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EIt's last season. these days all the cool kids quickly. Fasting diets have gained popularity in recent years, attracting a number of renowned fans. Like the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, for example, who tweeted Last month, he "played with the fast for some time". Dorsey explained that he was doing "a daily fast of 10 pm (dinner only) and that he recently did a 3 day fast." The billionaire added that the biggest thing he had noticed after being deprived of food was "how long is slowing down. The day seems so much longer when it is not interrupted by breakfast, lunch and dinner. No matter who [sic] if not have this experience? "
J & # 39; I! I have experienced the various side effects of fasting a lot because I did a lot in adolescence: it was called anorexia. And it was not fun. It destroyed my health and took me years to recover.
Of course, fasting is not synonymous with anorexia. This is not necessarily problematic. However, as Eating Disorders Specialist Allison Chase tells me, "any eating behavior that involves strict restrictions or rules is a concern" and may be a precursor to eating disorders that can be diagnosed.
The manner in which these behaviors are glorified is also of concern, particularly in Silicon Valley, where a number of senior technology leaders extol the transformative power of extreme fasting. Meanwhile, compulsive measurement behaviors associated with eating disorders including obsessive monitoring of your caloric intake and exercise, have been standardized by the fitness tracking apps and the Silicon Valley philosophy that constant self-examination leads to self-improvement.
Starving yourself and setting rigid rules and rituals based on when and how you eat is generally considered a problem when teenage girls do it. when technicians do it, they are treated very differently. Indeed, in many ways, one has the impression that Silicon Valley inadvertently modifies eating disorders.
Do you even fast, brother?
It is worth slowing down and defining "fasting". Like Dr. Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, and a sort of rock star among the fasting community, explains to me on the phone, the word "fasting" does not mean much. It's as instructive as talking about "eating," he says.
Longo notes that there are four distinct approaches to fasting, "all of which have advantages and disadvantages." The first is fasting over two days. The second method is often called a 5: 2 diet and consists of eating normally five days a week, followed by two days when you eat only about 500 calories. Then there is restricted feeding over time, where you fast 12-18 hours a day and consume all your calories in a narrow consumption window. Finally, there is the Fasting Mimicking Diet ™, original idea of Longo. This involves following a low calorie diet that follows a very specific carbohydrate / protein / carbohydrate ration for five days a month, a few times a year. The specially formulated diet costs $ 225 and, according to the website, "provides micro- and macro-nutrients scientifically studied in precise amounts and combinations that nourish you, but are not recognized as foods by your body and mimic therefore a state of fasting! "
Longo believes that fasting, in general, can be very beneficial. It compares this to a "reset" mode of your body that helps remove damaged cells and replace them with newly regenerated cells. He notes that various studies have shown that "fasting is as effective as chemotherapy" in the treatment of cancer and there is growing evidence that fasting can contribute to longevity by reducing the markers of aging such as cholesterol and blood pressure.
However, although interesting research has been conducted on the effectiveness of fasting, some studies have also shown that it can have negative effects. Longo stresses that it is always important to put safety at the forefront and warns against too extreme an attitude. For example, he states, "There is little doubt that fasting 12 to 13 hours a day is safe, but things get a bit complicated when you fast from 4 to 6 pm." Clinical studies have shown that this type of prolonged fasting can have positive effects. effects on the metabolism, but also a number of negative results, such as increased gallstones.
Longo unambiguously discourages the kind of three-day extreme fasting that Dorsey claimed to be playing with, which seems particularly popular in Silicon Valley. "We are no longer cavemen, we are not equipped to make extreme diets of fasting only with water," says Longo. "Your blood pressure can be very low. It's very dangerous.
Hacking his body
Silicon Valley's obsession with extreme fasting reflects a tendency to what is often called "biohacking"; the idea that your body is a system that can be quantified and optimized.
Geoffrey Woo, CEO of Hvmn (pronounced "human"), 30 years old, is a "human enhancement" company, is an enthusiastic supporter of biohacking and has developed a growing interest in fasting as a # 39, personal improvement. "The way I think about consumption, you take inputs into your digestive system to survive and optimize performance results," he explains. "Fasting is a deliberate deliberate pause in the consumption of everything except water. A lack of input is always a signal.
Woo and his colleagues started by doing 60-hour fasts and measuring their effects on the body in every detail. "When I do aggressive experiments, I have an implant that monitors glucose continuously for a few weeks," says Woo. "I can run quarterly blood tests for substances such as lipids and C-reactive proteins."
After experiencing fasting for a while, Woo now has a regular routine: he does a daily fast of 18 hours and a fast of 24 or 36 hours, one to two days a week. "I know it sounds complicated and complicated," he admits, "but eating three meals a day can also seem complicated if you're not used to it." Woo also recognizes that fasting can be risky. too far but says "there is an element of risk with any behavior". The current Western regime even includes an element of risk that he says "should be considered a disorderly diet". He notes that one-third of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic and that obesity rates are rising. "This is the most convincing data on what is messy or not."
Justin Rezvani, a 30-year-old technology entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, shares the same day's views. He started fasting a year ago. he had just sold his social media business for a lot of money, but was overweight and unhappy with his life. Like Woo, he took a systematic approach to changing lives. Each week, he follows a "five-day fasting protocol only with water" and uses various machines, including a glucose monitoring implant, to measure his metabolic markers. He lost 60 pounds of fasting and thinks it has improved every aspect of his life.
Innovation or anorexia 2.0?
Dr. Tiffany Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at the San Diego University's Food Disorders Center (UC San Diego), told me over the phone that it may be difficult to generalize when fasting behavior and self-monitoring begin to cross a line and become a problem. However, even though fasting diets may be suitable for some people, Brown is worried about the extent to which they are treated as a "trend" and presented in a largely positive light.
The fact that we do not all immediately describe the extreme fasting in Silicon Valley as a form of anorexia also speaks volumes about the gender dynamics around food and eating disorders. Anorexia is still very much associated with women and Brown notes that "people still have trouble recognizing that similar behavior in men is problematic". In his work with the National Association for Men with Eating Disorders, Brown met a number of men who said that their friends, family, and even doctors, did not recognize that their behavior was problematic, even though they looked malnourished.
This is not to say that women are not fasting: a recent YouGov study found that 62% of men and 60% of women say they have fasted, compared to 56% of men and 55% of women who reported fasting. 2016. However, the most virulent supporters of the fasting movement seem to be men. Silicon Valley has also developed a pseudo-intellectual vocabulary that distances it from the "feminine" connotation of the diet. The types of technology do not diet, you see, they apply "fasting protocols". They do not count calories, they quantify a range of metabolic markers with complex and expensive scientific equipment. They do not lose weight, they "optimize". Rather than focusing on weight loss, they seem more inclined to improve their physical and mental performance.
Of course, drastically reducing calories in search of a clear mind is not safer than fasting looking for a small size. You can change the image of messy eating, but you can not eliminate its dangers. Longo fears that "the increase in irrational exuberance" around the fast in Silicon Valley will become seriously out of control, especially with leading influencers like Dorsey meditating publicly on potentially dangerous fasting experiences. "It takes more responsibility," says Longo. "Or all of this will end in lawsuits."
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