I am indeed taking an ACE inhibitor, Captopril. I'm curious why that kind of medication would cause blood pressure surges while fasting.
I think part what might make a person react so negatively to the idea of a "fasting" diet, is that what we are doing here really isn't the kind of extreme dieting most people think of when they think of fasting, since we aren't going days without food. But out there in the world of silly/stupid/dangerous/extreme dieting, people are doing some very dumb starvation diets, and those can be very harmful, especially to anyone who has some kind of underlying, undiagnosed health problem, as many people battling obesity tend to have.
The world is also full of people with serious eating disorders who do starve themselves while drinking dangerous amounts of fluid under the name of dieting. And some of the currently popular fad diets out there are potentially very dangerous, since they encourage people to eat no more than 500 calories a day for long stretches of time which CAN be quite damaging unless those 500 calories have been very carefully chosen and designed to provide adequate protein, fat, minerals, and vitamins. Back in the 1970s a number of people died eating very low calorie liquid fasting diets which provided inadequate protein.
So someone who hasn't looked into the particulars of this particular diet might confuse it with one of those more extreme, currently popular, diets, which I do believe are dangerous, based on tales I have read on some other diet boards, where people who have eaten those starvation diets for a few months report that it can take them up to a year to get to where they recover from the damage they have done their metabolisms (and ability to lose weight and maintain that weight loss sanely.)
But alternative fasting with a few days between fast days strikes me as a far saner diet than most, and far less likely to cause problems. It doesn't carry the undertone of anorexic attitudes to whole classes of food as most other diets do. No wholesale demonizing of bread or fruit or fat or dairy or what have you. And that to me seems like it is much less likely to produce some kind of backlash in the future, as restrictive diets so often do. Or turn people into neurotics who people dread inviting to dinner because of the long list of things they refuse to eat (and make other people feel guilty about eating.)
Reading some other alternative day fasting boards that promote unrelentless alternate day fasting has made me think that too much fasting does attract people with eating disorders, and that there might be problems with that approach over a long period of time. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
) She was very impressed that I lost 14 pounds just last year when I was 72. She did not think that it would be harmful at all.
