48hr No Sleep

Actually. I went 41 hours during this eating only a bowl of Cheerios.

Simply forgot about it.

I had a moment when it felt like my brain shut down for a couple minutes. Like my body was drunk, heavy, and unresponsive. Yet my mind was fully aware of it, and responsive. Like I was trapped in a malfunctioning body.

It was at this point that I realized I hadn't eaten. This was about 38-40hr into it. I ordered some pizza and was fine after that.

Last hour if it all, however, my eyes started bugging out. Felt like my eyes were losing parallax.

Think about how our stereo vision works, and imagine if instead of our eyesight overlapping for 3D, if one eye was focusing a bit above the other spatially. Like to lasers focused to different places.

It was weird....

InfinitusEquitas said:

Since we're on the subject of long term deprivation... anyone tried fasting?

I've done 2-4 days several times, and one week once, so far, I'm kind of tempted to try for over a week. Every time before, a social obligation would lead me to have to stop.

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I've gone without food for a couple days, but never without both food and water.
Without water I would never do it. I have to drink lots if I don't eat.

There are definite benefits to occasional fasting imo.

Consider, it can take anywhere from 24-96 hours, or even as long as a week, for the food that you eat to pass completely through your system.

Fasting allows you to essentially, give your body time to clean itself out, and get the crap out (literally). It's also helpful if you have any kind of issues with upset stomach. Gives your gut time to recover.

Now to be clear, I don't practice absolute fasts without water, in fact I think it helps to hydrate more than normal. Also many find it helpful to switch over to juices, for some caloric intake, and to get some nutrients into the system.

I've gone a day or day and half without eating more times then I care to count, simply forgetting to eat. After the last time I figured, what the heck, why not try it for longer, and I felt better after.

What's interesting, is day 3, and after I didn't really feel any hunger, except when exposed to food (like if someone is having lunch in the office three doors down, my sense of smell seemed to be amplified). I'm just curios what others might have experienced.

InfinitusEquitas said:

What's interesting, is day 3, and after I didn't really feel any hunger, except when exposed to food (like if someone is having lunch in the office three doors down, my sense of smell seemed to be amplified). I'm just curios what others might have experienced.

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It happens to me too, after a while. There is an explanation for this, similar topic I read recently here:
What is happening when I wake up starving, wait an hour or two and don't eat, and the hunger dissipates? : askscience

Down with Umbrella said:

What are you playing? Xbox or playstation ?
User name?

Interesting experiment bloom. Pretty big numbers up there^^^ 36, 48, 52 hours... That's nuts.

I remember reading about a balloonist who circle navigated the globe in a hot air balloon. The article states: "The actual gondola itself was no larger than a normal sized closet. Fossett would on average, manage about 4 hours of sleep each day, in broken down segments of 45 minutes Naps."

That's gotta be rough.
I have insomnia, without taking XanaX every night I would average 4-5hours of sleep a night if I slept at all. My body requires 7hours to function properly other people maybe different.

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I primarily play CoD Ghosts, contrary to the global attest to it.

Xbox 360's my console. GT: Sylntassasin101 I have thought about changing it, but I've had it for 8-9 years now. It's become a piece of me now.

My twitch name, if you're curious (I've begun streaming almost daily again) is ReeberAFSC.



Onto the other half. I get where you're coming from. I don't have diagnosed insomnia, but I've got prescription adderall. As most know, this is a stimulant. Keeps me up at night by default. To combat this, I am prescribed remeron. This does two things. It combats the appetite suppressant in the adderall, and also aids in sleep.

I think it's the basic that did it to me, but I've gotten very good at functioning on low sleep. The one time before shipping out, that I did 24 hours, it was awful. By about 30 hours, I had a mental/emotional breakdown. I started uncontrollably crying while trying to play a game on my laptop. For NO reason. I couldn't stop crying, and I was throwing my head and basically throwing a tantrum for absolutely no readily available reason.

Since basic and tech school, I have gotten much better. I can function on 2-4 hours once I wake up. Once I'm up, and at work, I'm good. It's getting up that's rough. In basic we'd get to bed at around 2300 (supposed to be bunked by 22, but we had cleaning to do in secret) and be up around 0430. Sometimes we'd be night raided at 0200 and the rush of adrenaline afterwords kept us from sleeping.

So sleep loss really doesn't affect me much. Just the initial getting up, and lust for sleep that last an hour or two. Then I'm good to go

Fun-fact. I did the above 50 hours awake on 4-5 hours of sleep. The entire week prior, I was falling asleep around 0130 and getting up at 0555.


All that being said. I have a pretty significant relationship with my bed. I LOVE sleep. I just work well without it

Well, I'm going to have an empty fridge tomorrow, so I'm thinking after that I'll take 3-5 days off from eating, and see how it goes from there.

I will still be drinking a lot of water, a vegetable supplement, and (greens first) protein powder, psyllium, taking fish oil, multivitamin, zinc, magnesium, C, in the mornings, and a bit after gym.

Will read through the reddit thread in more detail later, specifically the keto portion is interesting.

I do tend to agree, based on my experience past few months, that intermittent fasting is an effective option for weight loss, but that I can see why it's not one usually recommended. The psychological component for those without physiological issues, is huge.

Haha this is an interesting thead. Good practice for the zombie apocalypse I suppose.

Down with Umbrella said:

Haha this is an interesting thead. Good practice for the zombie apocalypse I suppose.

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Lol agreed.

Guys don't starve yourselves to lose weight just go on a crazy workout routine and not only will you lose weight but the chicks will be all over ya in no time.

I went without sleep for three days once and when I did sleep, I slept for 24 hours. I had some of the most incredible dreams, including one where I found myself in a place I can only describe as nirvana.

Nope, definitely not fasting for weight loss. That's been proven by many people, many times over to be a BAD idea.

In theory it could work - you can starve yourself to lose weight, and then resume carefully monitored caloric intake. (In fact I remember reading about a guy who didn't eat for a year, and was fine except requiring some supplemental nutrients, potassium mostly, he was able to go from grossly obese, over 400lb iirc, to a normal weight.)

So theoretically it's doable. In theory, assuming I expend between 2500 and 3500 calories per day, depending on activity, I can literally quit eating for three months. (77lb overweight, at ~3700 calories per pound of fat.)

In practice, well, that's another story. We're hard wired with both physiological and purely psychological cues to seek out, and consume food. It's very likely that when we reach a point where sustenance is taken care of by more efficient means, we'll still continue to eat purely for pleasure, and at first out of habit.

In the meantime my order of Soylent just came in over the weekend, and I can't way to try it out. Only took them almost six months, but I guess that's the downside of being one of the original supporters on a crowdfunding project

Edit: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm

I restricted my caloric intake to about 600 cal's per day for three months and lost about 50 pounds, but I lost too much muscle mass and became weak. Tried to lift weights and couldn't lift more than 1/2 I could before. Bad idea indeed...

The muscle loss can be offset with weight training, but I can say through personal experience it is so much harder to exercise on an empty stomach.

I meant to do a calorie restriction to about that, maybe a bit less, starting monday, but haven't because of a bug I picked up... fever, chills, cough, all the usual crap, already feeling better, but not going to do it after I feel back to normal.

Basically going to stick to a mix of a vegetable powder supplement, psyllium, protein powder, fish oil caplets, fiber tabs, and multivitamin. Biggest component of the calorie intake will be the protein powder. The really hard part will be to stick to going to the gym daily.

Edit: Conversely I might just switch over strictly to water for 3-4 days, haven't made up my mind yet. My biggest issue with weight loss, is I make excellent progress throughout the week, but then a night out does incredible damage... or a weekend camping... alcohol has far too many calories

I'm sure someone here has done more, but one weekend about two years ago I went on a no-sleep study binge that was intended to be only one all nighter, but then a paper or two came up the next night, and I ended up staying awake for something like 63-68 hours (I am a diagnosed insomniac). I lost track there at the end, because it was probably 8:00 pm and it felt like it might have been 3:00am.
I must have hit that hallucination threshold at that point, maybe I just hadn't noticed before, but as I was walking back to my dorm to sleep, I saw a car in the pitch black parking lot before me that was completely off. However, two shadows that struck me as a couple of my friends looked like they were dancing in the driver&passenger seats. They cast their silhouettes perfectly like my two buddies and they were definitely moving/seated dancing for a good minute, when I finally got close enough to see it was the driver and passenger seat silhouettes. That was probably the most creeped out I have ever been in real life and I don't recommend it, unless you just really want to know what your mind can turn ambiguous shapes and objects into when you're alone and scared.

Something like that happened to me a long time ago, I was driving for too many hours and saw a wolf on the side of the road that looked to be 12 feet tall with its mouth agape and vicious teeth and all, a hallucination. Scared me pretty good, realized it was only that but I still drove on for awhile to put some distance before pulling over to sleep. Another time I was driving a motorcycle at night near Cheyenne, Wyoming (I love that part of the country) and saw a huge orange orb fly over me at about 500 feet (as I pilot, I'm pretty good at estimating distances). The thing stopped and hovered pretty close to me and then zipped off behind a mountain. Only thing is, I wasn't sleepy, not at all and had never been into drugs, so what was it?