I consider fasting for two weeks in October, but I'm unclear about it being beneficial in general or for what kind of fasting it might be beneficial and healthy. Thus this is a kind of request for rational discussion of this topic.
I looked for relevant LW posts but couldn't find clear evidence. I think this is an underrepresented and possibly underutilized lifestyle intervention.
As a starter you might look at
Wikipedia has fasting and intermittent fasting. The latter shows
health benefits include stress resistance, increased insulin sensitivity, reduced morbidity, and increased life span.
But as I'm healthy and lean the benefits of intermittent fasting are likely small for me. What other benefits could there be?
I understand that body cleansing is not a real thing, but I wonder about the effects of fasting on the gut flora. Could it be that fastig has a beneficial effect on your gut bacteria? Just because your body doesn't get rid of any poison this way as the greeks believed doesn't mean that fasting has no cleansing effects at all. It could be that you get rid of some harmful gut bacteria or other parasites (not that these are frequent these days).
Another thing is that fasting might activate and kind of train metabolism cycles which the body may loose over time otherwise. For me it might be too late (I'm 41) for that (mouse experiments show fasting tolerance is plastic with age), but maybe not. On the other hand I'm not very likely to ever need the ability to deal with lack of food (except possibly in case of severe illness of injury).
Links on LW: Low hanging fruit: analyzing your nutrition and If calorie restriction works in humans, should we have observed it already? both mention intermittent fasting but I gain little insight from these.
Also related is Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity. (Intermittent) fasting is also mentioned on Mental rebooting your brain.
My current plan is to use Buchinger style fasting with fruit juice, thin vegetable broth and protein additions (which kind of protein I'm still unclear). I will reduce exercise to balance and walking level types.
I'm also unclear how to measure and track the effect of this diet. Sure I will track weight. But should I track satisaction somehow?
What do you think?
My non-professional opinion is that much of the benefits of fasting come from what I call "running cool," i.e. eating so that you are at the bottom of your metabolic range. My thinking is that when you eat more than the minimum you need (but not so much more that you gain weight), the body adjusts by increasing its metabolic rate which puts more wear and tear on things and also leaves more energy free for mischief.
So that instead of fasting you might consider moderate calorie restriction -- you could call it micro-fasting between meals.
Yes, that's a real conundrum. Probably it can take years or even decades for the effects of one's diet to manifest themselves.
One idea I had is to regularly measure the uppermost frequency you find audible. Since this is know to decrease with age, perhaps it can be used to measure the rate at which you are aging. On the other hand, if you test yourself regularly in this way, possibly you will get better at perceiving high frequencies which would throw off your results.
Also, it might lead you into a lifestyle which is great for your hearing but otherwise counter-productive or even destructive. I believe Seth Roberts used to regularly test his ability to quickly do mental math and discovered great improvements from eating half a stick of butter a day. Until one day he had a heart attack and die.
I'm not sure whether I'm running cool, but usually I loose weight if I don't make sure that I eat enough. I don't feel hunger easily and on top of that I'm a picky eater. An enviable mutation in our society I guess.
I didn't mean the effect of my overall diet. I'm quite confident that it's healthy. I meant the effect of the fasting. To reliably detect if something goes wrong quickly or slowly.