Time Restricted Eating

When you eat is equally as important as to what

For example, people who eat in a 12 hour window or less have been able to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, abnormal blood lipids, and diabetes without medication. 

Eat all of your calories between an 8-10 hour window 

Scientists at Harvard and weight loss nutritionists from Spain have found that people who spread out their calories, on the healthiest of eating protocols over 12+ hours, didn't ever lose much weight. People who ate bigger meals, healthy or not, and scrunched them into a 8-10 hour window that occurred during the daylight hours, lost a lot of weight. 

The gut and metabolic hormones are only effective at breaking down and processing food for 10 hours. If you eat for more than 10 hours of the day your digestive systems slow down, due to gut muscle fatigue, this causes your food to move a lot slower which can lead to indigestion, acid reflux, takes you longer than 15 minutes to fall asleep, and you’ll likely get woken up often.

Eating in an 8-10 hour window can help you: 

• Lose weight and body fat

• Lower your blood pressure

• Improve your blood sugar levels

• Lower Total Cholesterol

• Lower LDL total weight

• Lower LDL particles 

• lower triglycerides

• Stay asleep longer

How this works is your body burns through all of the carbs in your liver in 6-8 hours. This makes room for additional sugar and triglycerides moving around in your blood to get shuttled in to be expended. After that’s used up (around 12 hours after your last snack, drink, or meal) your body accelerates the release of stored fat to be shuttled to your liver to fuel your body.

Once you’ve achieved your ideal body weight or want to maintain your body fat %, shift back to eating in an 11 hour window.

Finish your last meal 4-5 hours before bed and eat during daylight hours

Your melatonin naturally starts to rise 4 hours before bed, which will delay your blood sugar from dropping, causing metabolic health problems, and fat gain. If you finish eating 4-5 hours before bed your blood sugar will likely have already peaked at 30-60 minutes post meal and be on the way down for those final 4 hours before bed. If you finish eating closer to bed than 4-5 hours then a few problems will follow:

• The sugars in your blood will compete with melatonin levels from attaching to your sleep receptors in your brain, causing you to not get sleepy until later in the evening 

• You’ll fall asleep with a sub-optimal melatonin level, which could lead to you waking up in 4-5 hours, and unable to fall back asleep 

If you eat after it gets dark outside, that turns the lights off in your gut machinery. After the kitchen is closed, if you eat again, it is going to sit there until the morning, your fat burning hormones will be shut off until your gut is empty, which won’t happen until tomorrow morning. This will result in your elevated blood sugar all night, leading to insulin resistance, which is the path to diabetes, and then your liver will convert that sugar into triglycerides, making you fatter in real time. More triglycerides in your blood also increases your risk for heart disease, heart attack, and strokes. 

If you’ve ever wondered why particular diets or nutrition strategies haven’t worked for you in the past, if you weren’t executing them in a tighter window and during the day time may have been the reason.

My personal data showing you these tips work

Here are 2 separate days from my oura ring. I intentionally did some bad things in my lifestyle just to show you how much you can sabotage yourself in 1 day. 

Graph 1 (Great Plan)

Graph 2 (Not a great plan at all)

Impact of not eating in an 8-11 hour window, not eating during the daylight hours, and eating less than 5 hours of going to bed

• It took me 29 minutes to fall asleep, which is double the length of time that it should take, and is borderline insomnia (15 minutes of sleep I missed out on)

• I spent 8% more time awake in the middle of the night waking up between sleep cycles (37 minutes of sleep I missed out on)

• I got 18 minutes less of deep sleep which is critical for creating all of my hormones to burn body fat and reclaim my health

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References

Panda, S. (2018) The circadian code: Lose weight, supercharge your energy, and sleep well every night. London: Vermilion.   

Perlmutter, D. and Loberg, K. (2024) Drop acid: The surprising new science of uric acid--the key to losing weight, controlling blood sugar, and Achieving Extraordinary Health. S.l.: Simplified Chinese Press.

Yuan, X., Wang, J., Yang, S., Gao, M., Cao, L., Li, X., Hong, D., Tian, S., & Sun, C. (2022). Effect of Intermittent Fasting Diet on Glucose and Lipid Metabolism and Insulin Resistance in Patients with Impaired Glucose and Lipid Metabolism: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. International journal of endocrinology, 2022, 6999907. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/6999907