What Happens If You Don’t Eat For 5 Days?

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On day 1 of fasting, glycogen is eliminated from the body. Your insulin drops on your first day of fasting, allowing you to tap into your fat reserve.

Electrolytes, trace minerals, and B vitamins can be very beneficial during prolonged fasting, especially if you haven’t built up a reserve of these nutrients. You can drink tea and coffee without cream or sugar and have water with lemon during your 5-day fast. Plenty of sun, long walks in nature, hot and cold therapy, and HIIT can also enhance the benefits of prolonged fasting.

On day 2 of prolonged fasting, you get deeper into ketosis, which means your body burns fat for energy. Autophagy typically begins on the second day of prolonged fasting. This is the process in which the body recycles damaged proteins and uses them for fuel and new tissues.

On day 3, brain function and mood continue to improve. BDNF is stimulated, which helps support brain cell regeneration and increases your learning capacity.

You also enter a state of deep autophagy, which helps repair mitochondrial damage and clean up intracellular pathogens. On day 3 of a prolonged fast, your immune system essentially resets.

Prolonged fasting supports the growth of the thymus gland and allows the gut lining to regenerate completely. People often experience a massive spike in growth hormone on day 3, which protects against muscle loss.

On day 4, hunger is gone, and maximum fat burning occurs! Bone broth can be beneficial if you’re struggling through a 5-day fast or experiencing a stressful event.

Longevity and protective genes are heightened, and your antioxidant networks are strengthened during prolonged fasting. It can also help diversify your microbiome.

Slowly begin the refeeding process with around ¼ of your typical calories. Try an egg with sauerkraut, and then wait a few hours before consuming something like a small amount of soup with avocado. After a few more hours, consume berries and nuts. Wait before introducing a full meal and avoid sugar and carbohydrates. High-quality food is vital at this time!

After a 5-day fast, your skin, muscles, joints, and brain will show significant improvements! Regular intermittent fasting can help prepare you for a 5-day fast.

Dr. Eric Berg DC Bio:Dr. Berg, age 60, is a chiropractor who specializes in Healthy Ketosis & Intermittent Fasting. He is the Director of Dr. Berg Nutritionals and author of the best-selling book The Healthy Keto Plan. He no longer practices, but focuses on health education through social media.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Fasting, hands down, is the most powerful thing you can do for your health.
0:05.0	If you eat no food for five days, would you starve to death?
0:09.0	Or would you heal your body? Would you improve your organs?
0:12.0	We're going to talk about exactly what happens, day one, two, three, four, and five.
0:18.0	Doesn't health come from nourishing the body?
0:20.0	The real problem is that you're so used to
0:22.4	eating, it's hard to give that up. What we're doing we're fasting is we're basically mimicking
0:27.9	how our bodies were evolved genetically. If you just think about like the stone age time,
0:34.3	did we eat three meals a day plus two snacks? Could we actually order Pizza Hut
0:38.6	24-7? No. We did not eat very frequently back in the day. Now, our genes are so confused on what's
0:45.9	going on, especially if those calories are junk foods. When you start this program and you stop eating,
0:52.2	your brain's going to get smarter. Every single cell in your
0:55.0	body is going to be very, very resilient. So let's go through on day one. You are going to lose
1:00.5	something called glycogen. Glycogen is a series of glucose molecules connected together on a chain.
1:08.1	With each glucose, you have three waters. So if you actually look at what glycogen
1:13.4	is, it's like this fluid-filled sack of sugar. That is going to be tapped into and gone within the
1:20.3	first day. So you're going to get rid of that. When you get rid of that, you get rid of a lot of
1:24.6	water weight. Some people lose between one and even three pounds the
1:28.1	first day. And some people need to lose that because they're just retaining weight too much fluid as well.
1:33.2	You're also going to be lowering this hormone called insulin, which is the control switch
1:38.7	to whether you burn fat or you burn sugar. If insulin is low, you're going to be able to tap into your own fat.
1:46.7	What am I talking about? I'm talking about when you're fasting, you're no longer eating food,
	...

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