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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Interesting that you also got the sleep issues when water fasting. Same for me, although this time it was on day 5. Did you consume any caffeine?

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The Other End of the Galaxy's avatar

I haven't consumed caffeine during a water fast but my wife does. My thought was that taking some salt would help with sleep, but now that I've started iFMD and am sleeping well, I'll never find out!

During iFMD I almost always have a cup of green tea in the afternoon; no idea if it has any impact, positive or negative, on sleep.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

I was asking cause some people seem to get the sleep issues when fasting, others don't. I drink a lot of caffeine, so I'd been wondering if the fasting just reduced my caffeine tolerance somehow and the sleep issues were from the caffeine, not the fasting.

But if you get it w/o any caffeine, might not be the case.

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The Other End of the Galaxy's avatar

I'm not sure if any individual can gain any insight about whether caffeine causes sleep issues from the experience of others. There's so much individual variation that I think you just have to conduct the experiment on yourself. (There's a more general lesson here, but I'm not ready to write something up. Maybe I can find something well written by someone else.)

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Steve Brecher's avatar

As I understand it iFMD is five days, about once a month. What do you eat the rest of the time?

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The Other End of the Galaxy's avatar

In addition to eating larger quantities of our iFMD foods, we also eat seafood and dairy. In particular, I've been trying to eat more scallops, since they are one of the best sources of plasmalogens, a type of phospholipid that has recently been shown to improve cognitive function (egg yolks are another plasmalogen-rich food). I briefly mentioned plasmalogens in the last sentence in the Health section of my January post -- https://theotherendofthegalaxy.substack.com/p/podcasts-ive-recently-enjoyed -- and will probably write more about this at some point.

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