Ryan's question is what would your recommendations be for breaking a 36 hour fast.
Really, the two things that I would think about are your digestion, it's probably going to take
a little bit of time to ramp itself up. I don't think you're going to do any harm by eating things
that are difficult to digest, probably not great for your microbiome, but probably something that
would just adapt to you. And so I would take that very subjectively. In your experience,
what types of things do you have trouble digesting from when you stop a fast?
But I think it's going to be fairly common to feel like some things just don't digest this well
when you come off at 36 hour fast than you otherwise would. I think that's very
subjective. My main concern from a health perspective would be feeding syndrome. So
generally when you're fasting, you lose phosphorus because the phosphorus is
associated with carbohydrate metabolism and your glycogen levels have been depleted.
And the phosphorus is associated with ATP. Your ATP levels have been
depleted. You will lose phosphorus from your body. You also lose
magnesium and you also lose potassium and with magnesium that's because
it's also associated with the ATP. And then the potassium, it's a little bit more complicated
and it's related both to insulin having effect on potassium. And I think it's probably also
related to some of the acid based buffering that goes on during fasting. But in any case
when you have a sudden influx of food, you can drive all those nutrients back into the cells and
maybe their serum levels were normal, but you push them down. And so, if you find that you recover
fine from the 36 hour fast and you don't have any problems with it, I wouldn't say everyone has to
do this, but I do think that a lot of people might have an easier transition if they supplement with
something like a hundred milligrams of magnesium, 200 milligrams of potassium citrate,
and maybe two or 300 milligrams of phosphorus. If you go on Amazon, you can find good phosphorus
supplement, for example. And that might ease any of the refeeding syndrome things that you might
experience. And then in terms of food sources, eating a lot of potassium rich plant foods and
phosphorous rich meat and eggs would probably be the best way to
get those nutrients from the diet. So one way of restating that would be don't refeed based on
low nutrient foods. Refeed based on, apart from digestive concerns, on meat, eggs and
high potassium, high magnesium vegetables. All right, thank you for your question, Ryan.