The military diet, also called the 3-day diet, is a quick, short-term weight-loss diet that aims to help you lose up to 10 pounds (4.5 kg) in a week. Your health should always be your number 1 priority, no matter what your goal is. No weight loss is worth the risk of harming your body. Fasting for 3 days is not easy and should not be underestimated.
Therefore, under no circumstances should you risk your health by fasting in water. Wait until your doctor has given you the OK to try. Shorter fastings, up to 1 to 3 days, are more common among people seeking to detoxify and lose moderate weight. The military diet involves restricting calorie intake for 3 days and then following a regular diet for the next 4 days.
To optimize their weight loss, people may also want to try to reduce calories in the 4 days of rest. Since you have the drive for self-improvement, you might like an experiment that worked for me, in which I learned on my own to acquire the flavor of a food that I never liked (black licorice). And with 5 days, you'll have the advantage of spending more time in the autophagy, ketogenic, and metabolism restoration phase that you might not even get with a 2-day fast. So about 5.4 pounds so far and about 9 pounds less than my maximum weight of 341 pounds before my “preparation time” of eating less food.
Since the results of a 3-day fast range from 2 to 3 pounds, you can follow any of the following healthy diets, creating a caloric deficit of 500 to 1000 calories per day. As already noted in the first paragraph, it's natural that when you stop eating you start to lose weight. Continue your incredible work considering how you approach health, weight and happiness. If you exercise a lot while fasting or have an extra active metabolism (which is unlikely, since if you did, you wouldn't gain weight as easily), you could burn a little more than half a pound of fat a day, but not much.
To break your 3-day fast, you should eat something light, such as a bowl of bone broth, miso soup, or a piece of fruit. And a great opportunity to lose body fat, restore hormones and learn valuable lessons in the process. Although intermittent fasting alternates between periods of eating and fasting, fasting for 3 days does not allow you to eat or drink anything other than water. With that water, you can lose electrolytes, leading to dizziness and a headache, you know how to do that.
We should also remind you that a final preparation and precautionary tip is to have your doctor do it before attempting this 3-day fast with water. In essence, you can stick to your normal diet before starting a 3-day fast, but if you want to take full advantage of the benefits and make fasting a little easier, you should try starting with partially or completely depleted liver glycogen.
