Is intermittent fasting disordered? 🍽️

Plus: What it's like to be 90% recovered

Jun 05, 2025

Hi writers!

We all want to live healthy lives. We all want to feel good in our bodies. And when we struggle to find out how to do this within ourselves, we’re left to look outward for guidance, support, and affirmation.

Enter diet culture. The ravenous consumerist marketing beast that will sell us any idea so long as we’re willing to buy it. And we usually are.

Here at Recovery Writes, I’ve been picking apart some of diet culture’s promises that usually kick off a vicious cycle of weight fluctuation and moral unease. The latest (but not newest) method under my microscope? Intermittent fasting.

white and black wall clock — Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Fasting is a centuries-old concept that involves abstaining from eating for a specified period of time. It’s a more commonly known practice in religion and among professional athletes, but it has (relatively) recently leaked into the mainstream. There are supposed benefits, but that’s of less interest to me. What’s more concerning is how similar it is to full-on restriction.

This week, I examine the similarities and differences between intermittent fasting and disordered eating in an attempt to better understand whether the practice is, in fact, an eating disorder in disguise.

Yours in recovery,

Allie 💗

Food for Thought 📖

Intermittent fasting or disordered eating? How to spot the differences

When I first heard the term intermittent fasting, I had one thought: “Wow, that sounds a lot like my behavior when I was restricting.”

I was well into recovery by then, but it brought back striking memories of waiting as long as possible to eat. I was essentially training my body to learn how to starve itself.

Then I had a terrifying thought: Is intermittent fasting just a socially acceptable, diet-culture-friendly term for restriction?

As I’ve uncovered here on Recovery Writes, a lot (and I mean a lot) of mainstream diets are simply thinly veiled versions of disordered eating.

But because we see them advertised on TV and social media, we think they can’t possibly be harmful or have any detrimental long-term physical or mental consequences. But the truth is the complete opposite.

Intermittent fasting is hardly a new phenomenon, which makes me even more curious. If it’s been around so long, why aren’t more diet culture mythbusters breaking the truth wide open?

In this post, I plan to:

better understand the reasons people engage in intermittent fasting
explore the similarities and differences between intermittent fasting and disordered eating
offers ways to recognize the signs of problematic fasting and share how to get support

What it’s like to be 90% recovered

When people ask me if I’m fully recovered, I don’t always know how to answer. While I’ve made a TON of progress in my recovery, I still don’t consider myself 100% recovered. Instead, I tell people I sit somewhere in the 90-100% range.

What does this mean?

That’s what I’m hoping to answer through social media. Click below to follow my new video series where I explain what it’s like to live in that 10% between almost recovered and full recovery.