Is Intermittent Fasting Healthy for Work Culture?

Why therapists are worried that calorie restriction is now a productivity hack

Illustration: Nan Lee

In December, on the day after Christmas, an entire segment of Good Morning America was devoted to intermittent fasting.

Pioneers of human longevity science have long embraced the eating pattern, which they sometimes refer to as caloric restriction. Ingest less food, they say, and the body shuts down a crucial pathway for regulating cellular metabolism, putting cells into repair mode. The thinking is that humans age less quickly while cells are shoring up their defenses instead of growing and dividing.

Now a diet favored by people questing to live longer was getting airtime on a popular morning show. The message was clear. Intermittent fasting is no longer just the purview of folks like Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO who outlined his strict eating regimen during a podcast interview last year, revealing he doesn’t eat until 6:30 p.m. each day. The diet has broken into the mainstream. Last year, intermittent fasting was the most-searched diet on Google.

While some fasting diets are in the service of weight loss, the way intermittent fasting is often applied in the corners of Silicon Valley — where it seems to have cultivated an early following — falls under…