Everything you want to know (and some you don’t) about doing a 14-day water fast

I started my fast only 2 days after finishing up my antibiotics for tonsilitis. My throat still felt funny and slightly swollen, but I was determined to start and, well… that’s just the kind of person I am. It may not have been the smartest way to start the only second-ever water fast I had ever undertaken (I tried a 3-day water fast before and only made it two and a half days haha), but it is what it is and I want to be completely transparent about this entire fasting process.

Day 1
(piece of cake)

• Easiest day of the fast.
  
  Since I was still healing from tonsilitis I figured it would be best to take a couple of supplements the first few days of my waterfast, so I took Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc supplements with my morning water for the first few days. I drank almost 4 liters of water on the first day and I didn’t feel hungry at all. Clearly my body was perfectly fine living off the glycogen stores from all my previous meals the day before. There was literally no perceptible difference in the way I felt – physically or mentally – on the first day, and I barely felt hungry.

Days 2, 3, and 4
(this is difficult but kinda cool)

• Not too bad, still had a good amount of energy and the hunger was easy to ignore by drinking water.
  
  I took all the vitamin supplements every morning for these days as well and drank roughly between 3-4 liters of water per day. These days were the easiest of the entire fast for me. Anytime any hunger pains appeared, I simplly drank water and they went away within 5-10 minutes. I had plenty of energy, and I even went to the gym on the morning of Day 4. At the gym I ran for 20 minutes and did a short ab workout – although it was a decent workout, it was less than I was used to and I didn’t fully realize that I was starting to feel the physical energy drain that would characterize the rest of my water fast.
  
  *TMI WARNING: Day 3 was my last solid-ish poop for the next two weeks. I honestly thought it would be the only time I pooped for the entire water fast (surprise!… it wasn’t).

Day 5
(ughhhh… I want food)

• First actual hard day of the fast. Super hungry. Brain fog. Low energy.
  
  Today sucked. It was the hardest day of the fast so far. But I was able to stay positive because everything I had read online told me that it got SOO much easier after day 5. The internet made it seem like day 5 was a magical day where, if I could just make it through this one tough day, then everything would be infinitely easier after that. My hunger would disappear. My brain would be laser focused and I would have all the energy I needed.
  
  So even though I was hungry literally the entire day (no matter how much water I drank…. which was definitely more than 4 liters), I pushed through and made it to the evening SUPER excited to fall asleep and wake up feeling completely different.
  
  *TMI WARNING: I had another bowel movement on day 5 (can’t exactly call it a poop). I’m going to go into detail, so if you don’t want to know… skip this. It was super watery and had a slight yellow tinge to it. The smell was pungent but not putrid (if that makes sense). I wasn’t as suprised that I had another bowel movement after not eating for four days as I would have been if I hadn’t done a few juice cleanses before.

Day 6
(Huuuunnnnggrrryyy)

• Also really difficult. Dull aching hunger. Low energy. Brain fog.
  
  Day 6 was almost a carbon copy of Day 5, minus only the bowel movement and the unwavering belief that it would get easier. And I made it even harder on myself when I went to a local clothing swap (new clothes at no cost, how could I not right?) where they were also serving all you can eat pizza. The event was held at a local Italian restaurant so the entire time I was looking for new clothes everything just smelled like butter and garlic and tomato. I was dying.
  
  The one thing that really helped me throughout my water fast (because I was still very much spending time with other people in the outside world, and unsurprisingly the world doesn’t stop eating just because you’re water fasting) was immediately telling people I was water fasting. If I wasn’t in Bali this may have come off as obnoxious – thankfully in Bali these kinds of things are pretty normal – but it always helped keep me in check. If I made it a point of telling everyone around me I was waterfasting I had WAAAYYY more accountability out in public to stick to it. I drank about 3 liters of water each day.
  
  I had also read online that adding pink himalayan salt to your water every morning and drinking a tablespoon of ACV (apple cider vinegar) in your water every night were good practices during a water fast, so I went to the grocery store to get both of those on day 6 – the grocery store was harder, but thank god for will power.

Day 7
(This sucks: When your “why”
becomes the MOST important)

• Hands down the hardest day of the entire fast. Sharp hunger pains. SUPER low energy. Brain fog… all compounded by the knowledge that I was only half way.
  
  The theme of day 7 was FML. I seriously hated it. If there was any moment where I felt like I was just going to give up, say fuck it, and start eating, it was today. My energy hadn’t come back (I honestly believed I’d be able to continue going to the gym throughout the water fast… maybe that was naive, but it was a huge blow to me to be so physically weak) and I was hungry the ENTIRE day. No amount of water made the gnawing pain in my stomach cease. And just to give you an idea of how little physical energy I had: I had to go to Immigration in the morning to get my visa renewed and just the process of sitting on the back of a motorbike taxi, sitting at immigration, and then getting back on another motorbike taxi wore me out so much that even though I had slept EIGHT hours (I usually sleep 4-6), I immediately fell back asleep when I got home and slept for another 3 hours. Seriously, my ability to move around was so restricted by my lack of energy it wasn’t even funny.
  
  I think the only reason I kept going at this point is becuase I had such a strong “why”. I wasn’t doing this water fast because I wanted to be skinnier or look better in my clothes/a bikini. I wasn’t doing this because I wanted to harm my body or starve myself. And I wasn’t doing it just to see if I could. I was doing this because I was desperate to heal my body. My body was screaming out to me that I had been making the wrong choices when it came to food or diet or exercise or lifestyle or any combination of the above and I needed to help it heal. If you have access to affordable, quality healthcare you can probably just go to your local MD and run some tests to see what nutrients you may be lacking or what hormones specifically are out of balance or really anything. If you run enough tests you can figure out what your body is trying to tell you. But I don’t have that, so I chose to trust my body to know what it needed to fix instead. I was doing this waterfast to give my body the time and the space it needed (by not forcing it to give up copious amounts of energy each day to simply digesting a constant stream of food) to get to work healing the internal parts of me that were in disrepair (see: https://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/stages-of-fasting-what-happens-when-you-fast/). This sounds hokey if this is your first time hearing about fasting, but the more research you do into it, the more it makes sense. Either way, I truly think that if I had a weaker reason why I was doing this, I would have just given up at this point. It really was that hard.
  
  *TMI WARNING: I had another “bowel movement” (even less like a poop than the last one) which DID surprise me because I was now seven days without food. started watching videos of people eating online
  

Days 8, 9, and 10
(getting used to wanting food and not eating it….)

• The physical hunger dissipitated, but my body felt as weak as it did after the first time I ran a marathon. These days were characterized by mental clarity, bad breath, and trouble falling asleep.
  
  In comparison to day 7, these days were easier hunger-wise… although I’m pretty sure that’s just because my body had finally adapted (or given up) to not eating. But the physcial energy deficit was still very REAL, and no matter how much I brushed my teeth, my mouth just smelled and tasted terrible. I started taking the vitamin supplements again to try to help with my physical energy, but all these did was make it much harder to fall asleep at night. But just because I was no longer ravenously hungry didn’t mean my mind didn’t very much still want food. I wasn’t physically hungry, but mentally I wanted to eat. And it was during these days that I kind of became addicted to watching people eating food on Youtube (and yes, that is a real thing). It’s probably not recommended during a fast and I’m sure for many people it would just make things worse (almost like being taunted with something they want but can’t have), but for me it literally replaced eating. My body wasn’t hungry, it was my mind… so I fed my mind with the video. It was almost therapeutic (or pathetic, I’ll leave it up to you to decide haha)

Days 11, 12, and 13
(Weak but determined)

• Hungry, but only at night. Physically, extremely weak. Mentally, extremely alert and capable. Completely sick of the taste of water.
  
  There was no way I was giving up on any of these days, and I think knowing that just made them easier. When I first started running cross country in high school I learned several mental tricks to push myself to keep going even when I was tired or started cramping or just felt like giving up. During a race my coach would always be waiting at exactly the halfway point to give us our times and push us to run harder. This is also usually where the parents will hang out and there will be a water table, and with so many people around, it’s definitely not a place you would consider quitting. And you usually had to run a good distance to get completely out of eyesight of all these people. If I ever got tired or felt like quitting after this point I had a pretty messed up little mantra I would repeat over and over to myself in my head to keep me going: “Only LOSERS quit this close to the finish line. Only a seriously pathetic, absolute f-ing loser would quit when they were THIS close to finishing. It’s one thing to quit at the beginning, but to quit this close to the end… it’s something only the most pathetic, stupid, weak loser would do. You might as well have never even started running in the first place if you were just going to quit now.”
  
  Like I said, it’s definitely not the nicest thing to be going on in a teenager’s head, but it worked. And I would repeat it to myself over and over (although usually with more expletives) in my head any time I felt even the slightest urge to stop running because I was tired or my stomach hurt or whatever other excuse I had that day and it kept me going. And I’m pretty sure I’ve internalized at least the gist of it, because now whenever I do something, I always reach a point at which I couldn’t give up even if I wanted to. My body just won’t let me. And that’s exactly how I feel about these last few days of my water fast. It’s not exactly that they felt any easier than the previous days, it’s just that I had reached that same tipping point where I literally couldn’t have given up even if I wanted to…. whoever said nothing good ever came from negative self talk? haha jk.
  
  I didn’t feel any more or less hungry/physically weak/mentally aware these last days than I had the previous ones. The only thing I felt truly differently was an overwhelming sense of absolute determination to see this thing through to the end. As far as I was concerned, the time where I could have chosen to give up was behind me, and I was going to see it through regardless of whatever happened. (I’m serious, I probably could have had a mild heart attack during these days and I STILL would have kept going… which isn’t exactly a good thing.)
  
  *SIDE NOTE (TMI): I had about 5 fresh coconut waters spread throughout my 14 days of water fasting, and on day 12 I noticed that almost immediately after I had the coconut water I had a bowel movement (super watery, and almost more yellow than brown). Which made me wish I had paid closer attention to whether any of the other ones coincided with my drinking coconut water.
  
  

Day 14
(My WTF, is this even real?, low-key,
meditation/reflection day)

• Not hungry. Low physical energy. Bad breath. Mentally, super alert and introspective.
  
  For the reasons stated above, I wasn’t worried about breaking my fast early or be tempted to cheat, so I went to a restaurant on the beach, ordered a glass a water and spent the entire day reading a book (I read the whole thing thats how much focus and mental acuity I had), journaling, watching the waves and really just contemplating what I’d just done. Day by day it had been an absolute fucking struggle, but looking back on it on the last day it almost didn’t even feel real. It really felt as if no time at all had passed. And, all of a sudden, 14 days didn’t really feel that long. I wanted food, but I wasn’t hungry. And, if I wasn’t so sick and tired of walking around as feeble and physically drained as an old person, I probably would have wanted to keep going – although I wouldn’t have let myself; I struggled with eating disorders as a teenager, and although It’s been years since I’ve engaged in self-harming eating habits, it’s something I’m still very conscientious of.
  
  This day ended up being one of my favorite because I took the day off from stress and worry and work… I pretty much just checked out of life haha… and I let myself just do things I love. Spending an entire day reading at the beach felt like more of a luxury than even the nicest michelin-star 7-course dinner (and since I’ve actually had one before, I feel extremely confident making that comparison).
  
  And it also gave me the chance to spend time in my body and the review the changes I’d noticed.
  
  First, and also most weirdly, my eyes had become WAAAYYY less sensitive to light. It used to be that I couldn’t leave my house even on cloudy days without my sunglasses and it could even get so bad that my eyes would actually feel like they were burning and start to shut (super dangerous when you’re driving a scooter, let me tell ya). But on day 6 I broke my sunglasses and out of sheer laziness I just hadn’t gone to a shop to replace them, but I found I didn’t need them. Even when the sun was directly in my eyes throughout the next couple of days it was only a minor annoyance – that was a physical change I definitely hadn’t expected.
  
  Second, the inflammation around my ribs and chest had reduced SIGNIFICANTLY. I always felt like I had the weirdest bloat because it wasn’t just my stomach area, but also my chest area that would feel bloated and stretched out, and during the fast as it went down and I did more research I realized that this had probably actually just been inflammation caused by my internal organs’ inability to do their job correctly (either from overwork or damage).
  
  Third, the acne on my face disappeared and I had the smoothest and clearest skin I’ve had since I got off all my hormone medication that had been “fake” making me better for the last 7 years. And I say fake because once you do more research into most of the medicine that doctors prescribe patients in the western world, they almost always are only intended to mask or get rid of the symptoms of the underlying problem. Very rarely do doctors prescribe medicine (for conditions, not talking about illnesses like the flu) that actually FIX the underlying issue.
  
  Fourth, my nails – which had been weak and brittle almost my entire life – are MUCH stronger now (which REALLY surprised me, because logic suggests that without the nutrients from food the OPPOSITE should be true).
  
  Those are the main differences I’ve noticed so far. Only time will tell just how much my internal organs have improved as a result of this fast (especially since I can’t run any actual tests to find out). I’m most excited to see how my digestive tract and stomach have been affected and to what exent i’ll notice improvements when I start eating “food” food again (the first few days after the fast you have to slowly ease your body back into eating so it’s lots of broths, steamed veggies, and other soft/easy foods).
  
  But, overall, the one thing this fast did for me is that my body feels more like it’s old self than it has in years. My physical energy will return the second I start putting food in, but what I’ve done for my body is just irreplacable. I feel so much better and healthier and I’m actually thinking of doing a 5-day water fast once a month just as upkeep (sort of like how you’re supposed to dust and vacuum your house once a week so that you don’t have to spend an entire weekend cleaning your nasty house every month). And I mean, after 14 days, 5 sounds like nothing; it’ll be the easiest thing in the world and the benefits of doing it are immeasurable.

Well, that’s everything there is to know about what it was like (for me at least, everyone’s experience is different because every body is different) to go 14 days with nothing but water.

What do you think? Would you consider trying it?

Also, let me know if there’s anything else you’re still curious about, I would love to answer any questions you might have that maybe I might have missed in this overview!

Love from Bali,
Kate