The Question Almost No One Asks Before Booking a Fasting Retreat
Before my first extended fast, I did what most people do. I read reviews, browsed photos of the rooms, checked out the daily schedule, looked up the location. I wanted to know what was included, what to pack, what to expect.
It wasn't until years later—after many more fasts—that I realized I'd missed something important. And when I started talking to other people about their retreat experiences, I noticed almost no one was asking about it either.
The question? What kind of air purification, water filtration, and building materials are in the space where I’ll be fasting?
Why This Question Never Occurred to Me
Simple: I couldn't see it. When you're researching a retreat, you focus on what's visible—the photos, the views, the room layout, the peaceful setting. What doesn't make it into the brochure? The building materials that off-gas. The electromagnetic fields from wiring and Wi-Fi. The quality of the air circulating through the HVAC system.
Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not impacting you.
It was actually my training in functional health that connected the dots—learning how environmental compounds can quietly accumulate in your body over time. Once I understood that, I started asking different questions.
What Changed My Thinking
When you stop eating for an extended period, your body doesn't just rest—it gets to work. Fat stores begin breaking down, releasing compounds that may have accumulated there over years. Autophagy kicks in, clearing out damaged cells. And importantly, fasting triggers powerful adaptive responses: research shows it activates Nrf2, a pathway that upregulates your body's production of glutathione—often called the body's master antioxidant—along with other detoxification enzymes.
In other words, your body is actively ramping up its cleanup systems during a fast. This is one of the reasons fasting is so powerful.
Once I understood this, the environment question suddenly made sense. If your body is doing deep housekeeping—mobilizing stored compounds, activating detox pathways, clearing out cellular debris—why would you simultaneously expose it to new environmental burdens?
Think of it this way: your body is finally getting the chance to clean house—dusting the furniture, wiping down the countertops, mopping the floors. Meanwhile, the windows are open during a dust storm and someone keeps tracking mud through the door.
What I've Learned to Ask
Once I started thinking about the toxins we can't see, I sought out building biologists to look at my own home environment. That process taught me so much about invisible environmental burdens—and it changed how I thought about fasting. If these things matter in everyday life, how much more do they matter when your body is in active cleanup mode?
I'm not a building scientist. But I've learned what questions to ask. Now, before recommending any fasting environment, I want to know: What type of water filtration is used? How is air quality managed? What building materials were used in construction or renovation? How old are the carpets and when were they last chemically cleaned? What's the approach to EMF exposure?
You may not get perfect answers when you ask these questions. But how a retreat responds tells you a lot about how deeply they've thought about the full fasting experience.
The more I learned, the more I realized I wanted to create a fasting space that addressed all of this from the ground up. That's the vision behind Fasting in Paradise—but wherever you choose to fast, I hope you'll ask these questions. Your body is doing important work. It deserves an environment that supports it.
For more questions worth asking—the kind that won't appear on most retreat websites—see 5 Questions to Ask Before Booking Any Fasting Retreat.
About the Author: I've been attending extended fasts for over a decade and am the founder of Fasting in Paradise, a women's fasting retreat launching Fall 2026. Learn more about my background.