Water Fast Coaching and Articles

Once you’ve gained confidence with 3-day fasts, a 7–10 day water fast offers an entirely different level of healing. This is when your body not only burns fat through ketosis, but begins to detoxify stored toxins, release inflammation, and activate deeper repair mechanisms. It’s not always easy—but it’s often where the most profound shifts take place, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

In this article, you’ll learn what to expect at each stage of a 7–10 day fast, how to prepare and refeed safely, and how to recognise signs of deeper healing—including what’s known as a healing crisis. If you’re planning your first longer fast, this is your guide.

CONTENTS:

• Introduction
  Why 7–10 days unlocks deeper healing than shorter fasts, and how to approach it with confidence.
• What Happens During a 7–10 Day Fast
  The two typical trajectories of longer fasts: feeling energised or moving through detox symptoms.
• Dietary Preparation Before the Fast
  How to eat in the days leading up to your fast to protect digestion and ease detox.
• Refeeding After a 7–10 Day Fast
  What to eat (and what to avoid) when breaking your fast—plus how long recovery might take.
• The 7–10 Day Fast in Greater Detail
  A day-by-day breakdown of how your body and mind change throughout the process:
  • Days 1–3 – Glycogen depletion and the switch to ketosis
  • Days 4–6 – Maximum ketosis, detox symptoms, and physical renewal
  • Days 7–10 – Healing crises and profound shifts in body and consciousness
• What Is a Healing Crisis?
  Understanding why symptoms may return and how to recognise true healing versus signs to stop.
• What About Fasts Longer Than 10 Days?
  When deeper or extended fasting is appropriate—and how to know if it’s right for you.

Introduction:

Assuming you don’t have any urgent health issues which require an immediate extended fast (typically lasting 14-40 days), then I believe the best way to establish a long-term relationship with water fasting is to develop and nurture that relationship gradually. The most reliable way to do this is to work initially with short fasts which feel relatively manageable, without putting undue pressure on yourself.

After you feel comfortable with 3 day water fasts and, physically, your body can make the switch to ketosis without much fuss, then it’s time to consider a 7-10 day water fast. For it’s only after you begin drawing solely on the energy of fat cells that the process of detoxification can kick into a higher gear (more info here) and you can start to reap the greatest benefits of a water fast. This means that a 3 day fast simply isn’t enough to confront any deeper issues you might want to heal.

If you’ve found it difficult to get through your first few three-day water fasts, it’s only understandable that the thought of a 7-10 day fast seems even more daunting. For this reason, I offer private online consultations and coaching for water fasting.

What happens during a 7-10 day water fast?

Despite some natural doubts and fears, many of my clients find that 7-10 day fasts tend to go more smoothly than they first expect (so long as they’re basically healthy and don’t have any serious issues with detox). This is because your body does some of the hardest work in the first three days while it establishes ketosis – and during which your fuel tanks are also running on empty. From the third day on, though, ketosis continues to become increasingly efficient, and this typically leads to one of two outcomes.

On the one hand, some people begin to feel lighter and fuller with energy. In many ways, the fast can feel like a celebration of freedom from the daily need to eat food. This freedom, as well as a lighter body and clearer consciousness, can feel so good that many people actually experience a sense of reluctance in returning to food at the end of the fast. There really is a beautiful purity about just being, without the needs and addictions of food distracting you, weighing you down.

On the other hand, some people experience a distinct roller coaster ride from this point as detox symptoms ebb and flow. In essence, with your ketosis engine having powered up over the first three days, your body now wants to turn all of that energy towards detox and healing, which can actually lead to lower perceived energy levels. It’s important to remember that you’re not actually lacking in overall energy, but rather that energy wants to flow inwards instead of outwards like it does in everyday life. Don’t get disheartened: as hard as it often is, this means your body is working for you!

As your healing metabolism firmly establishes itself by the end of the third day, the digestive system is in the midst of shutting down its normal function. As a result, most hunger pangs usually subside significantly after this point, assuming you’re able to rest and not overextend yourself with too much work. When I’m working with a client, one of the most frequent conversations is the need to try and slow down the pace of everyday life, both in order to maximise healing as well as to minimise any remaining hunger pangs. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to give up your job and spend the whole day in bed (!), but it does mean that it’s a good idea to try and reduce your commitments during the fast. Remember: your fast should be about you and not trying to pretend it’s ‘just another day’ of your regular routine.

This is all the more important if you’re fasting in order to address a health problem. Your body has a finite amount of energy, and it’s simply not worth wasting too much of that energy on the activities of everyday life. One of the most important issues I discuss with clients is how to best manage daily activities in order to maximise the healing potential of a fast, when it isn’t possible to take time off from work. The reality is that we often don’t live in an ideal world – and the sooner this is recognised, the more effectively it becomes possible to devise alternative strategies.

Dietary preparation before a 7-10 day fast:

Given that digestion comes to a halt after a few days of fasting, it’s extremely important to consider how and what you eat in the transition period both before and after any fast longer than three days. The transition before a fast is important because you don’t want your digestive system to shut down with food still remaining inside the intestines. This is important for two reasons.

First, it can rot inside you. Not a pretty thought. And as it rots, the toxic by-products aren’t going to help your body – precisely when you’re trying to detoxify through the fast itself.

Second, during the most intense periods of detox, your liver is often forced to release semi-processed toxins into the bile, which then leads to a potential toxic build-up in the colon. You don’t want to complicate matters further by having any digestive remnants hanging around as well!

Practically, dietary preparation means gradually lightening up your diet in the days before a 7-10 day fast. This means different things to different people, depending on their specific diet. Exactly how to carry out a dietary preparation is something I discuss with each client on an individual basis. However, one common element involves increasing relative fruit and/or vegetable intake. Where this is contraindicated because of food sensitivities or gut issues such as SIBO, it is extremely important to find an alternative strategy.

There are several benefits of focussing on fruits and vegetables before a 7-10 day fast. First, they require less energy to digest. This allows your body to wind down digestion and switch into its healing metabolism more quickly and effectively. Second, they contain plenty of fibre to help elimination, thereby clearing out digestive remnants before peristalsis (motility) largely ceases during the fast. Third, they are so-called ‘alkaline-forming’ foods. This helps to balance the pH of your body during the fast, especially during the heaviest periods of fasting detox.

Refeeding after a 7-10 day fast:

The transition out of a 7-10 day fast is at least as important as the preparation beforehand, because your digestive system is hibernating. It can’t digest. You have to wake it up slowly and with respect, eating small portions of easily digestible foods. Otherwise, you’ll be sorry!

Just as any food remaining in the gut at the beginning of a longer fast can rot, so a similar situation can occur now too. Anything other than the simplest fruits and vegetables is likely to sit in your stomach, until your digestive system is able to cope. This can and will take days. After fasting, many of my clients find that the transition time back to normal eating with a normal appetite can last up to a similar length of time as that of the fast itself (although there is also a large degree of variation from person to person, and many people bounce back more quickly).

In essence, a refeeding strategy should look the mirror image of what happens during the dietary preparation before the fast (see above). The exact pacing of refeeding, however, should be dictated by the body itself, rather than by emotional cravings for particular foods or simply a driving desire to eat. Until gaining enough experience in fasting, most people find this exceedingly difficult – and, consequently, managing issues during refeeding is one of the most important elements of my work when coaching most clients.

I remember the exuberance of celebrating the end of my own first 7 day water fast. I had no idea what I was doing! A simple salad quickly become a slice of pizza – which then turned into eating the whole pizza!!! It weighed like an anchor in my stomach for literally days afterwards… Needless to say, I learned my lesson afterwards!

To help people deal with the trials and tribulations of refeeding, I offer an exhaustive pdf on the subject in the webshop:

The 7-10 day water fast in greater detail:

Days 1-3:

Of course, the first three days of a 7-10 day water fast generally follow the process described in the 3 day water fast. With experience, though, it will become much easier – even enjoyable – and the process to complete the switch to ketosis will accelerate.

Days 4-6:

Days 4-6 is the usual timeframe when your body reaches maximum ketosis. This is clearly supported by my clients who love data, and who choose to measure their daily blood ketone levels. With a remarkable degree of consistency, most of them reach an average maximum ketosis of 5-6 mmol/l, usually around Day 5 (+/- 1 day).

At this point, after having fully ramped up ketosis, your body will want to devote greater resources to detox and healing. You’ll know when this happens! Above and beyond the detox symptoms mentioned above, your breath will stink. Your sweat and general body odour will also stink, as your skin releases toxins which may have been locked up inside you for literally most of your life. No, it’s not a very social occupation! But directly experiencing the repulsive things coming out of your body can make you appreciate how good it is to be free of them! It will give you the willpower to continue fasting in the future, no matter how hard it may have been in the beginning. I myself became a convert to water fasting on Day 4 or 5 of my first 7-day water fast, when my tongue began to produce a foul metallic-tasting froth. It tasted literally like poison.

Beyond the possibility of nausea at any time, detox can also typically cause aches in the muscles, connective tissue and the lymphatic system. However, this is generally more bearable than during the first three days, when you’re lower on energy. You’ll probably find there are periods when physically you actually feel great, with a clear and still consciousness, and then this will pass into a period of deeper cleansing when you feel weaker and heavier. During longer fasts, things always change. From hour to hour. From day to day. There’s no apparent logic to it, so don’t try to analyse. Just trust your body and go with the flow. It knows what it’s doing: how and what to detox, where to heal, and when to take breaks in between these more intensive periods.

Days 7-10:

You might be wondering why I’ve not listed a ‘5 day water fast’ or something similar here on this website. If you’d like to try four or five days, then by all means do! Every day of fasting does you good! But it’s because of the benefits of what often happens around the end of the first week of fasting that, in my opinion, it’s worth aiming for a period of 7-10 days. It’s at this point that you may experience a so-called ‘healing crisis‘. This occurs when your body has moved beyond the simple ‘house-cleaning’ of everyday toxins, and has started to tackle deeper illnesses, injuries and traumas (both physical and emotional). This is also described in the article on extended 14-40 day fasts.

What is a healing crisis?

A healing crisis consists of symptoms of an (old) illness returning or temporarily intensifying during the fast itself. This can be a little worrying, especially if you don’t understand what’s happening to you at the time. Nevertheless, it is perfectly normal. Think of it like this: fasting calls the illness forth from where it is otherwise locked physically into the depths of your body and/or emotionally into your subconscious. In calling it forth, you may temporarily experience the symptoms of the illness more acutely, but it is precisely through shaking it loose that you are then able to permanently expel the illness and truly heal. Western medicine can hardly ever achieve this to the same degree, because toxic (allopathic) drugs and physical procedures tend only to reduce or suppress symptoms. They do not deal with root causes of illness!

Occasionally, healing crises can be extremely intense. When this happens, it’s critically important to be able to tell the difference between a healing crisis and a sign from your body urging you to stop the fast. This is where working with an experienced fasting coach like myself can really help. If it’s a healing crisis, you should ideally try and push through. If it’s not, you should stop immediately!

What about water fasts longer than 7-10 days?

Given the degree of detox and depth of healing which occurs during a 7-10 day water fast, there’s usually no need to contemplate longer fasts unless you’d like to address a serious health issue or unless you feel the need to go deeper into your being spiritually. A weekly 24- or 36-hour fast (or perhaps regular intermittent fasting instead) combined with an occasional 7-10 day fast should be all that’s necessary in order to preserve good health. Exactly how frequently you conduct a 7-10 day fast is up to you, but please don’t violate your body by fasting before it’s ready – even if your rational mind believes it’s for a good cause.

Once you’ve faced and overcome the basic physical and emotional challenges on shorter 1-3 day water fasts, you can begin to trust your body and what it wants. At this point, your body always knows best. When the time is right, you’ll feel an inner urge welling up inside yourself to do a 7-10 day fast. You’ll look forward to it. For some people this may be only once every few years, for others up to a couple of times per year. Just follow your inner calling, and let the fast come to you – rather than the other way around!

Related articles:

• A stronger immune system
• Deeper states of consciousness
• The deepest detox
• Extended healing fasts

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