiently, I stopped drinking “empty” water.
Dry fasting, as it’s called, appears to take two main forms. In one, it’s an addition to intermittent fasting, where the person not only doesn’t eat food for a large portion of the day — typically anywhere from 12 to 20 hours — they also don’t drink any liquids during that time. The claim is that dry fasting provides an additional positive stress to cells on top of fasting from food. The other version of dry fasting involves not drinking any water at all for days, weeks, or even months at a time, ostensibly to “heal the kidneys.”
Neither assertion is backed by scientific research, and the only concrete biological outcome of not drinking water is dehydration.
“I would say a lot of these fasts are, it seems to me, getting more and more extreme in terms of what is being put forward under the language of ‘this is healthy,’” says Claire Mysko, CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association. “This has very dubious, in my opinion, health benefits that don’t really justify experimenting with this.”
Intermittent fasting is all the rage these days among body-hackers and longevity seekers, and it’s even gaining support from some obesity and diabetes experts. The goal is…
