Illustration: Matija Medved

Optimize Me

Dry Fasting Is a Terrible Idea

It’s a recipe for dehydration and kidney problems

Dana G Smith
Elemental
Published in
5 min readFeb 18, 2020

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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…

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Dana G Smith
Elemental

Health and science writer • PhD in 🧠 • Words in Scientific American, STAT, The Atlantic, The Guardian • Award-winning Covid-19 coverage for Elemental