Extreme Fasting: How Silicon Valley Is Rebranding Eating Disorders
The obsession with fasting overlaps with a trend for what is often termed ‘biohacking’ — the idea that your body is a system that can be quantified and optimized
By Arwa Mahdawi
Eating is so last season; these days all the cool kids fast. Fasting diets have rocketed in popularity over the last few years, garnering a number of high-profile fans. Like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for example, who tweeted last month that he had “been playing with fasting for some time”. 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?”
I have! I’ve had lots of experience with the various side effects of fasting because I did it a ton as a teenager: it was called “anorexia”. And it wasn’t fun. It wrecked my health and took me years to recover.
Fasting, of course, is not synonymous with anorexia. Nor is it necessarily problematic. However, as Dr Allison Chase, an eating disorder…
