i hope this isn’t considered an editing disorder but i sometimes find myself binging on sugar! it’s so bizare as i’m a pretty good eater outside of it.
i’m wondering if anyone can tell me about the mental benefits of fasting.
🙏
Seems like you can listen to the fasting method podcast.
I am a little new to the science side of things and am confused by the fasting community. My mom does it but it just seems like another un-sustainable diet trend. Just seems wild to starve yourself but I guess there’s scientists that show your body will eat the fat and bad bacteria in your body once you get into starvation mode.
My longest fast has been 60 hours, so I don’t know how much my opinion is worth, but anyway: The immediate mental benefits (i.e. when fasting) are a sense of clarity and mental acuity.
This doesn’t happen always and there are also times when you’re slow and sluggish. With me it can be as swingy as an hour or two of very high energy followed by a slump and then again a resurgence of energy and so on.
But there are definitely periods of high energy, elation and mental acuity the likes of which I haven’t experienced at any other time in my life. I’ve read on this subreddit a couple of week ago a comment that said that for that person fasting was stronger than or could compare with Adderall.
I’ve never done Adderall so I can’t compare, but I can say that it definitely felt like a strong upper. Just overall elation, bursting with energy, clear thinking and so on. Fantastic feeling. (Again, you can and often do also feel like crap when fasting. It’s complicated.)
That’s while fasting. In general fasting can serve as a self-confidence boost and can in my opinion even act as a mild anxiolytic in the sense that you know you’ve gone and can go again for a long time without food, so you don’t sweat the little things.
It’s also very reassuring to know just how resilient and capable we are if we’re able to go without food for a couple of days. It’s a good source of self-confidence and discipline, a sense of personal achievement and perhaps even a sense of self-worth.