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I’m a Sumo Sized Ginger Who Fasts 3.5 Days a Week. Here’s What Actually Happens.
Three weeks into a six-month honest experiment in losing the weight every diet failed to take.
By Joseph Riley Long | Published May 2026
TL;DR: I’m Joseph Riley Long. I’m 500 pounds and I’ve been overweight since I was five. I’ve tried more diets than most people have heard of. None worked long-term. Three weeks ago I started fasting 3.5 days a week, every week, indefinitely. The decision came from writing a fictional character who hadn’t eaten in half a week. I have a mantra. I have a system. I’m logging everything. This is article one of a six-month chronicle from inside the experiment. No coach. No program. No doctor. Just a guy doing the thing.
The Moment a Fictional Character Made Me Stop Eating
This is going to sound stupid, but it’s true.
Three weeks ago I was at my desk one night, deep in a manuscript, working out a character who had gone days without food. Not as torture. Just as circumstance. He was in a situation where eating wasn’t an option.
I started doing the math on what’s actually possible for a human body. How long before performance drops. How long before things get dangerous. How long before the wheels come off.
The number kept landing higher than I expected.
When I tallied it up, this character of mine had not eaten in roughly half a week. And I knew, as a writer who’d spent years studying nutrition because I couldn’t lose weight, that this was nowhere near dangerous for a healthy adult. It’s well within the range of what bodies are built for.
That’s when it hit me. I was sitting there, a 500-pound Sumo Sized Ginger surrounded by snacks I didn’t need, writing a character doing something I had assumed I couldn’t.
So I decided I could.
3.5 days a week. As long as I can keep it up.
Three weeks in, I’m still going.
Who I Am and Why I’m Writing This
My name is Joseph Riley Long. I go by Sumo. I’m a Sumo Sized Ginger from Buckley, Washington.
The first five years of my life I was underweight. After that, something flipped. People in my family point at the surgery I had to remove my tonsils. I’m going to let smarter people argue about that one.
What I can tell you is this: I have been overweight for almost as long as I can remember.
I’ve tried more diets than most people know exist. Keto. Paleo. Whole30. Intermittent fasting at lighter ratios. Mediterranean. Low-carb. Low-fat. Calorie counting on apps that turned eating into spreadsheet work. Intuitive eating. Vegetarian. The list goes deeper than this paragraph.
I’ve worked with nutritionists. I’ve worked with dieticians. I’ve spent years reading actual nutrition science, not influencer slop. I could lose a few pounds on most of these. None of them stuck. The weight always came back.
I don’t have a degree in nutrition. I’ve got a graveyard of failed diets and a fasting window that finally moved the needle.
I am not a doctor. I am not a coach. I am not selling you a program.
I am a guy who got tired of being heavy and decided to do the one thing that actually made sense to him after a decade of trying everything else.
I’m done being fat. Not ashamed. Not desperate. Just done.
This is article one of what I am committing to as a six-month chronicle. Upsides. Downsides. The parts nobody tells you. The parts nobody warns you about. I am going to talk about what I eat on the days I’m allowed to eat, how I move my body when walking hurts, the mental battle, the social wreckage, the unexpected gifts, the failures, all of it.
If you are someone who has failed at weight loss as many times as I have, you are exactly who I’m writing for.
The Mantra
When the hunger hits its worst, when the voice in my head tells me one bite won’t matter, when my whole body is screaming that something is off, I have one sentence I say to myself out loud.
“I deserve to know what it’s like to not be overweight.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
I have spent every single day of my conscious memory inside a body that hurts to live in. I have never known what it feels like to walk up stairs without thinking about them, to fit in a normal seat, to buy clothes from a regular rack. I deserve to know what that’s like at least once before I die.
The mantra reframes deprivation as investment. The hunger isn’t punishment. The hunger is the down payment on a body I have never been allowed to live inside. I say it out loud when the voice gets loudest.
I also call on God and Jesus during the hardest hours. Your mileage on that may vary. I’m telling you what works for me. The mantra and the prayer are both tools. Use what works.
What 3.5 Days Without Food Actually Feels Like
I’m going to tell you the truth about this part, because every fasting article I’ve read either lies or glosses over it.
Your body is a stubborn engine.
Day one it whines for gas. The first 24 hours are easy because your body is still running on glycogen, which is the carbohydrate fuel stored in your muscles and liver. Each gram of glycogen binds to roughly 3 to 4 grams of water. That’s why fasted weight drops 4 to 6 pounds in the first 48 hours before you’ve burned a single ounce of actual fat. It’s water following the glycogen out the door.
Day two the whine turns into a low hum. There’s a state I drop into around the 36-hour mark that I can only describe as predator-aware. My muscles buzz like there’s a current running just under the skin. I can feel the back of my neck before anything happens behind me. My jaw stays slightly tense without me telling it to. I am not anxious. I am not afraid. I am hunting something I can’t see.
This is fight-or-flight, but not the panic version. It’s a system reboot. Nerves wake up. The fridge hum sounds like a siren. Your own hands feel steadier. You’re not starving. You’re finally awake.
It’s not hunger. It’s every cell in my body screaming that something is off, and me choosing to ignore it.
That’s the war. That sentence is the war.
I don’t know why my body flips into this state. Maybe it’s some ancient wiring from a time when missing meals meant death and the body learned to sharpen itself for survival. Maybe I’m just hungry enough to hallucinate competence. Either way, I’ll take it. The buzzing, the edge, the clarity. It’s the first time in years I haven’t felt like I’m moving through syrup. I’m not going to pretend I understand the biology behind it. I just know it’s working.
Day three it flips the switch and starts burning the reserves you’ve been hauling around for a decade. You feel it in your joints, not your head. My senses sharpen further. I sleep less and sleep harder. I can write for hours without breaking. The physical hunger is there, sure. My stomach feels hollow at intervals. But hunger is a wave that crests and breaks. It does not stay at peak. It comes, you ride it, it goes.
The worst hunger hits at night, right before bed. There’s a circadian peak in ghrelin, the hunger hormone, that lands in the late evening. That’s when the mantra gets its hardest workout. That’s when I pray. That’s when I drink another glass of water and tell myself the morning is on the other side.
The mental side is harder than the physical side by an order of magnitude.
You are not fighting hunger. You are fighting four things at once.
You are fighting boredom, because eating is something you do when you’re not doing anything else, and once you remove it you discover how often you reached for food just to fill time you didn’t even know was empty.
You are fighting habit, because your hands and your mouth and your kitchen and your couch all have routines wired into them, and the routines do not care that you’ve decided to change.
You are fighting society, because every social event is built around a meal, and saying “I’m fasting” lands somewhere between concern and offense, and you have to develop a short clean answer that doesn’t invite a debate.
And you are fighting yourself, because there is a voice that will tell you one bite won’t matter, and that voice is louder than the hunger ever gets.
What I take during the fast: 2 gallons of liquid a day. Water. Black coffee. Stevia-sweetened tea. Zero-calorie drink mixes. Electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium). Salt in the water. A daily multivitamin. Nothing with calories. No broth.
That’s it.
Why 3.5 Days Specifically (The Math)
There are two reasons I picked this protocol over a shorter fast or a daily calorie cut.
Reason one: metabolic switching.
In the first 12 to 24 hours of a fast, your body is burning through glycogen. After that runs out, the body switches over to burning fat for fuel. This is the start of ketosis. The longer the fast, the deeper the switch. A 16-hour fast barely scratches the surface. A 3.5-day fast puts you all the way through and keeps you there for days at a time.
When you are an obese person, you have a substantial amount of stored fuel sitting on your frame. The body is happy to use it once it’s actually allowed to.
Reason two: a severe weekly calorie deficit without daily misery.
At my size and activity level, my TDEE (the calories my body burns in a day) is somewhere in the 4,000 to 4,800 range. On the 3.5 days I eat, I land between 3,000 and 3,800 calories with high protein. On the 3.5 days I fast, I land at zero.
That works out to a weekly deficit of roughly 15,000 to 20,000 calories. Translated into fat: a target of 4 to 6 pounds per week.
That is a deficit no daily diet can match without making you miserable every single day.
I would rather be hungry hard for half a week than half-hungry forever. That is a personality trait, not a recommendation. But it is the reason this protocol clicked for me when nothing else did.
What I Got Out of My Earlier 20/4 Fasting
Before I went to 3.5 days, I ran a 20/4 cycle for a stretch. Twenty hours fasted, four hours to eat.
It was rewarding. I felt sharper. My body composition shifted. I gained muscle.
But I did not lose fat.
The 20/4 protocol kept me in the early stages of fat-burning every day, then pulled me back out as soon as I ate. I never got deep enough into ketosis for sustained fat loss. For someone with a small amount to drop, 20/4 might be the move. For someone with a Sumo-sized amount to drop, it was never going to cut it.
That’s the lesson I had to learn the hard way before this protocol made sense.
How I Move on Fast Days
Walking hurts at 500 pounds. That’s just the truth. So I built a movement system that doesn’t punish my joints and still puts in real work.
10 short sessions per day. Every 90 minutes, across about 12 hours. Each session is a circuit of low-impact lower body, upper body, and stability work. Door-jam pushups. Resistance band rows. Chair hip thrusts. Horse stance holds. Leg kickbacks. Shoulder presses. The kind of stuff that adds up to an hour or two of total active time without ever asking my knees to carry me down a sidewalk.
Frequency beats duration at my size. Ten short hits a day means I’m never sitting too long, never letting the body sink into pure rest mode, and never asking for more than the joints can give.
Article three is going to break the whole protocol down. Every exercise. Every modification. Why no walking. How it changes between fast days and refeed days. If you are heavy and you have been told the answer is “just walk more” while your knees are screaming at you, that article is for you.
What I Eat on the Days I’m Allowed to Eat
I am saving most of this for article two in this series, because it deserves its own piece.
The short version: I eat whole food. Protein-forward. 200 to 320 grams of protein on a good refeed day. Eggs. Chicken. Pork. Ground beef. A homemade protein pudding (chia seeds, sugar-free instant pudding, protein powder, milk) that delivers protein and fiber in one bowl and that I’m now eating two of every refeed day.
I do not binge on the eating days, because that would erase the deficit and I am not doing this for nothing. I do not “earn” garbage by fasting. The fast is the tool. The eating window is also the tool. They have to work together or the whole thing collapses.
If you have ever done a hard cut and then blown the entire deficit on a Saturday, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Article two will get into specifics. The protein pudding recipe. The mistakes I’m making. The McDonald’s days I’m not proud of. The sodium battle. The wins. The grocery list.
What I Want You to Take From This
I don’t know if this will kill me or save me. But I know the man I was before was already dying, slowly, from the inside out. So I’ll take this sharp-edged, hungry, buzzing madness over that slow death any day.
If that sounds insane, good. Maybe it is. It’s mine.
I don’t know if this will work. I don’t know if I’ll be writing this same essay a year from now, still 500 pounds, still desperate, still pretending I found the answer. But I know that for the first time in my life, I’m not lying to myself about how hard this is.
The hunger is real. The boredom is real. The voice in my head telling me to quit is real. And for now, I’m still telling it to shut up.
That’s not victory. That’s just Tuesday.
But Tuesday is more than I had before.
I’m done being fat. Not ashamed. Not desperate. Just done.
I deserve to know what it’s like to not be overweight.
If you are overweight and you have failed at this game more times than you can count, hear me on this: the more you do nothing, the faster nothing happens.
I am not telling you to fast 3.5 days a week. I am telling you that the protocol that finally works for you is going to be the one that makes sense to your specific brain, your specific body, your specific life. For me, it was the protocol that matched the biology I had been reading about for years. For you, it might be something completely different.
Find the thing that clicks. Then do it long enough to actually find out.
I will be back next month with what month one looked like in numbers, in the mirror, and on the scale. Then again the month after. Six months. Then we will see what a Sumo Sized Ginger looks like on the other side of this.
FAQ
How long is a 3.5-day fast? Roughly 84 hours. I eat my last meal Sunday night and break the fast Thursday morning, give or take. The other half of the week I eat normally.
How much do you weigh starting this? 500 pounds. That’s the starting line. The whole point of writing this is being honest about that number.
How long have you been doing this? Three weeks at the time of writing. The protocol is locked in for six months minimum.
What’s your mantra? “I deserve to know what it’s like to not be overweight.” I say it out loud when the hunger gets loudest.
Do you drink anything during the fast? Water, black coffee, stevia-sweetened tea, zero-calorie drink mixes, electrolytes. About 2 gallons of liquid a day. No calories. No broth. Stevia and zero-cal sweeteners don’t spike insulin meaningfully, so they don’t break the fat-burning state in any way that matters.
What about exercise on fast days? Yes. Ten short low-impact sessions a day, every 90 minutes, no walking. Article three will break the full system down.
Why 3.5 days instead of 5 or 7? Because 3.5 days hits deep ketosis without crossing into territory I’m not personally comfortable with as a guy doing this on his own. Longer fasts have their own protocols and their own risks. I am working in the window where I can do this every week, indefinitely, without it owning my life.
Are you working with a doctor or a coach? No. I am a Sumo Sized Ginger writing about my own experiment. I am not advising anyone. I am not selling anything. If you want a doctor, talk to a doctor.
Will you keep doing this if you don’t lose weight? Six months is the commitment. I will publish what happens. If nothing happens, I will tell you nothing happened. That is the deal.
What’s the next article in this series? What I eat on the 3.5 days I’m allowed to eat. The protein pudding recipe. The mistakes. The wins. The grocery list. Coming next month.
What’s the hardest part of fasting 3.5 days a week? Not hunger. The mental battle against boredom, habit, society, and yourself. Hunger is a wave. The other four are the war.
Joseph Riley Long is a writer based in Buckley, Washington. He goes by Sumo, weighs 500 pounds as of publication, fasts 3.5 days a week, and is publishing a six-month chronicle of the protocol here on Medium. He co-hosts the podcast “Jackasses with AI: Burn the Beige” and is at work on the literary horror novel SPORE.
If this hit, drop a clap, follow, and tell me what you want me to dig into next month.
