anne from california wrote:Quick question about fasting: If I drink chamomile tea, am I still fasting? I like a cup in the evening after dinner.
Do it. I tell people there’s no fasting police.
In the book,
The Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore, they cite, “In general we encourage consuming plenty of noncaloric liquids (water, tea, coffee) and homemade bone broth, which is full of nutrients.” Later they say, “All types of tea are excellent choices,…” They talk about some teas, specifically green, cinnamon and ginger, being better for suppressing the appetite, but basically all are fine. It's a good book, I recommend it.
Fasting is a spectrum. On one end there are folks who don’t even have water when they fast (NOT recommended, usually for religious reasons). Then there are folks who fast for specific therapeutic reasons, and their regimen can be as strict as distilled water only for multiple days.
Then there are people like me who drink black coffee first thing in the morning (which some say breaks the fast because of what it tells the circadian rhythm of the body, but I like my morning ritual), I also drink tea, and take my supplements (which includes calories from fish oil) when I fast. But I do my fasts for “good housekeeping” not therapeutic reasons, so I figure I’m allowed wiggle room. On my multiday fasts I have home made bone broth to keep my electrolytes up, and (shhh, don’t tell anybody) yes I confess, when I was having a particularly hard time on day 5 of my multiday fast, I ate a few high fat (low insulin response) macadamia nuts to get me over the hump.