I Fasted for Six Days. Here’s What Actually Happened

Disclaimer: What you’re about to read is not advice. It’s a confession.

The Week I (Almost) Stopped Eating: A Cautionary Tale from My Weight Loss Experiment Days. Look, I was in my late twenties, thought I was invincible, and had absolutely zero medical supervision for any of this. If you’re looking for smart weight loss strategies, skip to the end where I talk about what actually worked. If you’re here for the chaos… buckle up.

My Greatest Hits in Questionable Diet Choices

Before we get to the main event my nearly week-long food strike let me paint you a picture of the experiments that led me here.

The Egg Diet: Three eggs. Every single day. Nothing else. And you know what? It worked! I lost weight! I also gained it all back approximately 3.7 seconds after I finished. Turns out your body really enjoys storing everything you eat after you’ve convinced it there’s a famine happening. Who knew?

Intermittent Fasting (The One That Actually Worked): This is my main weight management tool today, though I’ve dialed back the extremism significantly. I skip breakfast and lunch most days. In my experimental phase, I tried variations that ranged from skipping 24 hours straight to skipping breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.

Most of these failed spectacularly. There’s something humbling about trying to take your morning walk when your legs have apparently forgotten how to leg. The weakness hit me like a freight train made of jello.

The Squats Incident: Quick detour once I combined fasting with squats and dropped from 180 pounds to 163 pounds in about two weeks. I legitimately got scared. Like, looked in the mirror and thought, “Okay, we’ve gone too far into skeleton territory.” Those squats really work, but that was too much, too fast.

The Main Event: Six Days of (Almost) Nothing

The extended fast was the natural evolution of my fasting experiments. I’d done 24 hours, I’d skipped multiple meals so my brain, in its infinite late-twenties wisdom, decided: “What if we just… kept going?” Now, to be completely honest, I didn’t go completely without consuming anything. I drank black tea. That was my lifeline, my liquid companion, my morning ritual to mitigate the bad feelings. Something warm to sip on made the whole ordeal feel slightly less insane. No calories, no sugar, no food. Just tea and water for what I think was five or six days. (When you’re that delirious, counting gets fuzzy.)

Day 1-3: The Honeymoon Phase

The first couple days weren’t terrible. Sure, I was hungry, but there was almost a novelty to it. “Look at me, I’m fasting! I’m so disciplined!” My body was probably just confused, running on stored glycogen and false confidence. I kept up my morning walks during this phase. They felt okay not great, but doable. The black tea in the morning helped take the edge off.

Day 4: Welcome to Weakness Town, Population: Me

By the fourth day, “extremely weak” doesn’t quite capture it. You know that feeling when you’re sick with the flu and even lifting your phone feels like dead lifting? That, but voluntary. The walks stopped. I just… couldn’t. My body was done pretending this was fine.

Here’s the weird part though, I felt strangely lightweight. Like I could run a marathon. (Spoiler alert: I absolutely could not. My brain was writing checks my depleted body couldn’t cash.) I felt floaty, almost euphoric. That’s my body pumping out stress hormones and ketones, by the way. It’s not magic, it’s survival mode.

The brain fog started rolling in around this time too. Not in an angry, irritable way, honestly, I was too busy being concerned about the whole “this is getting out of hand” situation to be irritable. It was more like my thoughts were moving through molasses. Beyond the fog, I started experiencing these weird short-term memory gaps, tiny blips where I’d forget what I was doing or lose track mid-thought. My brain was basically running on fumes.

Day 5-6: When Your Hands Develop Opinions

This is where things got genuinely scary. My hands started twitching. I remember paying a taxi driver and watching my fingers shake visibly as I handed him the money, terrified he’d notice. Not subtle twitches either full tremors.

The memory gaps were getting worse too. I’d walk into a room and completely forget why I was there, or start a sentence and lose it halfway through. It was unsettling in a way that finally broke through my stubbornness. That’s when my survival instinct finally overrode my experimental mode. “Okay,” I told myself, “let’s break this fast before my body starts eating my brain, if there’s anything left to eat.”

Breaking the Fast: Soup Saves the Day

Thankfully, I’d done enough reading to know you don’t just demolish a burger after nearly a week of nothing. I broke my fast with soup, something light, easy to digest, gentle on a digestive system that had basically been on vacation. It was probably the best soup I’ve ever tasted in my life. My body went back to normal surprisingly quickly. The tremors stopped. The fog lifted. The memory came back. Crisis averted.

The Results (And Why They Don’t Matter)

Did I get extremely cut? Yes. Like, magazine-cover levels of lean. And here’s the kicker, it actually lasted a while because I kept up my exercise routine, mainly treadmill work. The results were impressive. But let’s be real: the ends don’t justify the means when the means involve your hands shaking and your brain forgetting what it was doing mid-thought.

What Actually Happened (The Science-ish Part)

Let me get real for a second. What I experienced were textbook symptoms of starvation:

The weakness: Your body depletes glycogen stores (quick energy) within 24-36 hours, then starts breaking down fat and eventually muscle tissue for fuel
The “lightness”: Ketosis and increased cortisol/adrenaline can create euphoria, but it’s your body’s stress response—think of it as your internal alarm system going haywire
The brain fog and memory issues: Here’s where it gets interesting. Your brain normally runs on glucose, which it loves. During extended fasting, it has to switch to using ketones as fuel. This transition isn’t smooth—it’s like forcing your brain to run on backup power. Some functions get prioritized (breathing, heartbeat), while others (like forming new short-term memories) start glitching. Add in electrolyte imbalances from not eating, and you’ve got neurons that can’t fire and communicate properly. The result? Those weird memory gaps where you forget what you were doing or lose your train of thought mid-sentence. Your brain is literally rationing energy for survival functions, and making new memories isn’t high priority when you’re starving.
The tremors: Severe electrolyte depletion, low potassium, low magnesium, low sodium, affects nerve and muscle function. Your nerves can’t transmit signals properly, leading to involuntary muscle movements. Combined with dangerously low blood sugar, and you get the shakes.
The rapid weight loss: Sure, the scale went down dramatically. But a significant portion was water weight, stored glycogen, and yes, some muscle tissue along with fat. Not exactly the healthy transformation I was going for.

Lessons Learned

After all my experiments, here’s what stuck: moderate intermittent fasting. I skip breakfast and lunch most days, eat a normal dinner. No extremes, no tremors, no memory gaps, no terrifying transactions.

The interesting things I learned from my nearly week-long experiment:

I can technically survive six days without food (though “survive” is doing heavy lifting here)
I now recognize the subtle signs of starvation way earlier than most people, which is… a weird party trick?
Soup is a gift from the gods when breaking an extended fast
Your brain needs fuel, and when it doesn’t get it, things get weird fast
This was monumentally stupid and I’m lucky nothing worse happened

The truth is, the egg diet, the extended fasts, the crazy experiments, they all had one fatal flaw. They weren’t sustainable. You can’t egg-diet your way through life. You can’t just… not eat for a week and expect your body to be chill about it.

DO NOT DO THIS.

Seriously, kids (and adults), don’t try this at home. Or at work. Or anywhere. Extended fasting without medical supervision can cause:

Electrolyte imbalances that can affect your heart rhythm
Dangerous drops in blood sugar
Nutrient deficiencies
Cognitive impairment and memory issues
Gallstones (ironic, right?)
Extreme weakness and dizziness
Muscle loss (including potential heart muscle deterioration)
Metabolic slowdown
And in severe cases, refeeding syndrome or organ damage

I got lucky. My late-twenties body bounced back. But I was playing Russian roulette with my health, and the fact that I didn’t end up in the ER was more fortune than wisdom. If you want to explore fasting, talk to a doctor. Get blood work done. Have supervision. There are safe ways to do intermittent fasting that don’t involve your hands shaking or your brain forgetting what year it is. My crazy experiment taught me limits, mine, and the human body’s. But mostly, it taught me that the best diet is one you can maintain without developing tremors or memory gaps.

Stay safe out there, and please eat something today.