[e40]

I wonder if shorter fasts between the long ones would make a difference?

Ignore the hurtful comments. A good portion of people don't have much empathy for others, combined with the anonymous nature of this forum, makes people say hurtful things.

Good luck on your journey.

[alecst]

Thanks, I appreciate that. And by the way, I had the same thought as you. I’ve been doing monthly 5-day fasts just to see what would happen. So far not much to report, but I’ll wait until 6 months have passed to draw conclusions.

[crdrost]

At the most extreme end of the other side, Buddhist monks, in addition to not eating meat (or, often, aliums like onions and garlic), also don't generally believe in dinner—they have to eat all their solid food for the day before noon, so you could view this as fasting for half the day every day.

(There are some caveats... At least for the Tibetan monks I knew, morning prayer is early at like 5am and comes with a sort of pita bread and tea, bedtime is closer to 9pm, and during these 9 hours there will be more tea. With a little googling I am able to confirm that some of the "pita" (pao balep) is consumed at the lunch tea, and I think this is after the lunch meal, so it might be 1pm. I think there's none at the evening tea that you'd have around sundown? Also in terms of calories the Tibetan tea is “bulletproof,” consisting of a very long steep for the leaves to extract maximum bitter flavors, that get mixed with a bunch of yak butter and salt. So liquid calories are very much a thing for them.)