Yes, It is necessary. Every time you eat, your body goes into digestion mode and ties up most resources, especially with the shit quality of food that most people eat.
When you stop eating, after 2-3 days (varies by person) you enter autophagy. This is literally a cleanup for your body. It recycles dead and dysfunctional cells. If you have been running your body on glucose, it now runs on stored fat. All of those inflammatory chemicals in shit like seed oils that are hard on the body, well they get stored in fat cells because the body never gets a chance to deal with them because more shit food is constantly being introduced to the system and has to be dealt with. When you burn those fat cells, the stored shit inside is released. Some people feel sick at this point, it is only because you now have to deal with the shit that was "swept under the rug".
Drinking a lot of water is vitally important for this process. Your body is breaking down cells and dealing with waste. If you are constantly chugging water, your body takes the opportunity to use it s a carrier and dump that shit so you can piss it away.
If it is your first time, you will feel very hungry for the first 2-3 days. When the body stops sending the hunger signals is when you know you're on the easy side of it now, and the body is burning fat and cleaning house. Once you get there, it is easy to continue.
After fasting, start eating very well: organic cruciferous vegetables and grass fed grass finished beef, all cooked in tallow or high quality olive oil. If you go back to eating shit food, you are not going to feel good. Once you go through the fast, and start eating, it is very easy to get by eating one large meal per day. If you only eat that one meal around 5-6 p.m., then you are only digesting once per day, and you won't be doing it while you sleep, you won't feel tired after lunch because there is no lunch. You regain a lot more energy because now you are actually living and not just dealing with the consequences of always eating shitty food to need feel really full and always having a bunch of shit flowing around in your body.
Doing a 3 or 4 day fast once a month is highly beneficial, some people do it more and there is nothing wrong with that.
Drinking water is not important when it comes to fasting. It will hurt the body if anything. When your body burns fat that chemical process produces it's own water, pure water which is why you need to be in ketosis before you fast. The body doesn't recycle dead cell, it eats them, that's what autophagy means. How you break a fast is also very important. I usually eat my homemade yogurt and sprouts. The yogurt for your crap factory and the sprouts are for the needed enzymes that the body is now craving. Again, read The Phoenix Protocol. It explains all.
Big caveat with the waterless fasting: if you know all of your organs are in top top shape, proceed. If you maybe partied a bit too hard in your younger days, drank a lot of booze and ate a bunch of shit food, the dry fast will be quite hard, a bunch of water will help with that. I agree that the dry fast is far superior (it is not even close) but when dealing with someone who has never fasted before, it is probably safe to assume that they didn't have the best lifestyle up to that point, so the water will help with the kidneys and liver. Also, having water won't knock you out of ketosis, but having even water in the belly can make it a lot easier for the first timer to get through it and achieve the benefits hidden past those first few days.
I second the phoenix protocol, I've done it as has my wife, with success, its tough but worth it. In fact probably I need to do it again.
If you go keto first and build up to it, not so tough. I started with 24 hours. A week later I did 48 hours. 2 weeks later I did 72 hours. Now I just do 72 hours twice a month.
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