Diet culture has spent years making extreme restriction sound like discipline. A young woman in China just ended up in the hospital because of it.
Qingqing, a pseudonym used by Chinese media, reportedly developed acute pancreatitis after following an extreme weekly diet cycle for several months. Standing 5’1″ and weighing 121 pounds, she decided she needed to lose weight and designed her own plan to do it. Her routine involved restricting herself to 800 calories on weekdays, eating small amounts of boiled vegetables, chicken breast, and fruit, then spending Sundays eating freely, hotpot, fried chicken, spicy noodles, milk tea, whatever she wanted.
The weight came off very quickly, a little too quickly. She reportedly lost 16.5 pounds in a single month. Then one Sunday, after a large bucket of fried chicken at noon and two packs of spicy noodles that evening, she began experiencing pain in her stomach, waist, and back. When the vomiting started, she was taken to The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, where she was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, per Oddity Central.
Woman Hospitalized With Acute Pancreatitis After Following a Weekly ‘Cheat Day’ Diet
Doctors at the hospital explained what happened physiologically. Prolonged extreme restriction pushed Qingqing’s pancreas into a kind of low-activity standby state. When Sunday arrived, and large quantities of fatty, rich food came in all at once, the pancreas couldn’t keep up with the demand for digestive enzymes. Do that enough weeks in a row, and the organ stops tolerating it.
“In an attempt to slim down, many people eat only one meal a day, believing they could become thinner,” a doctor at the hospital said. “However, this method would easily drive the pancreas to the brink of collapse.”
Pancreatitis doesn’t come on gently. Severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting are par for the course, and complicated cases can turn life-threatening. Qingqing’s doctors reportedly traced her diagnosis back to the months her body had spent absorbing the same punishing weekly cycle.
The restrict-then-binge cycle is more medically dangerous than most people realize, and it’s also one of the more common patterns associated with disordered eating. If any of this sounds familiar on a personal level, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders operates a helpline at 866-662-1235 with access to trained clinicians.
Cheat days aren’t inherently dangerous. But when the other six days involve near-starvation, the body eventually sends a bill.
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