After writing about fasting a few years ago, I had the unpleasant experience of not being able to fast. There are, as a recent book explores, different motivations for fasting. Whether for spiritual reasons or for health, fasting can yield tremendous benefits. And I have experienced both. Until it stopped working.
Having poked fun at people who claim they can’t fast (who dares to make fun?), I was ever so justly hoisted on my own petard. Granted, I still think the poking fun was warranted as there are far too many help-rejecting complainers who should have their excuses called for what they are: excuses.
But then there is the experience of being bone-tired and cold and realizing with a shock, “Forget fasting! I need a hearty stew and a hot cup of milky, golden tea!”
For a couple of years I muddled through, sometimes successfully fasting for days of atonement and sometimes finding a rhythm of intermittent fasting that ignited those blazing cognitive benefits, physical energy, and overall shine. It wasn’t until later that I found a resource I wish I’d had along this winding journey.
Through Jennifer L. Scott of the Daily Connoisseur, I discovered the work of Mindy Pelz. She seems to be a tenacious problem solver. So many women are told without qualification that “women can’t fast.” But if you, as a woman, have found fasting to be highly beneficial sometimes, how do you figure out when those times are and when to dial it back?
Few practitioners are willing to try to answer that question. Though she sometimes has a “Dr.” in front of her name, Pelz is not a medical doctor but, apparently, a chiropractor. Her book “Fast Like a Girl” attempts to address the common pitfalls of female fasting and offer strategies to make fasting as a menstruating and menopausal woman healthful and sustainable.
I fall into the camp that I don’t care if she has a doctorate in cosmetology, her tips are interesting and worthwhile, she seems to make an effort to understand the underlying hormonal science that makes fasting as a woman complex, and she is willing to try. That’s more than can be said of many “experts” and “professionals.”
It seems many of her protocols began as crowdsourced “studies.” Women in different phases of life and with different chronic conditions opted into her protocols and reported back. Her specific programs are a bit hardline, but you are, as always, free to adapt to your real life and your own body.
There is a helpful and refreshing sense of curiosity in Pelz’s project. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but I notice there are a lot of cats who die sedentary, overweight, and seemingly rather miserable. A moderate amount or curiosity about the status quo might not be such a bad thing!
After my first piece about fasting came out, I heard from a man who was clearly disappointed that he could no longer take an extended fast without running the risk of dangerously low blood sugar. My reply to him remains the same to anyone in the predicament: Let your inability to fast be its own worthy sacrifice. There’s one catch: In order to recognize what is lost when we cannot fast, we have to learn to fast when it is an option, otherwise, we’ll never know what we are missing.
Happy and healthy fasting!
