Gut flora is really complicated and we don't know a huge amount about it. You should look into MCT oil as this purportedly positively effects gut flora. If you try it, however, go slow at first.
A good test as to your insulin reactions is to notice what happens if you don't eat until you have been up for, say, five hours. If you become consumed with hunger pains it's a sign of weakness. Your caveman body should be able to easily go this long without food unless your sugar-hungry gut flora have hijacked your brain to send you "feed us now!" signals.
MCT oil is an intersting suggestion, but I will likely not try anything new here in combination with fasting - that is bound to create confounding which I wil be unable to unentangle.
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
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?