There are some crazy food trends out there, but perhaps the craziest thing is that people subscribe to them.

What’s important to note here is that controlling what you eat and when you eat it as a lifestyle can also be, in some circumstances, a form of eating disorder.

The latest trend is fasting. People like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have taken to social media to boast about their lack of food and the benefits of not eating, in what has been dubbed the #hungerbrag.

Over to the Guardian with a quick recap on Jack’s diet:

Dorsey explained that he does “a 22 hour fast daily (dinner only), and recently did a 3 day water fast”. The billionaire added that the biggest thing he had noticed after depriving himself of food was “how much time slows down. The day feels so much longer when not broken up by breakfast/lunch/dinner. Any one [sic] else have this experience?”

Here’s the thing – a lot of people have had this experience. It’s called anorexia, and it’s a condition that affects millions of people worldwide.

More than 70 million people, actually, who suffer from anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder.

Fasting, of course, is not synonymous with anorexia. Nor is it necessarily problematic. However, as Dr Allison Chase, an eating disorder specialist, tells me over email, “any eating behaviors that involve restriction or rigid rules is concerning” and can be a precursor to diagnosable eating disorders.

Essentially, the practice of not eating is being glamourised – especially in Silicon Valley.

A number of high-profile tech execs extol the transformative power of extreme fasting. Meanwhile the compulsive measuring behaviors associated with eating disorders, including obsessively tracking your calorie intake and exercise, have been normalized by fitness tracking apps and the Silicon Valley ethos that constant self-examination leads to self-improvement.

In other words, starving yourself and formulating rituals that determine when you can and can’t eat is seen as a problem when teenage girls do it, but when tech-bros get involved, we retweet their stories and buy a Fitbit.

But let’s hear from the experts who claim that fasting can be both good and bad, depending on how you do it. Here’s Dr Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California:

“There is very little doubt that fasting 12-13 hours a day is safe but things get a little more complicated when you fast 16-18 hours.” Clinical studies have shown this sort of extended fasting can have positive effects on metabolism but also a number of negative results, such as an increase in gallstones.

Longo unambiguously advises against the sort of extreme three-day water-only fasts that Dorsey said he was playing with, and that seem particularly popular in Silicon Valley. “We’re no longer cavemen we’re not equipped to be doing extreme water-only fasting diets,” Longo stresses. “Your blood pressure can go very low. It’s very dangerous stuff.”

The moral of the story here is that we shouldn’t be getting diet advice from the internet. If you want to try something, consult a health practitioner and make sure that you’re doing it properly.

We also need to be mindful of how we brag about things like fasting on social media. Eating disorders are a real and difficult struggle for millions of people, whose recovery won’t be aided by the normalisation of strict and potentially dangerous diet trends.

If you think that you or a loved one might be suffering from an eating disorder, help is at hand here.

[source:guardian]