Why I Quit Fasting
As I relaunch my website in early March of 2023, it’s been just over 5 years since I first gave birth to becomingfullyhuman.ca. And what a five years it has been. Coming back to redesign my site has been a walk down memory lane, since all my articles have had to be re-transcribed over to the new site. Scanning my old articles has been a trip; some of them so deeply wise, and yet the kind of wisdom I had yet to properly embody at the time.
Other articles offer a snapshot of where I was at, and no longer reflect the totality of my current truth. Isn’t that part of what terrifies us most about immortalising our thoughts into words or audio— that we’ll one day have to face that version of us, and how outdated our thoughts were back then?
I’ve changed over the past five years, I’ve changed a lot. My core value for truth remains, but more than ever I see that a devotion to truth is a devotion to the cycles of death and rebirth that come from constantly questioning and evolving. As I launch my website today, I thought there would be no better first-article-back than why I no longer fast. Full circle for me, since my website was born in 2018 as a result of a water fast. It was my very first article, and I’ll be the first to say that fasting played a very profound and necessary role in my life. But alas, no longer does.
What I’ve come to realise is that those who are healthy enough to fast, typically don’t. This is one of life’s infinite paradoxes, but it’s really so perfect in its irony.
Although I touched on it during my initial articles on fasting, I don’t think I realised that I was one of the people who probably shouldn’t be fasting. Although I did have a rather solid foundation of “health” according to the mainstream definition of it (i.e. no illness), the deeper truth is that I was not solidly enough embodied to really honour myself fully. I don’t think that I loved myself enough to make a conscious choice if fasting was serving me or not.
It was too easy at the time to focus on all the booming “science” about autophagy or the mental challenge of going without food for multiple days. In many ways, fasting at the time was an ego-trip rooted in a deep seated desire to lose a few pounds of body fat. Was it an eating disorder? No, I wouldn’t say so. But it’s the subtle dissociation I had from my body that made it impossible for me to truly be fasting from a fully empowered place.
I think that’s something one can only really see in hindsight. The more “work” we do on ourselves to overcome the major challenges we come to this human life to face, the more subtle the work becomes. You might look at the trajectory of someone who has a really bad eating disorder, who overcomes the binging and purging, and say “wow, you did it! you’re healed!”; but the reality is that simply exiting the worst part of that pattern isn’t where the work stops. The ways in which our beliefs permeate all our actions, words, and thoughts become subtler and subtler, to the point where we can in hindsight see so clearly that something that felt empowered at the time, was actually just a result of dissociative behaviour.
Now I never had any formal “eating disorders”, but I definitely had distorted eating in my younger years. From calorie-counting, over-exercising, juice fasts, cheat days, and all the rest: food was something I didn’t feel truly comfortable with, for a very long time. I had no genuine grasp on cravings, portions, or what was serving me or not. For a long time, food had a pretty big grip on me, and although I never had enough of a problem to address it directly, my relationship with food and my body changed tremendously over the years.
This change was born out of various dark nights of the soul, navigating the depths of my shadow, relationship wounds, and really for a few years examining how I show up in the world, and in partnership. Who I was attracting, what I was attracted to, and the space between how I showed up in the words vs. my values, wants and needs. As I came home to myself, to my body, to my femininity, as I healed the wounds passed down through generations, everything changed. I began to see fasting for what I truly was: an attempt to control the uncontrollable.
Although I didn’t see it at the time, I was striving to love myself fully and be loved, by being this thing (be it “someone who fasts” or “someone with a loveable body”), a thing that was never going to yield my desired subconscious goal, since self-love can never be born out of deprivation.
The Delusion of Appropriateness
Working with Neurotraining as a modality also radically shifted my take on fasting. Through muscle checking, a practitioner can test how much time is appropriate to fast, a number that is heavily based on adrenal health. Fasting is stressful, this is something I touched on many years ago; but what I missed was that we are rarely (if ever) capable of truly examining how stressed we are. Stress is mental, physical, and emotional; it is the intersection of so many things beyond our logical mind that it is quite literally impossible to know how appropriate (or not) fasting is to our internal ecosystem.
Even when we’re feeling good, it’s unclear how much reserve energy exists internally. We may feel good, but how much adrenal reserve do we have to honestly fast for multiple days? When I first got my “appropriateness” to fast check for fasting was late 2019, and I got a whopping 14 hours. It was only appropriate for me to fast fourteen hours within the 24-hour clock. That means I couldn’t even afford the typical intermittent fasting window.
The credit card analogy is really useful here. Your debit card is your excess energy. Spending that, is generally OK. Your adrenals are like a credit card. When you tap into them, you’re spending money (energy) you don’t have. Although it’s fine to ebb and flow into adrenal energy sometimes, it’s never a good idea long term. You may still feel good even when you're using adrenal (backup) energy, but the problem is that without kinesiology (Neurotraining), you don’t actually know what your credit limit is. Some people are so dissociated from their bodies that they belief to have a 10 million dollar credit limit, on a $30,000 yearly income. That sure as heck won’t end well. Your income, in this analogy, is all the inputs. The rest, the nutrition, the quality of sleep, how much earthing you get, how much sunshine and time in nature you get. Most people are tapping their proverbial adrenal card all day long, and relying on artificial energy hits from caffeine, cold plunging, intense exercise, and sugar, to feel good.
Effectiveness as a Solution
The other big part here, is the effectiveness of fasting to the solution we’re seeking. Actually reaping the benefit of this concept will require a dramatic amount of curiosity into your intention, goals, values, and your fears.
If you’re applying fasting as a solution to your goal, first you have to know your goal.
Why do you want to fast? Get really clear here. Is it for longevity? To lose weight? In both these examples, ask yourself why? Why do you want to live long? Why do you want to be thinner? Unravelling the “why” behind our desires can help us address the deeper goals, as well as the ways in which fears typically drive the bus.
I’ll flesh out some common possibilities for both examples.
I want to live a long time might be rooted in: fear of death or feeling unfulfilled in life and needing more time to find purpose.
I want to lose weight might be rooted in: I am unlovable in my current body and will find a partner more easily once I am thinner or I hate myself and will love myself when I have less body fat.
In all the examples above, fasting is not actually an optimal solution to solve fear-driven goals. You may want to lose weight and you may want to live a long time, but without addressing the underlying fears, they will push you to extreme’s. When fears drive our choices we’re operating from fight-or-flight and we cannot make conscious choices. We lean into quick-fixes for problems that do not have quick solutions.
If you gained weight over a long period of time, why? What’s your relationship to food like? Was food a coping mechanim? Did it help you feel safe? How many times have you yo-yo’d in weight thinking “I’ll just deprive myself this once and keep it off for good”? How many times do you look back on past photos when you weren’t happy in your body only to realise years later that you looked great back then? The intricacies of our fears, projections, and mind-stories runs so deep. Quick fixes, and never sustainable because they don’t address you as a whole person.
Although scientists have linked fasting to autophaghy, extremes are never the answer. Health is built on the foundation of micro-daily decisions, and they are not exclusive to physical health. And perhaps more importantly, what is health to you? Does living a long time matter if you’re fundamentally chaotic inside and don’t love yourself? Loving yourself is deep work, it takes time. Finding inner peace is a journey within that has nothing to do with how long you live or how thin you are. Health is so multidimensional, and in my experience it is never ever found in extremes.
Fasting as a Woman in her Fertile Years
When I did my 14 day water-only fast in 2018, I didn’t bleed the following month. I can still feel the sadness of that viscerally to this day. That I put so much stress on my body that it didn’t feel safe enough to ovulate the following month. As a woman in her fertile years, my period is such a sign of health. Since reproduction is such a core part of keeping the species alive, being fertile is a fundamental biological marker of health. To impose so much stress on my body that it pressed pause on life’s most important function for survival is the red flags of all red flags.
Cultivating a balanced and intuitive relationship with food, exercise, and rest has been life changing. Ebbing through periods of high activity during my follicular phase and resting increasingly more through my late luteal and into my menstrual phase serves my body. I can see so clearly that fasting is a form of stress that just doesn’t fit into my life as a woman in her reproductive years. This is actually big part of why I stepped away from extended fasting— that as a woman in my reproductive years, the dance of “stress” is infinitely more important to understand and honour.
Most women are so chronically stressed out that I would suggest even the follicular phase is unsuited for higher levels of stress. In this patriarchal world, we are so driven by success and comparison that we often lose track of our deepest wants, needs, and desires. We’re blinded by the illusion that a smaller waist or a promotion at work will bring us happiness, so we work ourselves to the bone, put up walls around our guarded heart, and try to deprive ourselves of the nutrients we need for vibrant vitality.
Whether you’re a man or a woman, understand that all stress is stress. Is the stress of fasting worth the reward? What do you really seek at the end of a fast, and is it the best investment of your time and energy?
Will I Ever Fast Again?
Last I checked in with a Neurotrainer, I was cleared for 36 hours of fasting, every other week. I did a 36 hour fast once about 8 months ago, but as the two weeks passed and I was “due” to fast again, I couldn’t be bothered. It really dawned on me that fasting simply isn’t really linked to the depths of any of my goals anymore. The more I know myself, the more I connect with and heal the underlying fears that were driving me to fast in the past, the less appealing fasting becomes.
Back to being a woman in her fertile years, there’s only a small window per month that is suited for larger amounts of stress. Despite doing my 14-day water fast in that window, I still put my body into such a state of stress that it didn’t ovulate the next month. There are so many things I enjoy doing that induce stress (like exercise and sauna) that I personally don’t see how fasting fits into this paradigm considering my goals.
I can’t say for sure if I’ll ever fast again. I don’t actually have anything fundamentally against fasting— just like anything it’s less about the what, and more about the why. What I do know is that since coming home to my body, finding love for myself, and cultivating a genuinely healthy, balanced, and intuitive relationship with food and movement… the appeal to fast, has vanished.
What do you think? How has your relationship to fasting and your body evolved over time? Where might you be putting emphasis on the wrong (or misguided) goals? Does this article trigger you? Inspire you? Take it away in the comments section.
Ps. It’s good to be back. With the re-birth of this website, I’m as excited as ever to get back on the keyboard and start writing in my own voice again. The past five years has taken me around the world, and writing for some of the most inspiring people and brands on the planet, but at the end of the day, Becoming Fully Human is where my voice feels safest and most purposeful.
