For almost four months, intermittent fasting has been both a delight and an enemy to me. Without knowing it, I'd accidentally participated in this lifestyle in the past, my high school years spent skipping breakfast and eating late lunches. Not caring much for fad diets and health trends, I simply never had a name to put to the face of intermittent fasting. Now, however, it is an active part of my daily life.
My first formal exposure to the concept of IF occurred at lunch this past semester. A friend briefly mentioned that they knew someone choosing to fast during Lent. For some reason, that tidbit of information stuck with me. A few days later, I did some research about it, then downloaded a few apps to try intermittent fasting myself. I quickly found it to be a fun and not too challenging for my preexisting eating habits.
(Only after a couple of days after I started did I find out that my best friend had also started fasting, seeking a spiritual cleanse by eating just one meal a day -- somehow, we independently reached a similar place at a similar time!)
For those who don't know about intermittent fasting, here's a quick crash-course: Though some consider it to be a diet, it is indeed a lifestyle, one that restricts your feeding window. 16:8, for example, allows you to eat during an 8 hour period, such as from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Other popular ones include 18:6, 5:2 (fasting for 24 hours twice a week), and one meal a day (OMAD). All that you can have during your fasting hours are water, unsweetened tea, and black coffee. The benefits of this are related to anti-aging, cellular cleansing, and mental clarity.
When I was still at college, I found the act of fasting to be new and exhilarating. It changed my entire perspective on what hunger is, reconstructing it as a manageable feeling rather than a desperate cry preceding collapse. I had the freedom to expand my perspective on the role eating plays in life.
My favorite parts? I cut out those late-night impulse-ramen binges. I learned to be more intentional about the foods I ate. I gained an interest in exercise. And, most of all, I came to love the feeling of accessing deeper reserves of energy, gaining an awareness of myself that stretches to my fingertips.
My least favorite parts? Nobody warned me that fasting can lead to eating disorder-like thoughts or even change my period.
That's really what made me start to reevaluate how I participated in fasting. It was easy to brush off one light period as an adjustment to new exercise habits, but come the second month, I became suspicious. Was fasting doing something to my body that I should worry about? A bit of research later, and yeah, I realized, maybe I should be.
The body -- especially the female body -- is a very delicate and precise mechanism. The slightest thing has the potential to throw the entire system off, and fasting can cause a hormonal response which stops periods. Some women just need more consistent and frequent meals. Some women throw themselves off by restricting too many calories and causing physical stress. Either way, the body gets pushed into starvation mode, ghrelin levels spike to create an even more impulsive appetite, and an imbalance of hormones create widespread problems.
After having read articles written by men, I realized how important it was to do more research specific to females. I also realized that being at home for remote schooling hadn't been a good environment for my relationship with food. The consistency of eating meals with friends between classes ceased to exist, leaving me groping in the dark for new habits and stability. That lack of structure within days of greater solitude ultimately opened me up for attack. Between not eating enough of substance after fasting for 18-20 hours and obsessing over the bad things I did eat, toxic behaviors wrested control over my health.
My own struggles made me question why people online rarely talk about the negative aspects of IF. Different communities inspire one another through before and after pictures to celebrate physical changes, but what of the process overall? Who else had gotten too close to the fire and found themselves hurt? How many others had experienced obsession, a need for sugar to replace real nutrition, shame, and anxiety over eating?
Maybe the answer is few. But, after searching Reddit, I've found others who have similar questions and experiences. Even if we are among the minority, any move towards gentler treatment of ourselves is progress in the right direction. I now know fasting for 20 hours everyday is currently unsustainable for me, so speaking out about my experiences will help others to know that doing 16:8 is nothing to scoff at. Some days, the challenge is valid; other days, you just need to eat some breakfast before 10 a.m.! It just seems like everyone is focused solely on change. As important, however, is sharing the mental steps experienced on the way.
Every lifestyle needs some sort of mentoring. Just like family can teach you how to cook and pass on cultures of eating, any form of fasting deserves shared wisdom and community. Without that, we might lose the wholesome balance of eating for ill-sustained passions.
At the end of the day, I still love intermittent fasting. The only thing I hate is how vulnerable I became to its less acknowledged dark side. Although I truly think that fasting is a good thing, it's always possible to seek a positive end in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
EDIT (9/2/20):
It's been a number of months. Not too much time, but it's incredible how quickly your perspective can change.
I almost went down a very dark path with my eating. The first part of this post nods to that fact, but I'm coming back in to fully affirm the fact that I willfully walked into self-destructive habits. The thing that saved me from further damage was going to work at a summer camp from May until July. The structured eating times, the meals in community, and the orientation of tasks during each day all helped to bring me healing. (That, and a good friend that always tried to hunt me down with a snack whenever I missed a meal.) It gave me back my healthy view of food. And, thanks to learning to cook and bake, showed me better ways of staying healthy.
Don't get me wrong -- intermittent fasting may work for some individuals, but my temptation to not eat enough calories and push limits rose up too strong. I'm very grateful for the strength I developed from exercising daily and the mindfulness I now have about what I consume, and yet looking back gives me some chagrin. It makes me feel sorrow for others who still struggle with eating, this basic function of life.
Why is it so easy for people to develop such unkind habits towards themselves? Why do we live in a world where we deny warning signs and brainwash ourselves? So much of what people see as good is just a convoluted way of hurting ourselves.
Let me clarify how I now feel about fasting. There is definitely validity in the concept, namely through its Biblical significance as a valid spiritual discipline. Unfortunately, I didn't do IF out of faith, although I did convince myself that's why I started. False. I twisted it for my own purposes, giving room for the Devil to pop in and play. How I approached it was the first step to allow it to overtake me. For a practice of control, fasting really stole all my power.
I'm happy to say that my old fasting app has been deleted from my phone. I held on to it throughout the summer, mostly ignoring it, but I still clung too much to old inclinations. I briefly adhered to calorie counting (some may say an attempt to fast without fasting). Sometime during June, I finally reached the point where I couldn't deny all of the stress these thoughts provide. I tossed out all physical evidence of the things which provided burdensome thoughts and impulses. This was one of the final major steps towards recovery.
These days, I eat a little something for breakfast most every day. I often skip eating at the campus dining hall for lunch during the week due to a busy schedule or lack of hunger, but I promise I balance it out with dinner and snacks. I make a point to listen to my body, not my mind.
Our stomachs were not made to be empty. Our spirits were not created to carry shame. Our minds should not be slaves to the things God gave us to be good.
In conclusion, I feel better now. I've replaced shame with God -- and, in fact, feel more confident handing over to Him the control. But even if it eels like it's been a lifetime since I avoided food for such long periods of time, accumulating hours of abstinence like badges of pride, I know that it hasn't been too long. Long in the sense of distance covered, yes, just not in linear time. I still get urges to wait an extra hour before eating lunch on a breakfast-less day, but what does that prove to anyone? What does that prove to myself?
Take care of yourselves, my friends. Devote the power of your will to what is good, not to the perverse and self-destructive. Do not obscure your purpose in a cloud of obsession, or convince yourself that something is good when it clearly is not from God. And if something brings you shame, question why that is, because only what hurts within you encourages that emotion.
1 Corinthians 10:23-24 (NIV): "I have the right to do anything," you say -- but not everything is beneficial. "I have the right to do anything" -- but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
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