Intermittent Fasting for GERD and Gut Health - My Hindsight View

This post is not intended to provide medical advice. This is just a recounting of my own experiences. Always speak with a medical professional before making choices about your personal health.

If you are interested in learning more about intuitive eating, disordered eating, and food allergy/celiac disease, you may want to check out this episode of The Itch Podcast where the subject is discussed in detail by a registered dietician and a medical doctor.

If you like this post, you may also like: GERD, Brain Fog, and Fatigue - How I Made it Through this Frustrating Journey

A few months ago I deleted one of my most popular posts, “How I Fell Into Intermittent Fasting”, knowing that it was a major source of online traffic and Google search clicks for my blog. But as I read through the post, written in 2018, I couldn’t help but notice that it reeked of disordered and judgemental eating patterns. At the time I wrote it, I didn’t even realize.

My struggle with GERD impacted my life

It’s sometimes challenging for me to look back on my content from late 2018 because it was a difficult time for me. I had left my job and was feeling so much guilt about the fact that my new business wasn’t earning money. I had decided to end some personal relationships and was dealing with that drama. My mental health was in a fragile state. Among my issues was acid reflux and GERD, an unpleasant and often scary condition that caused me to wake up choking in the night. Sleeping was no longer something to look forward to; it was a source of stress.

My eating became even more restricted beyond my food allergies because I had to consider acid reflux too. This required avoidance of foods that triggered my reflux, including coffee, cocoa, mint, bell peppers, hot peppers, tomato, lemon, rice, vinegar, ginger, coffee, alcohol, and more. It made socializing or eating with my family very difficult. I started intermittent fasting because I read that a tactic to manage GERD was to finish eating 3 hours before going to sleep, staying in an upright position until bedtime, and then sleeping on a wedge. I’m a very diligent person so I took these rules very seriously, and it did help me manage my symptoms in a significant way. My body needed more time to process food, and allowing a minimum 3 hour window allowed it the time it needed.

Why I started intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting took this diet to a whole new level.

But note that I was at a low and vulnerable point when I learned about this diet plan. I was impressionable and at the point of trying anything to feel better.

Intermittent fasting had become very popular on social media, and advertised as a health solution rather than a “diet”. I knew people who were doing it and claimed it made them feel so great. I started out with a 12 hour fast, meaning I stopped eating at 7 pm and resumed at 7 am the following day. This amount of time felt really good. It was enough time for my body to process my dinner, I was going to bed earlier, and I felt energized. I wasn’t starving myself, just augmenting the times at which I ate.

When I shared this with others or on social media, I was told that that’s “not a real fast”. Or that a “real fast” has to be at least 18 hours, that I couldn’t call this intermittent fasting. There was a lot of conversation online about “working up to a longer fast”, and even bragging from people who could fast for up to 20 hours a day. There are some fanatical fasters out there on the internet. Instead of ignoring this bullshit, I chose to work up to a longer fast.

Is intermittent fasting a fad diet?

This is the point at which an eating habit for the purpose of health became an unhealthy fad diet.

I was eager to integrate my trigger foods back into my diet for the sake of nutrition and variety, and intermittent fasting seemed to be working well enough for me that my body could handle the slow reintegration.I was challenging myself to stop eating earlier, to stop snacking throughout the day, to reduce “nasty foods” in my diet (who really decides what makes food nasty, anyway?). Sure, my GERD continued to improve, but it had improved at a 12 hour fast. I didn’t need to extend it beyond that because it was offering no additional health benefit. Every extra hour of hunger was just that - an extra hour of needless hunger.

I have dealt with disordered eating issues related to my food allergies since I was a teen., and I could feel myself tipping back into those old, well worn grooves. It felt like a sense of control. This was of course a false sense of control.

Then I started receiving compliments on my appearance. With disordered eating, the most severe moments do not always correlate with weight loss, but in this case it did. I’m a petite person, and even a fluctuation of 5 pounds plus or minus tends to garner comments from others because it is noticeable on my frame.

People told me I looked so good, that I had thinned down, that I was glowing. Again, my original eating plan was allowing me to sleep without getting GERD, which meant I was rested, and therefore more energized, etc. etc. My eczema was healing because I was getting enough sleep. So that was starting a chain reaction of good things. But the added hours of fasting did not do anything to enhance this cycle. It was just more time spent feeling hungry and depriving my body of what it wanted.

Realization about my obsession with fasting

I don’t want to go into any more detail about this except to say that eventually I realized the bullshit. I did not like that I was falling back into old patterns. I could tell I was on the wrong path. I didn’t vocalize it, but I quietly started scaling back on my fasts, stopped talking about fasting, and stopped judging myself for eating anything “nasty”. I also stopped referring to foods as nasty.

In my original post, I was so focused on how it was the intermittent fasting that made me look and feel better, and the added bonus was that I “lost the bloat and excess weight”. Who cares if I lost a few pounds? It literally means nothing at all. I should have been focused on how allowing my body time to process food was beneficial to managing my symptoms. Being patient with myself and listening to my body was the most effective step.

The old post was read by thousands of people over the last two years. Some critics argue that when content creators remove posts or videos from their past, or that they have changed their minds about, it is a move towards inauthenticity.

As a blogger with a readership, I am often faced with choices. Do I keep up this high performing post that people seem to love? That I get a lot of questions about? That seems to be fueling conversation? But what if it’s harmful? Is it harmful? Is it actually helping anyone? Ultimately, I chose to take it down because it was not helping anyone, not even me.

If you read that post, I hope you read this one too.

Looking for more great content about life with food allergy? Watch my video where I make and review recipes from 5 other food allergy bloggers!