Making the decision to re-build your relationship with food, your body and movement can be very daunting. Doing what is familiar, even if it doesn’t bring positive results, is still sometimes less daunting than trying something new. It is made even more difficult when there are contradictory claims on what you need to be doing and you don’t know who to believe.

Intermittent fasting is the concept of eating in specific, restrictive windows. There are various methods. There are some patterns where you have eating windows for several hours in a day or or limit energy intake for certain days of the week. There are also some religions which have periods where they avoid eating in relation to the Sun, like Ramadan.

Putting it simply, but reducing the time that a person can eat/capping how much a person can eat in certain days, it’s just another method to limiting energy intake. The main study aim of intermittent fasting is to see if it results in weight loss. There haven’t been many large studies of good quality. Unsurprisingly, there is some promise for short-term weight loss results (on average these studies run for 12 weeks) due to the restriction in energy intake. However, there is a lack of good quality evidence supporting it’s use for long-term weight loss or weight maintenance. There is also not enough research looking into if intermittent fasting can be potentially harmful to a person’s eating relationship.

The concept of limiting a person’s daily energy intake far below their BMR, I find, cruel. It’s starving the body of food for it’s normal, biological requirements. Not fuelling the body adequately can cause negative impact on a person’s mood stability, concentration, malnutrition of macro and micronutrients, hair thinning/loss, brittle nails, GI symptoms and more. There are natural periods when we do not eat - like when we sleep. During sleep, the body does lots of repair in the body which is why it’s important to get adequate hours of good quality, uninterrupted sleep. When we interrupt sleep with eating, there is supporting evidence that it can negatively impact the circadian rhythm (our biological clock) and have negative impacts on our body. So long-term midnight snacking wouldn’t be recommended. However, not eating enough throughout the day can cause disturbances in sleep. Since intermittent fasting leads to limited intake of food, it can have negative impacts on sleep for some people. Hunger can make it harder to fall asleep, as well as stay asleep.

Intermitted fasting can cause a worsened relationship with food by encouraging restriction and strict food rules, and a worsened relationship with a person’s body as they’re actively ignoring signals of hunger and fullness Due to the restricted eating time, a person ignores when they’re hungry and may feel they need to eat past comfortable fullness because they won’t be able to eat soon during eating hours. Intermittent fasting is forcing the person to not listen to their internal hunger cues, and encourages the concept of eating hours can cause binging behaviours for some people.

Let me make this clear, re-building your relationship with food, your body and movement cannot happen if you ignore your body and restrict yourself. Intermittent fasting is another form of dieting, where it imposes restriction, food rules and worsens the gap between a person and their body.

When I worked with people who did intermittent fasting, they often claimed that after 1-2 weeks they adjust to this pattern of feeding/restricting and no longer feel hungry. To them, they found it as a positive, whereas to me it, it was very concerning. The consistency in under eating causes the body to stop hunger signals because…well there’s no point anymore! Then this creates an even bigger struggle for the person to feed intuitively and widens the gap between the person and their body.

I hope this has helped paint a picture of what intermittent fasting is. If you are someone struggling with food, body image and movement, I strongly suggest seeking support. I offer 1-2-1 Consultations and we can work on repairing your relationships. I also guide clients through Intuitive Eating and if you have any questions regarding this, I’m happy to answer them. Feel free to leave a comment or book a 15 minute Discovery Call with me to start your journey.