You definitely want to have a check-up before doing this, you often don't know what you don't know.
Case in point: I've done IF on and off for awhile and a mate of mine was interested in trying it. He used to say that one thing that put him off was that he'd get cranky and a little shaky if he didn't eat for awhile. Something you could mistakenly arm-chair away as 'most likely just anxiety about being hungry'.
So he did IF for a bit and it was generally fine. He didn't do it really long-term.
So around a year after that he starts having visual problems. Well, turns out he's a type-1 diabetic and he'd been pre-diabetic for most of his life without realizing it. Relatively late-onset for the condition, but a lot made sense after that diagnosis.
Is this an argument against IF, or for getting a checkup? I'm not sure how IF would have contributed to diabetes, nor how not doing IF would have prevented it. The core issue here seems to be not getting a checkup and/or not enough information in general, the IF seems irrelevant.
Yeah I wasn't terribly clear :) My argument is just FOR getting a check-up, not against doing IF. Especially if you're practising it long-term, you want to make sure that it isn't something that's uniquely harmful to you.
To go back to the original comment, it's probably less about 'talking' to your doctor literally; sure there's nothing they can say about IF that you can't find out yourself, but they can get you blood tests and perform the right physical tests to make sure you're suitably healthy to do IF correctly without harming yourself.
Doing some Googling, I realise I've probably got the description wrong, especially the timeline.
I think the idea that he'd been less glucose-tolerant than average, before developing full-blown type 1, was thrown around but it wasn't anything definite.
