A reader asks if she needs to starve to lose weight. She is considering intermittent fasting but says the word “fasting” scares her.
While it is notoriously difficult to navigate the plethora of myths, fads and half-truths that plague the so-called wellness industry, one thing is not in dispute: if you don’t eat for long enough, you will lose weight.
And it is no laughing matter. It is the first principle of eating disorders. It is a dangerous truth captured superbly in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, in which Emily Blunt’s character proudly proclaims when explaining how she maintains her shape, “Well, I’m on this new diet. It’s very effective. I don’t eat anything and when I feel like I’m about to faint I eat a cube of cheese.” She follows this up by stating, “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.”
A woman I know, as batty as the Mad Hatter, if you ask me, recently told everyone she knew — including yours truly — not to contact her as she was fasting for divine intervention on whether or not to divorce her husband of six months. Now, there’s nothing wrong with faith, except that she broke her fast with a spontaneous weekend away with him, filling him with hope and the glow of renewed vows, only to leave him again two weeks later.
Genuine fasting, as we all know, has been practised for thousands of years across cultures and religions. People have fasted since antiquity for several reasons, including spiritual purification, mourning, atonement, discipline and even, by some, as a therapeutic tool for health.
Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, is purported to leverage the body’s natural shifts between fasted and fed states to promote fat loss, improve insulin sensitivity and support cellular repair processes. It would not be a stretch to link its popularity to the trend to look back to ancient ways of doing things, as if ancient humans were healthier and lived longer. Ever seen “paleo” show up in your various social media feeds?
To be fair, a lack of hygiene, no medicine, dangerous environments, famine and predators are the reasons prehistoric humans lived far shorter lives. And so the rationale is more about trying to mimic the diet and eating style that was probably fundamental to our evolution.
With this lens, intermittent fasting aims to enhance metabolic health, reduce inflammation and control weight without an obsession on counting calories. There are various types of intermittent fasting.
If, for example, you sleep eight hours, stop eating four hours before you go to bed and wait four hours after waking to eat again, you have completed one day on the 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol.
You have time-restricted eating windows, such as the 16:8 method, in which you fast for 16 hours and eat only in an eight-hour window (the most common type of intermittent fasting), alternate-day fasting (which I would never try) and some people even do a 5:2 diet, in which five days are normal, but for two non-consecutive days in the week they radically reduce calories.
I’ve been intermittent fasting since I left home for university. However, this is not because I am trying to lose weight. At university I was too lazy to wake up in time for breakfast and this habit continued into my adult life. I genuinely don’t enjoy eating early unless it is on a Sunday and I’ve gone on a breakfast run. Anyone who rides a bike will understand why you want to be on the roads before the careless, reckless masses start using the roads.
If, for example, you sleep eight hours, stop eating four hours before you go to bed and wait four hours after waking to eat again, you have completed one day on the 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol. Many people swear by it, arguing that it is the easiest way to manage total calories over an extended period. It works for me.
However, intermittent fasting is not for everyone, and despite the hype, a Cochrane review of 22 trials involving nearly 2,000 adults published in February found intermittent fasting yields little to no difference in weight loss compared with conventional dietary advice.
Once again we land on the only truth of sustainable weight loss: your lifestyle and hormonal environment matter far more than any “special diet”.
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