What do you do for your 37th wedding anniversary? Well, instead of a fancy dinner somewhere or a tropical vacation, Rob and I decided to opt in for something a bit different.
An Airbnb in rural West Virginia. More specifically, a quaint little cabin on 67 glorious acres. With NO food. Just water. For three full days.
While you might think that is crazy, but to us, it meant something more.
We didn’t do it for a cleanse or for weight loss. We did it to get closer to God. To strip away the noise, the food, the phones, the schedules, all of it, and create actual space to hear from Him. And what happened over those 72 hours, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, is something I have been wanting to share with you ever since we got home a few weeks ago.
So that is what this week is about. Because I think a lot of you are going to be more curious about this than you might expect. So here we go….
Why We Did It
Fasting is one of those things I had read about for years, both in the Bible and in the growing body of research around it. Rob had been interested in it for health reasons for a while. But somewhere along the way we started talking about doing it together, intentionally, as a spiritual practice. And our anniversary weekend in the mountains felt like the right time.
The Bible is full of fasting. Moses fasted for forty days. David fasted. Esther fasted. Jesus fasted before beginning his ministry. It is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest spiritual disciplines there is, and the reason is consistent across all of them: fasting creates a particular kind of space that very little else can. It humbles you. It removes the thing you reach for most automatically and asks you to reach for something else instead.
For me, I had been craving that kind of connection with God for months. Life had been full in all the good ways, but also in ways that made it hard to hear much of anything underneath all of it. This felt like the answer to that.
We live in a world that is constantly feeding us something. Food, noise, content, stimulation. Fasting is the practice of saying not right now to all of it, and finding out what is waiting in the silence.
What Happens Inside Our Bodies
Here’s what typically happens during a three-day water fast, and it genuinely surprised me even though I’d read about it going in.
Day one: your body burns through stored glucose.
In the first 12 to 24 hours, your body is still running on glycogen, which is stored glucose in your liver and muscles. Most people don’t experience massive hunger at this stage, but they do notice the pull of habit. The clock hitting noon and feeling like something should happen. The evening arriving without the ritual of dinner. What we reach for out of routine versus actual physical need turns out to be very different things, and day one makes that distinction impossible to ignore.
Day two: ketosis begins and autophagy kicks in.
Once glycogen stores are depleted, your body makes a significant metabolic shift. It starts converting fat into ketones and using those as its primary fuel source. This is ketosis. Alongside this shift, a process called autophagy begins to activate. In 2016, cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how this process works. Autophagy is essentially your body’s cellular cleanup crew. Your cells begin identifying and clearing out damaged, dysfunctional material and regenerating healthier cells in its place. Day two is also when many people experience a turning point physically. It can look completely different from one person to the next, which is part of what makes the process so personal.
Day three: deep autophagy and the reset.
By day three, the body is in what researchers describe as deep autophagy. Your immune system resets. Inflammation markers drop. Growth hormone spikes, supporting muscle preservation and cellular repair. Insulin sensitivity improves. And many people report a level of mental clarity on day three that feels qualitatively different from their normal baseline. That’s not accidental. Ketones are actually a more efficient fuel source for the brain than glucose, which is part of why focus and cognitive sharpness tend to increase rather than decrease as a fast extends.
The benefits researchers document from extended fasting include improved immune function, reduced inflammation, enhanced mental clarity, better insulin sensitivity, and significant cellular repair. It’s worth noting that these benefits build across the duration of the fast, which is why the third day tends to be the most transformative physically even as it’s often the most demanding personally.
What the Stillness Revealed
When you take away food, phones, noise, and schedules all at once, you find out very quickly how much of your daily life is built around avoiding stillness. We are a distraction-saturated generation. Most of us have not sat in genuine quiet in longer than we can honestly remember. And what lives underneath all that noise is worth knowing about. I believe it’s the secret sauce.
For me, watching the fog rolling in over the West Virginia mountains on day two was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in years. The birds, the deer, the sunrise on day three. Things I would have scrolled past on any normal weekend. The landscape was literally changing minute by minute, and I was finally still enough to actually see it. And as the landscape changed, something in me started to change too. The things I had been wrestling with for months began to settle into something closer to clarity.
Rob had his own version of that. He told me on the porch on day three that if the cabin was all we ever had, he thought he would be okay. No food, no things, no trips, no stuff. Just presence. That is not something you can manufacture. That’s something that emerges when you finally stop filling every space.
A Few Things Worth Knowing If You Are Curious
Please talk to your doctor before attempting any extended fast. This is not appropriate for everyone, and certain health conditions, medications, and circumstances make fasting inadvisable. That conversation is important and I would not skip it.
If you do decide to try it, even a shorter version, electrolytes matter. We used a quality sea salt (Baja Sea Salt) in our water throughout, about a teaspoon each spread across the day, and it made a real difference in how we felt. Hydration is not just about water when you are fasting.
And when you break the fast, go slowly. Your digestive system needs to be reintroduced to food gently. We started with bone broth for Rob, fruit for me, then light protein and veggies. Rob wanted pizza. The answer was NO! The first thing you eat after a fast like this should be the opposite of pizza, and your body will thank you for it.
You don’t have to do three days to experience something meaningful. A 24-hour fast, or even skipping one meal and using that time for prayer or journaling instead, is a legitimate starting point. The length is not the point. The intentionality is.
This Week on Beyond the Gray
Rob is back with me for Episode 16 as we walk through the whole experience together, day by day, including my car that would not start when we tried to leave, the s’mores that sat on the counter untouched for three days, and what happened on day three that neither of us were expecting.
If this edition sparked something in you, Episode 16 goes somewhere much more personal and honest.
I want to leave you with the question that has stayed with me since we got home. When was the last time you created real space in your life? Not a vacation full of activity or a weekend of catching up. Real stillness. The kind where you find out what has been waiting underneath all the noise.
You don’t have to go to West Virginia and stop eating for three days to find out. But I will tell you, something shifts when you do. And it is worth considering what your version of that might look like.
Here’s to living beyond the gray,
Kari
P. S. This is just one of my favorite photos from our cabin. Just look at the view.
