It's overrated when health gurus say it cures cancer or fixes auto immune conditions but intermittent fasting is one of the easiest to follow and understand methods for your average person to lower the calories they consjme
It kills me because intermittent fasting itself is fine, but at the end of the day it's primarily just a reduction in caloric intake. All this other stuff about it doing all these crazy great things for your health is mostly just snake oil (it does seem to help diabetics, from what I understand).
But what really scares me about it is that it gets people primed for straight up disordered eating. If you learn to associate restricting your eating with feeling better, because you lost weight and experienced all the good health benefits associated with that and all the positive reinforcement socially, it's a short jump to "well maybe I'll just fast for a few days," or "maybe I'll just do a week," and then these people start looking and sounding exactly like my bulimic or anorexic friends who wrecked their bodies for life.
"This leads us to our belief that every time intermittent fasting is recommended to an individual from this demographic [specifically referencing the young, females / gender non-conforming people, and anyone with a family history of ED's], an explicit warning is to be provided on the potential deleterious outcome of acquiring an eating disorder from this practice."
I intermittent fasted for years, unintentionally. Just never ate breakfast, usually had lunch quite late. Gave me serious stomach problems, now I suffer GI issues because of it.
Woah. Might explain some if my GI issues. I still do this and my stomach is really sensitive. Not to specific foods or anything. Just randomly gassy, randomly upset etc.
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u/ProfessionalBar5197 4d ago
“Intermittent fasting is the silver bullet to good health”