The Wrong Reasons To Fast

David Trammel's picture

The habit of not eating for a period of time, "fasting" has been around probably since there we humans who understood that they had a choice when to eat. Sure, going without food historically has been more about not having food than voluntary abstinence but still there has developed a myth of benefits of choosing not to eat. Be it mental clarity or religious piety, you can add the idea that intermittently fasting can help your health and cut down on your weight. The science as to the benefits isn't as large as many devotees would have you believe but still there is some data that suggests fasting is in fact healthy.

Fasting diets are going mainstream — ahead of the science. Here’s why.

So while we all might benefit from skipping a meal or two, leave it to Capitalism and Silicon Valley to find the wrong reasons to get forgo a meal.

What Billionaires’ Fasting Diets Mean for the Rest of Us

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t eat for 22 hours of the day, and sometimes not at all. Over the weekend he tweeted that he’d been “playing with fasting for some time,” regularly eating all of his daily calories at dinner and occasionally going water-only for days on end. In many cases, severe and arbitrary food restriction might be called an eating disorder. And while researchers are hopeful that some types of fasts may be beneficial to people’s health, plenty of tech plutocrats have embraced extreme forms of the practice as a productivity hack.

There has been growing a real concern that Corporate America is using their increasing surveillance of their work force, not just on the job but into their private lives as well as a way to increase their profit margin. Wellness programs, both voluntarily and mandated run the risk of setting the wrong agenda, one that maximizes the benefit to the Corporation over the health of its workers.

More and more as we head into the Long Descent, Green Wizards will need to learn ways to take back control of their lives as well as the ability to understand just who benefits from a policy or a program. and how to set boundaries that protect themselves.