Why is refeeding slowly necessary after a long term fast?

Question

Why is refeeding slowly necessary after a long term fast?

In: 152

Answer 1

Let’s pretend the body is an island, and the gut is the shipping dock where all of the resources and supplies come in. There are many dock workers who help unpack the supplies, organize them, and repack to send off where they need to go on the island for all the people that live there. In the body, these “dock workers” include some important electrolytes like potassium and phosphorus, these type of workers can do lots of important work in other places in the body.

So when there is no nutrition coming into the gut, there are no ships with supplies arriving at the dock. For the first few days the dock workers come to work, find there’s no work to do and head home early. After 2-3 days of no work, these dock workers start to quit their jobs to find work elsewhere on the island, some start to leave the island. After 4-6 days, the island and all of its workers are struggling to find enough work, supplies are getting depleted, and other operations are closing up shop. After 7-10 days the island is really struggling and nearing collapse…

Then suddenly, ships start arriving at the dock again. The island scrambles as many of the remaining workers as possible to the shipping dock(the gut) to handle the incoming and desperately needed resources, even with the already very limited amount of workers available. Now there’s a major shortage of workers in other critical areas of the island. In the body, the blood levels of potassium and phosphorus(the ‘workers’) drop; this disrupts the electrolyte balance in the body and leaves too little for the important functions of the heart, kidneys, brain, liver, etc. Under the care of a medical doctor, the potassium and phosphorus can be replaced to help protect that person from serious complications.

For the people inquiring about Refeeding related to self-directed fasting and attempting to make electrolyte replacements on your own, this is very dangerous and there is no reason to put your body under this stress. Please seek the advice of a Registered Dietitian or other licensed or otherwise certified health professional in your area about healthy eating patterns for your needs. Be safe and take care of yourselves.

Edit 1: spacing to reduce the wall of text look.