How to Break a Fast, and Tips for How to Improve Digestion

When practicing longer fasts, it's important to break slowly. Also, optimal digestion is one of the central cornerstones of good health.

The instructions on how to break a fast slowly are absolutely necessary for any fast longer than about 24 hours. However, people who do OMAD (one meal a day) will occasionally tell me they have some digestive problems that they didn’t used to have before fasting, such as bloating, diarrhea, or general stomach upset.

If that is you, try the directions below to break your fast slowly and see if that resolves the issues. It’s possible that even those doing the 16:8 protocol could benefit from a modified version of these principles, i.e., taking a few sips of something a few minutes before eating.

Here’s the general principle to keep in mind: the longer you fast, the more slowly you have to break your fast. And it never hurts to break slowly with even short fasts just for good measure. The instructions below are intended for any 24, 36, or 48 hour fasts. For longer fasts, stretch out the reintroduction time for food and broth.

How to Break a Fast Gently

At least 30 minutes before you sit down to eat, take one small sip of homemade bone broth, and then wait a full 5 minutes before taking another sip. After you take your second sip, you can decrease the time between sips to 1 or 2 minutes. After doing this for about 10-15 minutes, you can start to slowly sip the bone broth without breaks. 

About 10 minutes before you sit down to eat, take a small bite of whatever you will be eating: chicken, meat, veggie, whatever. Take a second small bite 5 minutes before sitting to eat to signal to your body that solid food is coming.

(Avoid breaking your fast with a high-carb meal because your body has taught itself how to burn fat for energy and you don’t want to wildly swing it into high-carb mode. One good idea is a nourishing chicken and vegetable soup. Any soup made out of a meaty bone is great for breaking a long fast.)

The reason you must break your fast slowly is that when you go for many hours without eating, your stomach stops producing stomach acid. According to Sally Fallon Morell in her excellent article on digestion: “An empty stomach never contains gastric juice, which only appears when food enters the stomach.”

If you suddenly bombard your empty stomach with food out of nowhere, your stomach will be distressed with so much food and no gastric juice. This causes it to send a distress signal that notifies your colon to clear out all food. You will get diarrhea that’s sometimes urgent. 

However, as soon as your stomach senses the tiniest bit of protein in your first sip of broth, it will immediately begin producing acid and waking up the whole digestive system.

Smelling and being around food for the half hour before you eat is also important for waking up your digestive system. Dr. Ben Lynch says that nearly half of your digestion preparation happens before you eat.

If you are still experiencing issues after following these principles, it likely means that you are eating too fast. Begin applying the principles below. These principles are great for everyone, whether you’re fasting or not.

Why Good Digestion Is So Crucial for Health

The principles below are necessary for people who have digestive problems such as heartburn/GERD (reflux), gastritis (stomach inflammation and excessive burping), diarrhea, constipation, bloating, gas, and any other problems. However, they are great principles to follow for everyone.

Why? Because digestion of your food is the cornerstone of health.

Think about it. There are myriads of nutrients your body needs to run its machinery, and if digestion isn’t working top-notch, many of those nutrients will be inaccessible.

Take amino acids as a case in point. The protein in the food you eat is made up of strings of amino acids arranged in a certain order. Think of amino acids as the Legos and the protein as the object one builds with Legos.

The 20 different kinds of amino acids can be thought of as 20 different colored legos, and they enter the body as an assembled structure (unless you’re supplementing with an amino acid like glycine).

One of the key functions of stomach acid is to take the large Lego structures (the proteins) and break them down into individual Legos (amino acids). This is important because they can only be absorbed in the small intestines as amino acids. Partially broken-down proteins, like still-attached pieces of Legos, are not absorbed.

Once the individual Legos enter the bloodstream through the microvilli (hair-like receptors on finger-like protrusions called villi in the small intestine) the body now has the building blocks or raw materials it needs to build whatever is necessary.

Your neurotransmitters are all assembled from amino acids. So if your digestive system is not fully breaking apart the protein structures into individual amino acids— it’s only partially breaking them down—then you won’t have the building blocks to make copious amounts of neurotransmitters that are necessary for optimal brain function.

Now, this is always a matter of degree. If you had zero amino acids and zero neurotransmitters, you’d be dead immediately. We’re talking here about optimizing digestion and brain function. Breaking down the amino acids twice as well will mean twice the brain power.

For example, the neurotransmitter dopamine is synthesized from the amino acids phenylalanine and tyrosine. Dopamine causes us to feel pleasure, alertness, motivation, reward, and focus. It also helps us learn, and it regulates mood.

A decrease in dopamine can lead to feelings of depression, listlessness, and addictive behaviors, which can sometimes be thought of as self-medicating by someone who’s depleted of necessary amino acids. This is part of the reason why Harvard Professor and Psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer has been able to cure so many people of their mental health struggles through diet. (The main reason though is because ketones fuel brain cells, downregulate inflammation in the brain, and heal a variety of brain problems.)

Similarly, the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is necessary for mood, sleep, and overall well-being, is made from the amino acid tryptophan. It never ceases to amaze me that Psychiatrists prescribe SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which work by increasing the serotonin in the brain by decreasing its reuptake speed) before first addressing protein intake and digestion considerations. They could even supplement with already broken-down amino acids such as tryptophan and see if the problem resolves.

Instead, they prescribe dangerous drugs, that, per the package insert, are well known to increase both suicidal and homicidal thoughts, as well as cause massive amounts of weight gain in most people. (Note: some people talk about the connection between school shootings and SSRIs as if it’s a conspiracy theory. Something is not a conspiracy theory if the package insert on the drug warns that messing with brain chemistry may cause those behaviors. And then we have the evidence that nearly every school shooter was taking SSRIs. Read this well-documented piece titled The Decades of Evidence That SSRI Antidepressants Cause Mass Shootings.)

Because the body is an ecosystem of interconnected parts, there are other causes besides inadequate protein intake and inadequate digestion that can cause mental disturbances. I’m merely stating that trying to supplement with amino acids and other nutritional cofactors would be a sane thing to attempt before resorting to dangerous drugs if we had a sane medical system and not a drug cartel run by the medical mafia. But I digress.

There are many other systems that run on amino acids as well and are therefore greatly slowed by poor digestion. For example, your body’s most powerful detoxifier is glutathione which is assembled from three amino acids: glycine, cysteine, and glutamine. When you are low on those, you will be low on glutathione and therefore low in your ability to detoxify from all that constantly bombards us.

Alrighty! I hope I adequately convinced you of the importance of good digestion. I have a lot more to say on that topic at a later date. For now, here’s the how-to.

Principles for Improving Digestion

Most of these suggestions are designed to push you into a state where your parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest mode, is dominant instead of your sympathetic nervous system, aka fight or flight mode.