How Will Starvation Affect My Flies? by Zoe Moreland

Planning my project was centered around what I wanted to test and what interested me the most, which is something I rarely encountered in my high school science labs.

For my independent project, I chose to look at how starvation and intermittent fasting affects female fertility. Intermittent fasting is becoming increasingly popular among people looking to lose weight and find alternative diets that fit a flexible lifestyle, however, restricting food intake can have negative effects on overall health. For example, anorexia is a common eating disorder where an individual restricts the amount of food they eat and it can lead to malnutrition, mental health issues, and even decreased fertility when a woman stops menstruating as a result of being unhealthy.
My goal for this project is to see the short-term effects restrictive eating can have on a woman’s fertility and overall health.

So far, the first few weeks of TRIP have been informative, independent, and supportive. Planning my project was centered around what I wanted to test and what interested me the most, which is something I rarely encountered in my high school science labs. So far for my independent project, I have been able to test two seperate groups of flies by fasting them for 8 hour periods, and I am looking forward to seeing the results from the assays in the coming week.