Intermittent Fasting changed my life — but not in a good way.
On the first day of senior year of high school, I sat in statistics class making smalltalk with my classmates. I was hyper-aware of the waistband of my leggings, constantly adjusting it to make sure my lower stomach fat was covered and held in completely, shielded from the world. I was terrified that if the waistband slipped down, my stomach rolls would be exposed and people would see the part of my body that I hated the most, that I fruitlessly tried to get rid of for years. I was pulling out my notebook when Justin walked into the room, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I audibly gasped. His formerly full cheeks were shallow, his once round stomach was now invisible under his oversized sweatshirt, and his legs were thin and muscular. I had always thought he was cute, but looking around the room it became clear that this realization was beginning to dawn on others. He must have lost almost 100 pounds over the last few months. My immediate thought was, how on earth did he do it? I had to know.
He settled in the desk next to mine, so my friend and I peppered him with intrusive questions about his weight loss. His answer boiled down to one simple tactic: intermittent fasting. Justin simply didn’t eat for 18 hours of the day, and allowed himself meals only during the remaining 6. He explained that this method is great for losing weight and gaining muscle, and that he never had to stop eating unhealthy foods because no matter what he ate, it was during such a short time frame that his body still shrunk. He cited scientific studies and showed us websites of people who swear that intermittent fasting is the healthiest lifestyle. My mind wandered to my stomach rolls, the way my arms jiggled when I waved, and my thighs that rippled when my feet hit the ground. Not eating for most of the day seemed like a small price to pay for getting rid of all that. So I scoured all the websites after school, read blogs and inhaled the research. It seemed to be the perfect solution: I could still eat what I wanted, all I had to do was change the hours when I ate. I could do that, I knew I was almost too good at self-discipline. I was sold.
I decided to do the 16–8 model: I consumed 0 calories from the hours of 8pm-12pm, and allowed myself to eat from 12pm-8pm. Since I woke up at 6:30 for school, mornings were rough — I spent my first 6 waking hours with no food, but convinced myself that things were going well. I distinctly recall telling my mom that I had liberated myself from being dependent on food: “everything is about food! Everyone needs food all the time! It’s so annoying. Ugh, It just feels so good to know that I’m really fine without food, at least for awhile,”. She was skeptical, but there was nothing anyone could have said that would have prevented me from doing what I thought was healthy and groundbreaking. All year, I brought a scalding hot thermos of tea to school, burning my mouth to distract myself from the hunger. The headaches came on by second period, and it was difficult to stay focused on class. But I told myself that this was all part of my body adjusting to how it was meant to be.
I still exercised every day, often before I had consumed any food. And by the end of senior year, my body was smaller — it worked, didn’t it? I had achieved weight loss. But somehow, I still wasn’t content. And there seemed to be no end to intermittent fasting, no point at which it was over — people seemed to just fast forever. Besides, I was way to nervous about what would happen if I did stop. It was difficult to imagine giving myself permission to eat whenever I wanted to: what would that even look like? I was so accustomed to control and self-discipline, that if I really let myself eat when and how I wanted to, I thought I might never stop. So I continued to live by intermittent fasting for the next 2 years, and if I hadn’t discovered the body positivity movement my sophomore year of college, I might have continued for the rest of my life.
Only now, looking back, am I able to see the ways that intermittent fasting damaged my physical and mental health. First and foremost, it distanced me from my body’s natural cues. As I learned later on, our bodies release hormones that tell us we are hungry and when we are full, but intermittent fasting taught me to ignore those signals. I was often hungry outside of my prescribed hours, but I did everything in my power to distract myself and ignore that gnawing feeling — the growling in my stomach, headaches and hollowness in my gut. On the other hand, I often felt full during the 8 hours when I was allowed to eat, but since I knew it would be another 16 hours until I got to eat again, I binged like crazy on any food I could get my hands on. I once ate an entire bag of grapes in one sitting, and jars of peanut butter didn’t last a week around me. I later learned that the biggest predictor of bingeing is restriction, and my body was simply reacting in the most natural way possible to keep me alive.
Like many diets and “lifestyle changes”, guilt and shame played a major role in my experience with intermittent fasting. On one hand, I felt like I had let myself down if I ate outside of those 8 hours, and was angry at myself for breaking the rules. However, I was also embarrassed that I was doing intermittent fasting at all. Even when my body image was at its worst, I was never one to proselytize, or even speak openly about what I was doing to make my body smaller. In college, most dinners, parties, and gatherings happened after 8pm, which put me in situations where I was the only one avoiding food, hyper-conscious that others might notice. In order to keep up with intermittent fasting, I missed out on spending time with family and friends, and even when I was physically present, I was not fully mentally present with the people I loved.
I’ve come to learn that food is not just fuel, and we are not simply machines. Food is an integral part of community, culture, family, friendships, traditions and religions. We are humans, whose bodies need nourishment and the quantity and timing of that nourishment can change every single day.
Intermittent fasting seemed like the perfect solution to my bodily insecurities, when in fact it was just as dangerous as other diets and forms of restriction. Intermittent fasting distanced me from my body’s natural cues, increased my anxiety and fixation on food, caused restriction and binge eating, and negatively affected my social life.
Thankfully, I learned that my ideal body is not the body that is sold to me in magazines or on fitspo Instagram posts. My ideal body is the body that results when I am able to eat whenever I am hungry, when I am able to move my body in ways that feel good and joyful, when I am able to attend holiday meals and not feel guilty about it, when I am able to genuinely enjoy late-night ice cream with my sister and early morning pancakes with my best friends without feeling an ounce of guilt, and without feeling like I ever need to compensate for it. It does not matter what that body looks like, or how much it weighs.
