I believed it intellectually.
I believed it personally.
I practiced it.
I defended it.

And for a while, it felt clean. Controlled. Virtuous. Powerful.

But after working with hundreds of people, and after pulling myself out of the most biologically depleted state of my life following a toxic job that nearly destroyed my health, my view changed.

I understand now that you cannot really help people unless you have been in the arena yourself.

Having to bring my own body back to health after being almost dead showed me, very plainly, what actually helps a body recover and what only looks good on paper.

That’s when fasting stopped making sense to me.

Fasting is a stress signal.

A controlled one, sometimes.
A survivable one, often.
A useful contrast signal in very narrow contexts.

But it is still a stress signal.

Fasting forces fuel switching. It lowers insulin, drains glycogen, increases fatty acid availability, and activates recycling pathways.

That is real physiology.

What fasting does not do is build tissue, restore structure, or increase long-term biological capacity.

Those require funding.

This has a name in my work.

I call it Perpetual Recovery Mode.

It’s what people are in when:

They don’t feel strong again.
They don’t recover faster.
Old issues don’t resolve.
New ones keep appearing.

The body learns how to survive on less.
It does not rebuild.

Somewhere along the way, fasting stopped being framed as a tool and started being framed as a virtue.

The longer you fasted, the better.
The more hunger you tolerated, the healthier you were.
The more depleted you felt, the more “autophagy” you were supposedly earning.

Apps now gamify deprivation.

Hit 16 hours.
Now 20.
Now 36.
Now 72.

Little badges. Little fireworks. Little promises.

What they never show is what happens after.

There is no ticker for tissue repair.
No badge for fascia rehydration.
No milestone for collagen synthesis.
No score for muscle integrity.
No indicator for resilience.

Because those are slow. Quiet. Unglamorous. And not marketable.

This was the first crack in the story.

Fasting increases lipolysis. Fat is released into circulation.

That does not mean fat is removed from the body long-term.

Permanent fat loss only happens when:
• energy availability is sufficient
• structure is preserved
• metabolic demand stays high
• the body trusts that food is reliable

Fasting mobilizes fat under stress.

If the system does not feel funded afterward, that fat returns. Often faster. Often preferentially.

Because fat is cheap insurance when the body doubts the future.

Even if you know you will refeed, your body does not operate on intention.

It operates on signals.

A multi-day fast tells the system:
• intake is absent
• energy is unreliable
• repair must pause
• non-essential processes shut down

That is a famine signal by definition.

The body responds appropriately. It becomes conservative. It reduces demand. It protects what it can.

This is not pathology.
This is intelligence.

Another myth that collapsed for me was the idea that fasting selectively “cleans up bad cells” or “eats baby cancer.”

Autophagy is a recycling program triggered by scarcity.
The Nobel Prize was awarded for identifying how autophagy functions under cellular starvation, not for proving that fasting selectively eliminates cancer cells or improves long-term human health.

There is no biological rule that says:
more autophagy = more health
longer fasting = better outcomes
scarcity = longevity

Those leaps are not in the science.

As for autophagy:

It does not know what you want to keep.
It does not prioritize longevity.
It does not make ethical distinctions.

It recycles what is available.

If scarcity is brief and refeeding is robust, this can be neutral or even helpful.

If scarcity is repeated or prolonged, structural tissue becomes negotiable.

Muscle. Fascia. Connective tissue. Structural water.

Those are expensive to maintain.

They are the first to go when energy stays low.

Fasting culture talks about fuel.

It does not talk about infrastructure.

Real health is not about how well you switch fuels.
It is about how much structure you can support.

Muscle is infrastructure.
Fascia is infrastructure.
Connective tissue is infrastructure.
Bone remodeling is infrastructure.

These tissues:
• drive metabolic demand
• create resilience
• protect joints
• preserve appearance
• allow fat to be unnecessary

They do not rebuild under chronic scarcity.

When I left a toxic job that had kept my body in a prolonged stress state, I didn’t heal by fasting more.

I healed by funding repair.

By eating enough.
By restoring minerals.
By rehydrating fascia.
By loading tissue appropriately.
By letting the body exit survival mode.

That was when energy returned.
That was when strength returned.
That was when warmth, resilience, and capacity came back online.

Most fasting influencers are not talking about lifetime health.

They are isolating a method because it is simple, dramatic, and marketable.

Fasting is easy to sell.
Building structure is not.

Fasting produces fast visual changes.
Rebuilding tissue takes time.

Fasting rewards control.
Repair requires trust.

So the narrative stays narrow.

But narrow narratives produce fragile bodies.

Fasting is not a foundation for health.

It can temporarily change weight.
It cannot build capacity.

Health is not how well you tolerate deprivation.
Health is how well you rebuild after stress.

Thinness is not capacity.
Lightness is not resilience.
And suffering is not proof of optimization.

Real vitality is funded.

Without funding, the body adapts downward.