Phase 1: Preparation

Before starting the Scorch Protocol, you must get your body ready. Think of this as “turning on the lights” before the deep work begins. Preparation means testing your baseline health, fixing major deficiencies, and then choosing one of two roads into the fast: a plant-based path that heals deeper, or a ketogenic path that is safer and far more forgiving. This page walks you through both.

Are You Ready to Start?

Blood Tests Done:Have you tested your Thyroid (TSH, Free T3, Free T4), Complete Blood Count (CBC), Metabolic Panel, Vitamin D, B12, Iron, Ferritin, and Cortisol? This tells you what you are working with. (It is not required for all these tests, in fact with most people we go off of symptoms only — not everyone has access to tests).
Body Temperature:Is your waking body temperature (taken before getting out of bed) below 36.5°C (97.7°F)? Log it from now on. It is the dial the T3 course is dosed to after the fast, and a low reading is the main sign you will come out of the fast needing that course. If it is very low, bring the numbers to me before you plan the fast. (Please see the body temp section on the T3 therapy page.)
Liver Health:Are your liver enzymes (AST, ALT) within a normal range? A stressed liver makes fasting more dangerous. If they are high, prioritize liver support first. (Sometimes powerful extended fasting is enough to fix a fatty, dysfunctional liver, but if you have liver issues it is good to do some liver therapies and binding)
Medications:Are you on any medications, especially ones that are hard on the kidneys or liver? Some medications make fasting dangerous or impossible. Use A.I. to scan your medication list and ask which ones are the worst for liver health, which ones have a long half-life, and which ones have the worst withdrawal.

Step 1: Baseline Testing

You cannot fix what you cannot measure. Get these tests done before starting:

TestWhy It Matters
Thyroid PanelTSH, Free T3, Free T4. A low T3 or high TSH means your metabolism is suppressed, a key target of the protocol.
Complete Blood Count (CBC)Checks for anemia, infection, and immune system status. Low white blood cells or hemoglobin can make fasting risky.
Metabolic PanelChecks kidney and liver function. Your kidneys will be working hard during a dry fast, so they must be healthy.
Vitamin D & B12Severe deficiencies in these can cause fatigue, nerve damage, and immune failure. Fix these before fasting.
Ferritin / IronLow iron (anemia) causes fatigue and makes fasting much harder. Your body needs iron to transport oxygen during healing.
Morning CortisolLow cortisol (adrenal fatigue) is very common in chronic illness. It affects how well your body handles stress, including fasting.
Sex Hormones (Total & Free Testosterone, Estradiol, SHBG)Your baseline before the rebuild. Years of low-carb fasting drive SHBG up, which can hide a low free testosterone under a normal-looking total. Estradiol goes on the same panel because you protect it, not crush it, when testosterone comes online later. Retest after carbs return.

Step 2: Fix Critical Deficiencies

Based on your test results, address these common deficiencies. Do not start the fast with known, severe deficiencies, as your body will not respond well.

Priority Supplements Before Fasting

Known Deficiencies:If a blood test already shows a specific vitamin or mineral deficiency, correct it before you fast. Do not walk into a fast carrying a known, uncorrected shortfall.
Magnesium (Glycinate or Malate):Most people are deficient. Magnesium is involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions and is critical for proper insulin function and sleep.
Potassium:Ensure adequate intake from food (avocado, coconut water, fruit) before fasting. Low potassium during a dry fast can affect the heart.

Step 3: Choose Your Preparation Path

There are two ways to prepare for the fast, and they are not equal. One gets you closer to fully healed. The other is safer and far more forgiving. The right choice depends on how sick you are, how many medications you are on, and how precisely you can follow a plan. Pick honestly.

Both paths begin the same way. Starting at least 3 weeks out, remove alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and ultra-processed food completely. This clears the caffeine-withdrawal headache and the dopamine crash out of the way now, so they do not land on top of you during the fast itself. From there the two paths diverge.

Path 1: Plant-Based Preparation (The Gold Standard)

This is the stronger path. Done correctly, it gets you closest to fully healed, because it builds exactly the baseline a dry fast heals best from: a higher metabolic rate, higher T3, and a body primed so that the Day 3 acidotic shift hits with full force. That shift is the therapeutic event, and the larger your metabolic gap entering ketosis, the deeper it goes. It demands precision, so choose it only if you can follow the steps closely.

After cutting those inputs, the taper counts down to the fast. Day 0 is the day the dry fast begins:

  • 2 weeks to 5 days out: Strict whole-food plant-based, with no added salt, oil, or sugar. Stripping these out sheds excess stored sodium so the fluid and blood-pressure swings of the first fasting days are gentler. This is about removing the excess, not depleting you. You bring electrolytes back up to a safe baseline on the rehydrate day below.
  • The final week: Magnesium citrate at a higher dose, daily, with plenty of water (see Step 5). It keeps the bowel moving as the food gets lighter and lowers the kidney-stone risk going into a dry fast.
  • 5 to 3 days out: Raw fruit, raw vegetables, and steamed vegetables only. No grains, beans, nuts, or heavy starches. This low-residue step is the real cleanse, clearing fiber out gently through food instead of through harsh laxatives.
  • 2 to 1 days out: No oils, no meat, nothing hard to digest. Light plant food only, cooked soft where that helps. This is also where you bring electrolytes back up to a safe baseline before going in.
  • The last day: Juice only, fresh fruit and vegetable juice with no pulp, so there is as little as possible left in the colon when the fast begins.
  • Day 0: Begin the dry fast.

This path is also where medications come down, where appropriate. Two kinds of drugs matter most: ones that stress the kidneys or raise dehydration risk, which generally need to be off before a dry fast, and fat-soluble drugs that sit in your fat stores and re-enter the bloodstream as you burn fat, which are tapered over the weeks beforehand. This is selective, not a clean sweep. Anything load-bearing that is holding you together, like a Lyme protocol or an antifungal or antiviral you depend on, stays. Which specific drugs and what schedule is individual, and this is exactly what the membership is for: bring me your list and I work it out with you. Do not change prescriptions on your own.

Path 2: Ketogenic Preparation (The Safer Fallback)

This is the forgiving path. Eat 50 grams of carbohydrate a day or less for at least 1 to 2 months before the fast, with the same cleanse prep below. Keto-adapting first means your body is already burning fat when the fast begins, which makes the fast dramatically easier and safer and leaves a large margin for error. Because the fast itself is softened, the medication picture is usually less drastic too.

The trade-off is ceiling. A body that eased into ketosis meets a smaller Day 3 shock, so the healing is gentler than the plant-based path. This is a tolerance accommodation, not a depth multiplier. Choose it if you are seriously ill, on many medications, have failed fasts before, cannot follow the plant-based steps precisely, or simply want the largest safety margin for your first attempts.

Which Path Is Right for You?

Choose Plant-Based if:You can follow a plan precisely, you are stable enough to taper medications on a worked-out schedule, and you want the highest healing ceiling.
Choose Keto if:You are sicker, on many medications, have struggled with fasts before, or want the safest and most forgiving on-ramp.
Neither, yet:The order is fast first, always, with one exception. If fasting has already failed you, meaning you have pushed through fasts, kept getting worse, and show signs of metabolic trouble (cold, weight that will not move, worse after each attempt), fasting is not your entry point. You need a T3 jump start to rebuild the metabolism first, and then you come back to the fast. Over-adaptation (many months of low-carb with weight loss stalled at the same calories that used to work) is the usual picture here. See the T3 therapy section, and run your numbers past me, before preparing to fast.

What the evidence says: that exception, and the judgement of who needs T3 after the fast, are my clinical rules. The literature has no published criterion for who needs T3 after a fast; the nearest objective candidate is the low free T3 and high reverse T3 pattern measured in chronic fatigue patients (Ruiz-Nunez 2018), which is a blood test, not the history-and-temperature screen I use.

Step 4: Mental Preparation

Setting Your Intention

Write Down Your Why:Before you start, write down exactly why you are doing this. On day 2 or 3, when it feels hardest, you will need to revisit this.
Inform Your Support System:Tell someone you trust that you are doing this fast. For fasts over 72 hours, arrange daily check-ins with this person.
Clear Your Schedule:The fast works best when you can fully rest. Try to schedule it during a period where you have minimal responsibilities. This is not the time for work deadlines or social obligations.
Prepare Your Environment:Stock up for the refeed: dried fruit for kompot (prunes, dried apples, apricots), coconut water for day 2, and soft foods for the days after. Prepare a cool, comfortable space to rest. Remove temptations.
Pray or Meditate Deep Into the Fast:This one matters more than most people realize, so do not sleep on it. A dry fast pushes you into a depth of ketosis you have likely never been in before. Carnivore eating does not reach this depth. Even long water fasting does not reach it. Something happens to the brain in that state that no amount of normal meditation practice reproduces: the mental noise drops away, the body settles, and you can hold a focused inner state that meditation teachers spend decades training toward. People who have never meditated a day in their life will sit down on day 3 or 4 of a dry fast and feel what a thirty-year practitioner feels. The fast hands you a state that is otherwise reached only through years of training. You do not have to earn it. It is a gift of the protocol.

A contemplative or prayer practice helps many people settle into and hold this state once they reach it on day 3 or 4. If that appeals to you, the Mindfulness & Neurology page covers specific approaches that work well in the deep-fast window.

Step 5: The Cleanse and the Final Days

Eat Light, Flush Gently, Skip the Enemas

Going into the fast with an empty colon means your body is not dealing with rotting material in a sealed, waterless environment, which is extra toxin load at exactly the time you want nothing pulling your immune system the wrong way. But more is not better here. The Scorch Protocol focuses on eating light, not on overdoing the enemas and flushing, because that flushing is itself a big stressor on the body. Enemas, colonics, saltwater flushes and herbal colon cleanses irritate the bowel lining and strip out potassium right before a fast that already stresses your electrolytes. Enemas are not necessary in this protocol, and I do not use them. The plant-based taper (or the keto prep) does most of the work of emptying you out gently through food. Magnesium citrate finishes the job.

Magnesium citrate is the tool I keep, and I run it at a higher dose than a maintenance supplement, daily through the final week, rather than as one big purge. It keeps the bowel moving as the food gets lighter, and in my experience it minimises the chance of a kidney stone forming once you go dry. Once you are in the fast, autophagy and fat burning handle the real cellular clearance from the inside. There is nothing left to “flush.”

What the evidence says: the light days match what the German fasting clinics call a relief day, a vegetarian day under about 1,000 kcal before the fast (ÄGHE 2002; Wilhelmi de Toledo 2019). Citrate is a real stone inhibitor: in the pooled trials, recurrent stone formers on citrate salts formed markedly fewer new stones than on placebo (Phillips 2015), and five dry days doubled serum uric acid and concentrated the urine (Papagiannopoulos-Vatopaidinos 2020), which is where citrate helps. Marked caveat: those trials used modest daily doses for years, not a week of laxative doses; at laxative doses magnesium pulls water and electrolytes out of you right before a week without water, and magnesium toxicity is documented when the kidneys could not clear it (Khairi 2014; Bokhari 2018), so the week at a higher dose is my practice with no trial behind it. Skipping enemas sides with the gastroenterology evidence, which found no supporting trials and documented harm from colon cleansing (Acosta and Cash 2009), and against the tradition: every dry-fasting school empties the bowel once before the fast, by enema or laxative, though none uses enemas during the dry days (Khoroshilov 1994). On the liver flush, the “stones” people pass after an olive-oil flush were analysed and were soap made from the oil (Sies and Brooker 2005).

Magnesium citrate laxative bottle, available at CVS

Standard magnesium citrate laxative, available at CVS and most pharmacies

What to Use:Magnesium citrate, liquid or capsules, the standard product sold at any pharmacy. The dose is higher than you would take as a daily supplement and lower than a colonoscopy purge: enough to keep you emptying comfortably each day. I do not print an amount here because it is set against your bowel response and your kidney history. Either form, take every dose with a large amount of water.
How to Do It:Take it daily through the final week, with a full glass of water each time and plenty more through the day. You are not trying to blast the colon empty in one afternoon. You are keeping it moving as the food gets lighter, so that by day 0 there is very little left in it and nothing violent had to happen to get there.
Timing: The Final WeekRun the magnesium citrate through the last seven days before the fast, not as a single clear-out two days out. Magnesium citrate pulls water, so keep drinking all week, and let the juice-only last day be where you top up before going in. Do not go into a dry fast dehydrated by the very thing meant to prepare you.
The Last Two Days: No Oils, No MeatOne to two days before the fast, drop oils, meat and anything else that is hard to digest. Light plant food, cooked soft where that helps, is the menu. On the last day, juice only: fresh fruit and vegetable juice with no pulp, nothing else, so that there is as little as possible sitting in the colon when you go dry. If you came through the plant-based path salt, oil, and sugar free, these two days are also where you bring electrolytes back up to a safe baseline. You shed the excess earlier so the fast starts gently; you do not want to walk in actually depleted.
Best Pre-Fast Hydration: Carb JuicingReal hydration is more than water. The carbohydrates in fresh juice help your body actually hold onto water and carry minerals and vitamins into the cells, so carb juicing (fresh fruit and vegetable juice, no pulp) is the ideal way to hydrate going into the fast, and it is why the last day is juice and nothing else. The one exception is the ketogenic path: if you have been specifically cleared for a keto prep, stay on water and electrolytes and skip the juice so you do not break ketosis before Day 0.
Why It Matters:A clean, empty colon going into the fast means less endotoxin recirculation, less digestive distraction for your immune system, and a higher-quality autophagic state throughout. You are already committing to something powerful. This preparation step costs almost nothing and meaningfully improves what your fast can accomplish.
Liver Support: TUDCA Over Liver FlushingLiver flushing is still not recommended. The one case where it makes sense is a motility failure so severe that you cannot push food out at all; short of that it is one more stressor with no job to do. I prefer several weeks of TUDCA supplementation over liver flushing protocols. TUDCA supports bile flow and liver cell integrity, and the extended window allows long-persisting medications and their active metabolites to begin clearing before the fast begins. This matters because drugs processed via the liver’s CYP450 enzyme system are often fat-soluble and accumulate in fatty tissues, and as you burn fat during the fast, those residues re-enter the bloodstream. Long-acting benzodiazepines (Diazepam, Librium), SSRIs like Prozac (whose norfluoxetine metabolite takes up to 5 weeks to wash out), antipsychotics like Vraylar (active metabolites persist 1–3 weeks), and cardiovascular drugs like Amiodarone (half-life up to 78 days) all fall into this category. Starting TUDCA weeks in advance, not days, gives your liver a meaningful head start before the added metabolic demands of fasting arrive.
Stop Exercising, Rest Into It:In the final days before the fast, stop hard exercise and avoid sauna or any trick meant to “burn off” glycogen faster. Your body has a transition speed that took millions of years to evolve, and forcing it faster only adds risk while protecting nothing. Conserve your energy and your muscle for the fast itself. Strict physical rest going in is part of the protocol, not laziness.

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References

  1. Ärztegesellschaft Heilfasten und Ernährung (ÄGHE). Leitlinien zur Fastentherapie. Forschende Komplementärmedizin und Klassische Naturheilkunde, 2002;9:189-198.the German fasting-therapy guideline: a vegetarian relief day under about 1,000 kcal before the fast; magnesium sulphate used as a laxative for its water-drawing effect
  2. Wilhelmi de Toledo F, Grundler F, Bergouignan A, Drinda S, Michalsen A. Safety, health improvement and well-being during a 4 to 21-day fasting period in an observational study including 1422 subjects. PLoS One, 2019;14(1):e0209353. PMID 30601864. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0209353.the Buchinger cohort used a 600 kcal vegetarian day before the fast and a laxative on the first morning of a fast that includes about three litres of fluid a day
  3. Phillips R, Hanchanale VS, Myatt A, Somani B, Nabi G, Biyani CS. Citrate salts for preventing and treating calcium containing kidney stones in adults. Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2015;(10):CD010057. PMID 26439475. DOI 10.1002/14651858.CD010057.pub2.pooled trials of citrate salts in recurrent stone formers: markedly fewer new stones than placebo over one to four years at modest daily doses; upper gastrointestinal upset the commonest side effect
  4. Papagiannopoulos-Vatopaidinos IE, Papagiannopoulou M, Sideris V. Dry fasting physiology: responses to hypovolemia and hypertonicity. Complement Med Res, 2020;27(4):242-251. PMID 31958788. DOI 10.1159/000505201.five dry days in healthy adults doubled serum uric acid and concentrated the urine, the setting in which citrate is protective
  5. Khairi T, Amer S, Spitalewitz S, Sharon D, et al. Severe symptomatic hypermagnesemia associated with over-the-counter laxatives in a patient with renal failure and sigmoid volvulus. Case Rep Nephrol, 2014;2014:560746. PMID 24563801. DOI 10.1155/2014/560746.magnesium toxicity from over-the-counter magnesium laxatives when the kidneys could not clear it
  6. Bokhari SR, Siriki R, Teran FJ, Batuman V. Fatal hypermagnesemia due to laxative use. Am J Med Sci, 2018;355(4):390-395. PMID 29661354. DOI 10.1016/j.amjms.2017.08.013.a death from magnesium laxative use in a woman with normal kidney function, serum magnesium climbing within two days
  7. Acosta RD, Cash BD. Clinical effects of colonic cleansing for general health promotion: a systematic review. Am J Gastroenterol, 2009;104(11):2830-2836. PMID 19724266. DOI 10.1038/ajg.2009.494.no methodologically rigorous trials support colonic cleansing for health, multiple case series of harm; the gastroenterology basis for skipping enemas and colonics
  8. Khoroshilov IE. Clinical and hygienic aspects of absolute (dry) fasting. Author's abstract of a Candidate of Medical Sciences thesis, Military Medical Academy, St Petersburg, 1994 (abridged English translation, Siberika Publishing, 2020).the Russian dry-fasting method used a single siphon enema before the dry days and no enemas, baths or laxatives during them; the tradition empties the bowel first, which this protocol does through food and citrate instead
  9. Sies CW, Brooker J. Could these be gallstones? Lancet, 2005;365(9468):1388. PMID 15836886. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)66373-8.the 'stones' passed after an olive-oil and lemon-juice liver flush were analysed and were saponified fatty acids, not gallstones
  10. Ruiz-Nunez B, Tarasse R, Vogelaar EF, Janneke Dijck-Brouwer DA, Muskiet FAJ. Higher Prevalence of "Low T3 Syndrome" in Patients With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Case-Control Study. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne), 2018;9:97. PMID 29615976. DOI 10.3389/fendo.2018.00097.the nearest thing to a published criterion for who might need T3 after a fast: chronic fatigue patients carried lower free T3 and total T3 and more reverse T3 than matched controls at a similar TSH; a blood pattern, not the history-and-temperature screen used here

See the full research & citations page for the complete evidence base and how each study is used.

The information on this site describes a personal health protocol and is provided for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice. Consult a qualified physician before modifying your diet, fasting practice, or any medication regimen.