I did this for roughly 3 weeks while in the hospital for Crohn’s disease. Nothing by mouth and only had saline for 2 weeks because TPN was not available. The last week I was on TPN before starting to eat again. I went from 190lbs to 135lbs and it took months to gain weight back. The first few days sucked but eventually you weren’t hungry at all, but I really wanted water and couldn’t have it.
Same, during my recovery from both surgeries I dropped a ton of weight, that I didn’t really have to lose since leading up to the procedure I had already lost a ton of fat and muscle. 5’9 male and I got down to 114
So many ensure shakes after that until I was able to eat. Then lots of food like I hadn’t ate before
Depends on what you mean by “all required minerals, vitamins, etc.”
If you are including all proteins, fats, and calories, then nothing happens. (assuming you didn’t miss anything at all)
If you exclude any required “etc” then your body will try to keep you in homeostasis for as long as possible, depleting any reserve unit it can’t anymore.
If you’re short calories, then your body will process fats and muscle and you will get leaner until it can’t manage.
If you’re short protein, then your body will process muscle and you’ll lose strength until it can’t manage.
If you’re short calcium, then your body will process bone until you break something.
Probably, without a very careful regiment, with blood work and doctor’s supervision, you’ll end up with a deficiency of some kind and could cause permanent damage.
Your distinction between liquids and smoothies is problematic. How do you define either of them? There are countless complete meal replacement drinks (e.g. Soylent, as someone already mentioned) that are definitely liquids, and arguably smoothies. But they are also arguably not smoothies, depending on your definition. The one I use is primarily milk protein isolate + vitamins and heavy cream. It tastes like a thick milkshake. Does that count as a smoothie?
Depending on your physical strength, you’ll stop feeling hungry after 2-3 days. You’ll start to give off a body odor at around day 4, when you’re in full ketosis. After a week, you stop losing much water, mostly body fat. If you continue this regimen for more than 4 days, you’ll suffer refeeding syndrome If you break the fast with normal food, which can have severe consequences, so you better educate yourself before you try it.
All in all though, people fasted for weeks thousands of years ago, and you’ll be under supervision (unless you’re crazy), so you’ll be just fine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri's_fast
If you’re going to do an extended fast, you definitely need medical supervision. Or at least advice. From a real medical professional not the internet
Exactly.
I’ve been drinking soylent as a primary source of food for 3.5 years, including 2000 calories a day of it when I was gaining weight.
You will save money and effort of preparing and eating food. You will wash a lot of cups.
But soylent is closer to a smoothie than water with dissolved minerals. I think if you really tried to consume all your vitamins, minerals and proteins from something with near water like viscosity you would have to be drinking it constantly. You would be peeing 100 times a day too.
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Fun fact is TPN (total parenteral nutrition, i.e. IV food) is usually somewhere around 2L of volume daily, and the limiting factor preventing us from concentrating it more is the protein component. We can make some really concentrated sugar solutions, fat is so calorie dense it doesn’t take up much space either, but protein isn’t particularly calorie dense and can’t be concentrated very high before it starts to crystallize.
I don’t know why I didn’t think about it. IV food would be precisely this already. 😅
I wonder how fast the ingest -> per cycle is compared to going out the back door. Wouldn’t we know this with coma patients? Or do they get feeding tube smoothies?
With regards to coma patients or patients otherwise unable to eat for themselves, they will commonly have a feeding tube placed either into their stomach or just past their stomach at the start of the small intestines. Enteral nutrition or “tube feeds” are then usually run 24hrs a day. Lower rates are easier to tolerate. For people that are otherwise active but for a given reason cannot swallow (people who have had a stroke for example), tube feeds can be run faster and intermittently to give them more freedom to move about through the day.
Thanks for the information, this was interesting
Depending on the number of calories you would lose weight until you resumed your normal diet. This is sometimes used as a weight loss strategy in extreme cases.
