Don’t just read the headline, pick a number of days and go for it. It does take a bit of planning, psychological preparation and knowledge before you undertake this ancient healing and spiritual practice.

But first of all, why even do it?

1. Water fasting lets your body take control of glucose and insulin levels. When you eat three times a day, plus snacks in between, your glucose and insulin levels are constantly ramping up as soon as they get a chance to settle down after the last meal (or snack). If you want to look and feel younger, and live longer, take control of your glucose and insulin.
2. Water fasting gives your cells a chance to get rid of debris. When you eat, your body is in a near-constant state of dealing with the onslaught of nutrients being spread around – where do we send this protein? what should we do with this sugar? It’s in constant management mode. If you take that away, it starts looking around for something else to do and usually finds built-up dead cells and debris and it starts taking out the trash.
3. Increases hormone sensitivity. The issue with diabetes or thyroiditis is often not the lack of enough hormone, it’s more about the fact that your cells are no longer receptive to the hormone–like a heroin junkie that needs more of the drug to get high. When you fast, your cells become more sensitive to various hormones (insulin, HGH, testosterone, T4, etc) because it isn’t being bombarded with them all day, every day.
4.  You’ll lose weight. Not eating for an extended period of time will inevitably cause weight loss. How much is dependent on your weight and BMI, but if you are looking to shed some pounds, there isn’t a much quicker way than a water fast.
5. You will reset your mental and physical relationship to food, allowing you to be more in control of yourself once the fast is over.

How to do it

“Just drink water; don’t eat food.” More or less, that’s accurate. But let’s get a little bit more specific.

First of all, choose a length of time you want to fast. People have gone up to 40 days, but the standard is three days. I recommend starting with a 3-day fast.

If possible, take time off work for these three days (maybe take one day off and do the other two over a weekend).

Before you start your fast, take at least three days and maybe up to a week to prepare yourself both physically and psychologically. You will want to start by cutting out sugar, carbs and processed foods during this time. It will make the “withdrawals” much less acute.

Understand that you will be hungry and you will crave food, which goes without saying. If you plan on spending most of that time at home, perhaps clear out your pantry and refrigerator. Have friends hold on to your food for you. It’s just too easy when the temptation strikes to walk into the kitchen and pluck something out of a cupboard and in five seconds, you are back to square one.

Stock up on filtered, clean water. Don’t just drink out of the tap for three days. This might do you more harm than good considering all the toxins in your average sample of city water. If you have access to a reverse osmosis filter, use that. Otherwise, get spring water from the grocery store.

You will want to drink about half your body weight in ounces per day. So if you weight 200 lbs, you will want to drink 100 ounces of water per day. So plan for that when you purchase or prepare your filtered water.

To Lemon or Not to Lemon

While not at all necessary, you can add lemon to your water because it does add a bit of flavor, which is nice, but beyond that, lemons are a great for detoxification. Lemon juice is quite close to stomach acid on a molecular level, which tricks your liver into making bile which, in turn, pushes food and waste through your system much more quickly. Plus, you get a nice dose of Vitamin C and antioxidants, both of which are great for detoxification. Just be sure to use organic lemons.