Are there benefits to giving yourself a longer daily break from food?
The reason many blood tests are done after an overnight fast is that meals can throw our system out of balance, increasing certain disease biomarkers, such as blood sugar, insulin, cholesterol, and triglycerides. However, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:20 of my video Time-restricted feeding put to the testless than one in ten Americans can even do It’s 12 hours without eating. As evolutionarily unnatural as it may be to receive three meals a day, most of us eat even more than that. A study used A smartphone app tracked more than 25,000 meals and found that people tended to eat about every three hours for an average span of about 15 hours a day. Could it be beneficial to give our body more rest?
Time-restricted feeding is “definite such as fasting for periods of at least 12 hours but less than 24 hours,” and this involves trying confine caloric intake to a set period of time, usually varying from 3 to 4 hours, 7 to 9 hours or 10 to 12 hours per day, resulting in a daily fast lasting 12 to 21 hours. When the mice are restricted At a daily feeding window, they gain less weight even when fed the same amount as “impromptu access” mice. rodents have However, your metabolism is so high that a single day of fasting can starve up to 15 percent of your lean body mass. This makes it difficult extrapolate of mouse models. You don’t know what happens in humans until you put it to the test.
Dropout rates in time-restricted feeding trials certainly appear lower than most long-term forms of intermittent fasting, suggesting it is more easily tolerated, but does it work? Researchers found that when people stopped eating between 7:00 pm and 6:00 am for two weeks, they lost about a pound each week compared to having no time restriction. Note that “there were no additional instructions or recommendations regarding the amount or type of food consumed,” nor were there devices, calorie counting, or record-keeping. Study participants were simply told to limit their food intake to 6:00 am and 7:00 pm, a simple intervention that is easy to understand and put into practice.
The next logical step? Test it for months instead of just weeks. Obese men and women were asked to restrict eating to the eight hour period between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm Twelve weeks later, they had lost almost seven pounds, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:18 in my video. This seemingly simple intervention can operate from several different angles. People not only tend to eat more food later in the day, but eat high-fat foods later in the day. By removing Eating in the late afternoon eliminates prime-time couch snacking, a high-risk time for overeating. And, in fact, during the study of not eating after 7:00 pm, subjects were inadvertently eating about 250 fewer calories per day. Then, there are also the chronobiological benefits of avoiding eating late at night.
I made a whole series of videos about the role of our circadian rhythms. have In the obesity epidemic, how is meal timing modified? can be critical and how we can match meal times to our biological clocks. Just to give you an idea: Did you know that calories Eaten at dinner gain significantly more weight than the same amount of calories consumed at breakfast? See the table below and at 3:08 in my video. 
calories accomplished in the morning cause less weight gain than the same calories consumed at night. A diet with a more abundant breakfast Causes more weight loss than the exact same diet with a larger dinner, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:21 in my videoand late night snacks are They are more fattening than the same snacks if eaten during the day. Thanks to our circadian rhythms, metabolism deceleratinghunger, carbohydrate intolerance, triglycerides and propensity to gain weight are all the things that go bump in the night.
What about the fasting component of time-restricted eating? There is already the double benefit of consuming fewer calories and avoiding eating at night. Does the fact that you’re fasting for 11 or 16 hours a day play any role, considering the average person can only go about 9 hours a day without eating? How would you design an experiment to test that? What if you randomly assigned people into two groups and had both groups eat the same amount of calories a day and also eat late into the night, but one group fasted even longer, for 20 hours? That’s exactly what researchers from the USDA and the National Institute on Aging did.
Men and women were random eat three meals a day or include all of those same calories in a four-hour period between 5:00 pm and 9:00 pm, and then fast the rest of the day. If the weight loss benefits of the other two time-restricted eating studies were due to passive calorie restriction or avoidance of late-night eating, then presumably both groups should end up the same because they are both eating the same amount. the same amount and they are both eating late. However, that’s not what happened. As you can see below and at minute 4:49 in my videoAfter eight weeks, the time-restricted feeding group term with less body fat, almost five pounds less. They consumed about the same number of calories, but lost more weight.
As seen below and at 5:00 in my videoa similar study with an eight-hour feeding period result in three more pounds of fat loss. So, it seems there’s something to giving your body daily breaks from eating all day long.
However, because that four-hour feeding period in the study was at night, participants suffered the chronobiological consequences (significant increases in blood pressure and cholesterol levels) despite weight loss, as you can see below and at 5:13 in my video. The best of both worlds was proven in 2018: early time-restricted feeding, narrow window eating earlier in the day, which I covered in my video The benefits of eating early with time restriction.
Isn’t the circadian rhythm business amazing? Morning calories count less and are healthier than evening calories. So, if you’re skipping a meal to extend your daily fasting period, skip dinner instead of breakfast.
If you missed any of the other videos in this fasting series, check out the related videos below.
