Access the
benefits of
water fasting.

Medically supervised by a physician, from the safety and quiet of your own home.

Water fasting

What It Is,
Why It Works

A clinically established intervention with a simple premise

Therapeutic fasting under medical supervision has been studied since the 1960s. Its effects on metabolism, autonomic regulation, inflammation, and the central nervous system are well-documented in the published literature. This is an established area of medicine, not a fringe practice.

The premise is straightforward: every living organism has an innate capacity for self-repair. What gets in the way is the continuous demand we place on our systems — digestion, detoxification, stress response, metabolic regulation — running in parallel, all day, every day. When food is removed, the body redirects that energy toward deeper processes: cellular repair, immune regulation, metabolic recalibration. The system, briefly freed from its ordinary workload, turns its attention inward.

This is not a new idea. Fasting appears in the oldest medical traditions on earth. What's new is our ability to watch it happen — in real time, through continuous monitoring, with a physician reading the data as it arrives.

Physical and neurological change

What May Shift

One integrated physiological process, two dimensions

In the body

Blood pressure decreases. Insulin sensitivity improves. Inflammatory markers shift. Cellular autophagy accelerates as the body, freed from digestion, turns its energy toward repair.

These are documented outcomes across decades of peer-reviewed research on medically supervised fasting. I follow each of them through your continuous data stream throughout the week.

In the mind and nervous system

Without the regular punctuation of meals — and the stimulation that normally fills the gaps — people meet what daily life has been keeping at a distance. Sometimes clarity. Sometimes older material: boredom, restlessness, grief that hasn't had room to surface.

What develops has a name in the clinical literature: autonomic range. A wider band within which you can meet what life brings and remain regulated. People describe coming back with more room than they left with.

A measurable physiological shift

The Autonomic
Transition Window

Watched for in real time, around day three

Around day three of a five-day fast — as the body completes its shift into ketone metabolism — the autonomic nervous system passes through a measurable transition. Sympathetic activation gives way to parasympathetic regulation. For a brief period, the patterns the system has been holding become available for revision.

I call this the Autonomic Transition Window. As far as I know, no other clinical service is currently monitoring for it. It's detectable because the studio's monitoring architecture is built specifically to detect it. Your continuous heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, glucose, and ketone levels stream from the wearables on your wrist to a secure Canadian-hosted database, where my signal-detection system reads the data as it arrives.

When the monitoring shows the window opening, my attention turns to you. What you do with that time is yours. I hold the clinical conditions that make it possible.

The Transformation Arc

Aporia Score (AS) trajectory across the five-day fast and re-entry

Arrival &
intake

Shift begins

Ketosis entry

Autonomic
window

Deep
regulation

Parasym-
pathetic

Refeeding

Re-entry &
expansion

Wearables

EmbracePlus · Dexcom Stelo
Ketone meter · Blood pressure cuff

→

Secure Database

Canadian-hosted · Encrypted
Continuous data stream

→

Physician

Daily review · Real-time alerts
Signal-detection algorithm

Five days, mapped

The Journey

Day 1 Arrival

Day 2 The body shifts

Day 3 The window opens Autonomic Transition Window

Days 4–5 Deep regulation

Day 6+ Re-entry

Days 1–2

The body shifts

Hunger arrives and passes. Energy drops, then settles. The system moves into ketone metabolism. Sympathetic activation rises as the body works through the metabolic transition — this is normal, expected, and closely watched.

Day 3

The window opens

The Autonomic Transition Window opens. The defended configurations the system has been holding soften briefly. My monitoring registers it. What happens in that time belongs to you.

Days 4–5

Deep regulation

The system settles into parasympathetic dominance. Clarity arrives. A wider range of internal states becomes accessible. Many people describe these days as genuinely restful in a way they haven't experienced in years.

Re-entry

Returning with more room

Carefully sequenced refeeding. A structured review with me once you're through it. You return to your ordinary life with a measurably expanded tolerance range and a full record of what your system did during the week.

What it feels like

Most people move through waves: hunger, quiet, restlessness, clarity, emotion, and deep fatigue or stillness. Nothing is forced. The work is to stay close to the body, the data, and the moment.

Remote, monitored, supervised by me

How It Works

The kit

Your monitoring devices arrive by courier before the fast begins — an EmbracePlus wristband, a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor, a blood ketone meter, and a blood pressure cuff. Setup takes about fifteen minutes. I'm available to help if anything needs troubleshooting.

The fast

Water only for five days. Your devices stream data to me continuously — I review it each day and am available for clinical questions throughout. Nothing is left to guesswork. If something needs attention, I'm already reading it before you call.

Refeeding

From day six, a carefully sequenced return to eating. Once you're through it, we meet to look at what the data captured and what you experienced. That conversation is part of the work.

Clinical eligibility, reviewed individually

Is This For You

A real clinical intervention — screening matters

A medically supervised water fast is a genuine clinical intervention, and I screen carefully. The work is most safely offered to people who arrive in a stable enough place to undertake it.

This is for you if

You are physically healthy and stable
You can give five quiet days to the process
Your calendar has real space — no travel, no heavy commitments
You remain under the care of your own family physician
You are ready to rest, not perform

Requires careful screening if

Pregnancy or breastfeeding
Type 1 diabetes or insulin-dependent conditions
Medications that require food
Current or recent eating disorders
Significant cardiac, renal, hepatic, or psychiatric conditions
Acute crisis of any kind

Physician-supervised throughout · Stop at any point · Your family doctor stays involved

The physician behind the studio

Dr. Adriaan van der Wart

MBChB · Family and Emergency Medicine · British Columbia

I built Open Medicine Studio because I needed a place where this work could be done carefully and taken seriously — not flattened into wellness, and not pushed into a clinical category that didn't quite fit.

I'm a family and emergency physician practising in British Columbia. My medical training was completed in South Africa, and I've worked across emergency, rural, northern, Indigenous, expedition, and end-of-life medicine in Canada for over a decade. Along the way I've done my own fasts, sat with silence and with plant medicines under careful guidance, climbed mountains, burned out, and come back.

In 2008, I was the ship's doctor on a forty-day Atlantic crossing. Three men in genuine crisis boarded that boat. By the time we made landfall, they had changed in ways that the medicine I'd been trained in couldn't account for. That experience set the direction of everything since.

What makes this different is the way I watch it. Most clinical medicine happens in a room. My window into what's happening in your body is continuous, research-grade, and real time. I'm not waiting to be called. I'm already reading. Medicine practised at a distance, at depth, and in real time.

Common questions