this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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its not like i go to parties or eat with my friends every day. and besides its pretty easy to adjust my fast for those days when i do have social calls. instead of eating lunch at midday I eat with my friends at 14:00s.
fasting to me is a perfect means of controlling my anxiety and dealing with the completely out of whack food environment in which we grow up today. the food industry relies on inducing overconsumption. it hjacks our bodies' natural hunger cues via high processed foods. fasting is a natural way to restore a healthy eating instinct. it was only through fasting that i went from wanting to eat all the time to eating in a timely way, valuing each dish i make.
this goes back to eating as a social experience. because i am no longer subject to the deleterious effects of high processed foods i can easily spend a week out with family and friends, eating three times a day, and then return to a reasonable, nutrition based eating period with no problem.
as a side note, the real slippery slope is semaglutide. because those meds are a brute force way to emulate the effects of a healthy hormonal cycle, so it is only logical that once you're off the meds you're back to equating appetite with hunger and feeling hungry all the time.
I’m glad it works for you. Please understand your experience is not universal.
I will repeat: for a lot of people, myself included, IF triggers disordered eating patterns.
Semaglutides are a medical miracle for diabetics who struggle to control their blood glucose
They are also just like all other drugs in that when you stop taking them, they stop working. This is also true of literally every other pharmaceutical, and that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t take their psych meds or their anti-seizure meds or their blood thinners.
I would never try to convince someone to change eating habits that are working well for them, but diets (including IF) can absolutely be harmful for some people and I would suggest being sensitive to that when discussing this topic.
I do not deny that every person needs to find their own way through the high processed foods / ersatz foods epidemic. But it has to be done in one way or the other. It's like with triggering foodstuffs. If sweets are especially troublesome for you, then you end up having to thread the needle. You have to control yourself from consuming the worst kinds of fat/sugar amalgams that capitalism throws at you. And yet you are likely better off not pretending that you can disavow sweets altogether. What you cannot do is pretend that you don't have a problem. You gotta confront it.
The solution at the end of the day is to consume as much real food as possible, which in turn will allow your body to restore its natural eating patterns. Avoid the chemically pre-digested bread as much as possible because you are simply not built to consume it without spiraling out of control. Eat beans, proteins, fruits, veggies and so on. Even the fatty hummus you make at home won't be as dangerous to your metabolism as the frankensauces that are served out there with impunity.
In a food environment designed to hjack your hormonal processes and turn your intuition towards overconsumption (and food industry profits) fasting is far from a fad diet. Its a form of resistance against a poisonous food environment. Is it a silver bullet? Probably not. Behaviorial change is down to each individual, and many people will be able to ward themselves off against ersatz foodstuffs via many smaller dishes over their day. The point is that safeguarding one's body against this environment has to be done one way or the other.
What is already not working I believe is the usage of semaglutides as anything other than a diabetes medication. Because let's face it, that's what is happening. If your entire food environment is designed to inflame your appetite, then taking semaglutides as a suppressant is like placing a bandaid atop an open wound.
I don't think the other person is going to reply to this comment because there's a fair few things that you have said here that are, to put it bluntly, pretty insensitive to a person who has just brought up the fact that they struggle with disordered eating.
I'm not saying that you comment should have a trigger warning on it, but there are topics and ways of discussing things like food and diet which can aggravate disordered eating. A healthy lifestyle is clearly something which is important to you. It's worth considering whether your comment in this context is working in service of that outcome or whether it's working in a counterproductive way.
Every single line written in my comment comes from a place of dealing with disordered eating as well. Specifically the parts where I talked about triggering foodstuffs and how everyone needs to charter their own course.
We can't ignore the facts. We live under a food environment mostly made up of ersatz foods which are designed to trigger disordered eating. In acknowledging that, we come to understand the industrialized way in which are psyches are subject to siege. That is the context where I believe it becomes not only insensitive but also counterproductive to label fasting a fad diet. It's not even a diet, it's a behavior change that does work for lots of people because it resists the worst influences of the food industry in a direct and straightforward manner.
I don't believe my comment was insensitive and neither was theirs, I think we put forward both of our points of view and walked out with mutual understanding of them. It wasn't the first time I'd hear that fasting = disordered eating and I'm sure it wasn't the first time they heard about risks associated with semaglutide medication.
I'm referring to a subclinical eating disorder or a label for someone recovering from an eating disorder here, in the sense that the other commenter has used the term, and not just "eating in a way that is unhealthy"
You, me, my therapist, psychiatrist and the leg I almost lost to diabetes are all on the same page then.
Okay, so then it's worth reflecting on why you're framing your discussion of foods and eating habits in terms that are well known to aggravate symptoms of eating disorders in people who suffer with these conditions.
If your reply is taken at face value then you're acting in a way that intentionally risks causing harm to people with eating disorders but I don't believe this is the case and I don't think that you're trying to convince me it is.
I only have my own experience and that of my immediate circles to draw upon. And so far I've been told that merely describing who we are can only be interpreted as either an intentional attempt at harm, or harm out of ignorance. I don't think this is what you intended to claim, because you yourself said elsewhere in this thread that IF is polarizing because for some of us it is the exact kind of lifestyle intervention that is warranted - whereas for others it can be damaging. All of which was already baked into the conversation I already had with someone else above.
MH was glad IF worked for me, didn't feel the need to change my eating habits but pointed out that specific form of intentional dieting can be dangerous to specific people. This absolutely true and something I never disagreed with. I built on what she said, because I truly believe that everyone has to charter their own course in today's food environment. Our only real and major disagreement in the conversation we've had is the uses and limits of semaglutide, about which I hope my pessimism is unwarranted.
Edit: so from what I understand while you don't necessarily disagree with what I said, you take exception to terms I've used. Could you be more specific? I don't always discuss these things in english, so I'd be interested in specific instances of callous terminology I've employed.