Fasting

[bigmonkey]

I did a search on this but didn't get much in the way of results so thought I'd just go ahead and make a new post.

In the past I've had periods of time where I will eat several meals a day and could eat even more if I wanted, and had other periods where I can comfortably live off a slice of bread or piece of fruit once a day for weeks. The difference is in the size of my stomach. The more you eat the larger your stomach is stretched, so you become hungry again sooner, or this is my understanding anyway.

At the moment I'm in the grip of a large appatite period, and I'm planning to get onto a fairly extreme diet by going on a week's fast. I drink plenty of juice though, probably about a litre a day, and some squash, so I get quite a few calories. The purpose is just to allow my stomach to shrink enough so that I can exist on very little afterwards.

Anyone think this is a stupid plan or unhealthy? I have fasted several times before and done longer each time. My current record is 140 hours which is just under 6 days, so a week's fast isn't exactly a great leap for me. Also, on every fast I've done, I've found that towards the end I've felt like I could continue it for considerably longer. I don't think it would be that inconceivable to go for a month or longer, but I would probably need to be drinking more calories in juice then I would be taking on my low-food diet.

As far as I'm concerned, a good fast does exactly the same thing as a stomach staple would do, except it takes less time to recover, is completely free, and doesn't involve any surgery.

Also, my current position is that fasting might be unhealthy for older people, but I'm only 21 so not really in much danger of ill health yet.

So that is a presentation of my current beliefs about the subject. Does anybody who has good reason to think they know more than me about this (most people here would I imagine), want to enlighten me about these possibly naive beliefs I have? Would anybody recommend (or condemn) a "fast-then-diet" approach, because I've never really heard of that before?