A 456 pound 27 year’s old man in Scotland fasted for 382 days. He consumed only water and vitamin supplements. He lost 276 pounds and completed the fast with no health-threatening effects. Some will say that this man was in “starvation mode” this entire time.

The majority of people don’t know the difference between starvation and fasting. Starvation only accrues when you ran out of stored body fat to tap into as energy. Whereas being in a fasting state means there is no digestive process occurring in your body, and you are burning your stored fat for energy.

We all know fasting is a religious practice. In fact, as a religious person myself, I was taken aback when I learned that non-religious people were practicing fasting but only for its health benefit. After some research on the topic, I realized that there were many communities online that practiced fasting for health-related reasons. One of these communities is named after the community leader Dr. Mindy Pelz which is the community I will be talking about in this paper.

Dr. Mindy Plez is a nutritionist and the community gatekeeper. She has many online platforms such as Facebook, twitter, and Instagram, but her main online platform is YouTube. I learned about this community through her YouTube channels.

Dr. Mindy has been a nutritionist for the last twenty years. She had the opportunity to work with many Silicon Valley corporations, Olympic athletes, academic awards, winning actors, and families. Her passion for “healthy life style”  grew when she succeeded in curing herself of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) at the age of nineteen years old by fasting and maintaining a good diet. She started her YouTube channel in 2013, and since then, she gains 100 thousand subscribers. She posts videos every two days, and she is also very active in her Facebook and twitter accounts. Her goal, she stated on her Facebook page, is ” to give you cutting edge, science-based, effective and simple to use information that will keep you and your family healthy”(dr.Mindy). She focuses on teaching her followers and patients what they need to reset their health and understand the cause of their problem.

Almost every person in Dr. Mindy community suffers from conditions such as weight loss resistance, hormonal imbalance, insomnia, depression, or anxiety. I personally came to this community YouTube channel because I wanted to lose some weight. Most of what dr. Mindy teaches her followers or patient is fasting; the different type of fasting and their benefits on the body. In her YouTube videos, she will usually take a problem that most of us in the community are facing for example weight loss, and teach us what type of fasting we need to do, how long it has to be and, what we are allowed to digest during the fast. She will then proceed by explaining the science behind her teachings.

After some research, I found numerous news articles and research papers, glorifying fasting, and its health benefits. In one of these articles that I found called “Intermittent Fasting: Is it Right for You?”, the author explains why fasting (intermittent fasting in this case) is good for weight loss. The author stated, “Insulin levels drop when a person is not consuming food. During a period of fasting, decreasing insulin levels cause cells to release stored glucose as energy, also known as fat. Repeating this process regularly, as with intermittent fasting, leads to weight loss” (Gleeson2019).

Since I join this community, I came to understand that I did not need to only fast when my church was doing the monthly group fasting. I could fast on my own or join the group fasting Dr. Mindy organize every month. I could also if I wanted to, do a long fast to ask something to God. This way, I could kill two birds with one stone. This is one of the reasons I love fasting so much. Now, I do intermittent fasting regularly.

During my field observation, I learned many details about the community I did not realize in my one year being with them. All the community members, including Dr. Mindy, only talks about healthy dieting and fasting, they never talk about off-topic issue. You could say this was one of the community rules; we are not allowed to talk about anything other than fasting or dieting. I also observed that whenever someone posts a question on Dr. Mindy Facebook page, she will always answer that question in her next video. She usually posts her YouTube video on her other social media pages. Her videos are, on average, fifteen minutes long.

The comments section of her YouTube channels is always full of essays. The people that watch Dr. Mindy videos always write long comments summarizing the video and expanding on some points she did not talk about in her video.

Another observation I made was the fact that there are almost no comment chains (people replying to other people’s comments) in her entire YouTube channel.  I can count in both hands the number of chain comments I came across while exploring her YouTube channel. The longest I saw was a comment that had five replies, and one of those replies was Dr. Mindy. Dr. Mindy seems to love reading and liking comments on her videos. I also realize that the number of dislikes on her videos is extremely low. In fact, I found more than 5 of Dr. Mindy videos with more than three hundred like and zero dislike. The videos were all at least six months old and had more than seven thousand views on them. This shows just how her followers appreciate Dr. Mindy.  I too, respect Dr. Mindy because she always gives us useful and relevant information, which are always supported by research. She also is very active in the community.

I also concluded from my observations of all the platforms the community was using (Facebook, twitter, and Instagram) that most of the community members are middle-aged men and women. I am probably one of the youngest people in the community. I did not observe any in-group language,  but  after watching more than half of Dr. Mindy’s videos, I realized that she always started her videos by saying, ” Ok Dr. Mindy here…”

I think the reason people follow Dr. Mindy’s “fasting lifestyle” is because they want a solution to their problems. The diseases and insecurity (skin problem or overweight) that comes with living in a society like ours where everything, including the food you consume, is dangerous. I think most of the health issues Americans are facing today, and this also includes Dr. Mindy community, come from the consummation and easy access to fast- process food.  I believe that anyone that can do fast should fast. They don’t have to do it for religious reasons or join a community. They can have a regular schedule for eating and stick to it in order to give the body time to digest food and repair its cells. It’s incredible how much the human body can repair itself when it is not busy digesting food. Dr. Mindy always says that it never too late to reset your health, and i totally agree, and there is no better way than fasting.

 

 

 

Citation

Gleeson, J. R. (2019, July 29). Intermittent Fasting: Is it Right for You? Retrieved from https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/intermittent-fasting-it-right-for-you.

Dr.MindyPelz.(n.d.).Retrievedfrom https://www.facebook.com/pg/drmindypelz/about/?ref=page_internal.