Book review: fast like a girl
Fast Like a Girl focuses on empowering women to embrace fasting as a lifestyle, working on their relationship with food and health. While most fasting advice has been a one-size-fits-all approach that leaves women with more questions than answers, in this book Dr. Mindy shares strategies, specific protocols to use if you are trying to overcome a condition, fasting hacks, and tools that she has used to help hundreds of thousands of women to thrive with their fasting lifestyles.
However…
While I am a girl and interested in nutrition and health optimisation, especially as I get older, I have always been wary of fasting. Having had brain surgery then struggled to consume enough food following the effects of corticosteroids on the body’s anti-inflammation - which it thankfully does very well in brains but doesn’t restrict its action throughout your body including the inflammation producing mucus membrane of your tummy and requisite acids to digest the food you’re building your recovering body with. Added to that I feel now my son, who is nearly ten, has enabled my family to ‘fast’ for the last ten years where eating dinner around 6/7 and the breakfast 8/9 we consistently ‘fast’ 14-15hours daily?! In a nutshell, I think fasting is even more personally prescribable than Dr Mindy recommends.
There is growing evidence in support of intermittent fasting. However, high quality scientific evidence is limited: much that shows benefit is from rat and other animal studies – these aren’t always reliably reproduced in humans. Many of the human studies are quite small, and often done with the express purpose to addressing specific health challenges. Some longer, large, properly controlled studies have failed to show the benefits sought after with the diet. In the human trials that do show benefit, the fasting is supervised medically, with regular blood work and check-ins.
Unfortunately it’s the last section of the book provides a “30 day fasting reset”, which makes me cringe most because it’s predictable: I understand how appealing it can be for women to believe that a 30-day fasting reset followed by a lifetime of following a cycle of starving and eating with limitations will change their lives and waistlines, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to think critically about the most important thing here, which is your individual circumstances.
Having seen so many female clients lives change after they stopped starving themselves, I find fasting psychologically complicated. It leaves common themes alongside deprivation like sabotage, guilt and shame open slather. I’m not sure it empowers women to give them more restrictive diets? Though, while I don’t ever recommend these types of self-healing diets, I do appreciate the author’s narrowing her diet’s audience to women, to cycles and away from a one size fits all solution. Even should more data become available where fasting is concerned, I would still stress that the best data is the data you have on yourself.
Fasting is probably best described as a tool. Starving yourself every single day isn't the smartest thing to do. A nutritious, hearty breakfast early in the day kickstarts my metabolism even if only from the sit down (& delicacy!) we have as a family every day at the moment (I’m so grateful!). It’s all too overwhelming to take it all on! I think the best shot you have is to have a sense of what’s going on with you. Control what you can control. How do you feel? Keep collecting data on you daily and choose to change as needed. It’s a lot of work but you’ve your whole life to do it.
