Intermittent fasting for seniors (!)

And the unrelentingness of diet/consumer culture

I’m 41 which means I’m starting to get a lot of menopause ads.

One thing I’ve noticed about some of these ads is that marketers are trying their hardest to make menopause—the process by which a person who has previously menstruated starts to no longer menstruate—chic. They are trying to sell us on menopause as an aspirational lifestyle. Just like everything else.

See here, here, and here.

This is certainly not that. But it feels menopause ad adjacent by virtue of its toned, older models boasting conspicuously small midsections (if there’s one “promise” many of these meno-chic companies tantalize consumers with, it’s the elimination of something those in the biz refer to as “meno-belly”).

Do yourself a favor and don’t google meno-belly.

The above ad is for something called the Simple Life app, which is “Science backed. You approved.” Oops, I meant “Science backed. You approved. *” The asterisk disclaimer, located wayyyyyyy down at the bottom of the page in tiny, barely legible font, reads:

*The app is not intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of diseases.

Obviously.

Let’s go through the various intermittent fasting (or what Ragen Chastain calls “repeated short-term starvation” and what Gwyneth Paltrow calls “intuitive”) “plans” and assess.

• Are you 45-50? I’m not, but in a few years I will be, and I can look forward to “living longer,” “finding consistency,” enjoying “whole body support,” and “staying sharp” if I just don’t eat until 7pm two days a week. Sounds completely doable and completely sane. This diet is the only one given a fun title: “Eat Stop Eat” which is another way of saying “eat and eventually stop eating” except with rippling muscles and a tiger BFF.

• 50-55? “Fast for 14 hours. Eat whatever you want within 10 hours.” I guess this is less terrible but the necessarily late breakfast would make me hangry. This diet (sorry, “plan”) involves more tattoos and a smaller tiger.

• 55-60-year-olds can reap the same benefits mentioned above if they “fast for 18 hours” and then eat “whatever they want” for the next six hours. How many days a week? Unclear. But I feel like getting up at 6AM, eating nothing all day, developing hunger headaches and intense fatigue, irritability, and digestive issues throughout the day and setting my alarm to wake up at midnight to “eat whatever I want,” would be completely doable and completely sane. The good news? A significantly bigger tiger.

• Once you turn 60, Simple Life says happy birthday by allowing you to return to what seems like a fairly typical eating/not eating schedule. “Eat for 12 hours. Fast for next 12 hours.” This plan (like all the prior plans) includes incredibly perky boobs BUT ALSO a new animal. 🐺

• 65+ is the final intermittent fasting plan (unless diet culture heaven exists, in which case we can all look forward to measuring our internal worth by our body size in the afterlife too!) and the plus symbol is doing a lot of work because Simple Life doesn’t necessarily suggest 99-year-olds continue to fucking diet but it doesn’t NOT suggest that either! “Eating only during an 8 hour window.”

  So if you wake up at 6am, for example, you must finish nourishing your body by 2pm. The woman enjoying this particular plan looks just as stressed out as her younger peers probably because she’s fucking hungry for most of the afternoon and all of the evening. Every. Fucking. Day! I’m happy to see she’s accompanied by a massive grizzly bear, which must make up for the misery of unrelenting daily deprivation because according to another sweet asterisk, “45% of users on the protocol now.” If you can see your way through the god-awful prose of that sentence (?), and if you choose to believe literally anything this ad is selling or communicating about “science backed you approved” health, the fact that nearly half of the adopters of this app have been alive for over 65 years and are still actively engaged in diet culture is fucking GRIM.

Finally, I’d like to offer a shout-out to this Instagram couple, who absolutely must have gotten some sort of consulting fee from Simple Life for creative inspiration.

liverking

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