I'm not sure intermittent fasting is really for me, but I am curious about it and some of the claims of energy levels. However, it's one of those health practices where there's a ton of discussion around the benefits, and then on closer look I realize 90% of them are talking about weight loss, which is not something I need or that interests me at all.
I find I run into this all the time. In nearly every online discussion weight loss is synonymous with health improvement - true for many people, but it makes navigating these topics in larger public spaces a minefield for someone on the lower end of what is traditionally considered a healthy range.
At the moment I just have to avoid any specific practices and stick to the basics: staying active, eating whole foods (:im-vegan:), getting enough sleep, breaks from sitting, refraining from too much alcohol, stretching, etc. Also the psychosocial side: maintaining community around me, getting enough nature, work-life balance, yada yada yada.
How do you parse this out? Can anyone speak to benefits from a practice like intermittent fasting (or anything else touted) if you're not trying to shed pounds? Does anyone else resonate with my position?
Not trying to whine as being thin comes with a lot of fucking privilege.
EDIT: I wasn't intended this post to be exclusively about intermittent fasting. I'm curious about it in particular, but I also wanted to speak to the general phenomenon that so much of the general health advice I see around is actually just weight loss advice. This is pervasive outside of discussions too - books and articles outside of strict academic work seem to conflate the two all the time because for a large portion of the audience that's really what they're after.
I hate when weight loss is equated to being healthy. At my thinnest I was being terribly overworked at a shit job, getting hardly any sleep, and eating one meal a day. My body and self felt horrible but I was getting compliments galore about my like 40 pound drop in a very short timeframe due to those conditions. I became much more healthy after taking care of myself. In that I am now what some people would consider overweight but I'm in a good place and much healthier so what does it matter.
For me being healthy is carrying weight and while it's different for everyone I think the mindset of seeing a fat person as inherently unhealthy is bullshit and also fatphobic all around :shrug-outta-hecks:
Being heavy correlates to some bad health outcomes, but so do a lot of other things, often more so than weight does. As far as I understand the obsession with weight as the be all and end all of health is almost entirely brainworms and doctors being twits.