My intent with the article is to show off similarities to how health fads are now being peddeled towards men even though women have been going through similar things and have gotten more slack for it. I've done enough research to point out how intermittent fasting is good for you in certain circumstances as well. Overall I linked to 18 other articles (17, if you want to exclude one linking to another article I put together) so I didn't just pick the top 5 links in a google search to show the benefits, problems, and people's responses to these things.
As for people not needing to eat as much as they do, that has been the norm for decades. It's not anything new. It's more like over the years portion sizes have gradually increased in size and people don't notice it. Instead, people shrugged it off and continued eating more even though corporations pushed the idea of eating excessively subtley.
It's similar to things now where packaging of products - and their amount inside - has shrunk over the years. People don't talk about it much because we've been conditioned over the years in various ways.
As for breakfast, that isn't a fad either. Breakfast by definition is "the first meal you have of the day." When you have it is up to you, but people will call it something else if they don't have it in the morning.
And that's really the point of the article: repackaging particular tropes to make it sound more appealing to people. In this case interment fasting (IMF) isn't anything new but suddenly it feels like because instead of a woman talking about how she lost 50 pounds, it's a guy who is saying he has found mental clarity and has more focus. And that does make a big difference if you know anything about how men and women are treated these days on a societal level.
And of course people are going to have success with these fads. I know of a diet where you eat nothing but fruit every day and there have been people who have gotten a lot of success from that. Then you also have people who were so close to getting scurvy because they were not putting in enough protein into their bodies. But just because it works for a bunch of people doesn't mean every single person in the world should start jumping on this. Our bodies are very different and that's what a lot of fads don't account for. They just assume every fad is ideal for everyone when it's not.
