Your Solution to Longevity and Shredding Fat

When you think of holidays, you probably don’t think of food deprivation. But, plenty of cultures have integrated fasting into their traditional observances, for millennia. Muslims around the world are celebrating Ramadan, a holiday which emphasizes fasting during daylight hours. Since the holiday essentially mandates time-restricted feeding, with food only being consumed before sunrise and after sunset, Ramadan has piqued the curiosity of the research world. What’s more, we also recommend time-restricted feeding. Therefore, it only seemed appropriate to dive into the topic of fasting this month and discuss the potential benefits that time-restricted feeding can have on our health and how it can help us reach our goals.

At breakfast, lunch, dinner and grazing for snacks throughout the day; we could be eating for a 16 hour. Increasing research is showing that we should narrow that window and give our body a chance to reset and cleanse itself. So we have to do get rest and clean our body. Let’s introduce time restricted feeding.

Timing for Restricted Eating

Time-Restricted eating is a type of intermittent fasting that limits your food intake to a certain numbers of hours each day.

Intermittent fasting is a broad term that refers to multiple specific eating patterns.

Each type of intermittent fasting includes fasting periods that are longer than a normal overnight fast of 8–12 hours.

“Time-restricted eating,” or “time-restricted feeding,” refers to when eating is limited to a certain number of hours each day.

An example of time-restricted eating is if you choose to eat all your food for the day in an 8-hour period, such as from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The remaining 16 hours each day are the fasting period, during which no calories are consumed.

This same schedule would be repeated every day.

Matching this time with your circadian rhythm and internal clock also looks to be beneficial. Your eating clock starts the moment you ingest something that isn’t water. For most of us, that would be our first cup of coffee in the morning.

 Advantages

●        Easier Execution

Typically, intermittent fasting is conducted through alternate day fasting, which entails regular eating for most days of the week with 2 to 3 days of severely restricted caloric intake on non-consecutive days. The major downside of this method is the simple fact that those fasting days are hard. Dropping down to just 500 calories a day usually causes intense feelings of hunger and subsequent grumpiness — ultimately causing individuals to revert back to regular eating.

Once we get over the idea that we need to eat every three hours, adapting to this schedule of eating overshadows any other diet or routine.

Intermittent fasting is hard in the contemplation, of that there is no doubt. “You go without food for 24 hours?” people would ask, incredulously when we explained what we were doing. “I could never do that.” But once started, it’s a snap. No worries about what and where to eat for one or two out of the three meals per day. It’s a great liberation. Your food expenditures plummet. And you’re not particularly hungry. … Although it’s tough to overcome the idea of going without food, once you begin the regimen, nothing could be easier.”

●   Shredding Fat

 

For some people, time-restricted eating will reduce the number of calories they eat in a day. However, if you eat higher-calorie foods, you may not end up eating less with time eating.

In it’s simplest description, TRF keeps the bad weight off and keeps the good weight on. While using an eating schedule, it is much easier to decrease body fat and maintain or increase lean muscle mass.

The benefits were huge. Mean insulin levels dropped significantly, and insulin resistance dropped as well. Insulin is a driver of obesity, so merely changing the meal timing and restricting the number of hours you ate, and also by moving to an earlier eating schedule produced huge benefits even in the same person eating the same meals.

Most people who only implement this schedule, with no other change to diet or exercise, tend to lose body fat.

●   Chance of Cancer and Metabolic Disease

Caloric restriction and fasting have been key weapons in the fight against cancer and metabolic disease. There hasn’t been tons of research on these issues, but the future looks bright.

 Benefit of intermittent fasting for a normal healthy (disease-free) adult. Recent animal studies and a few preliminary human trials have shown a decrease in risk for cancer or a decrease in cancer growth rates.

In one study of time-restricted feeding during 9–12 hour phases, fasting was shown to reverse the progression of obesity and type 2 diabetes in mice. Obesity is a major risk factor for cancer, which may support fasting to treat cancer.

One study fed rats a high fat diet, put them on a time restricted feeding program, and didn’t reduce calories. This protocol helped to prevent metabolic disease in this group versus the control group.

Longevity

Calorie restriction (CR) extends life span and retards age-related chronic diseases in a variety of species, including rats, mice, fish, flies, worms, and yeast.

We can mention again, caloric restriction has been shown to increase the years of your life. When you are in a fasted state, your body looks for ways to keep you alive.

I don’t think many of us want to go on week long fasts to live a couple years longer. Good news for us is that time restricted feeding activates many of the same mechanisms that caloric restriction activates.

 

●    Save money and time

So, if you want to keep pasta, chocolate, and wine on the table while staying “on your diet,” it may be a palatable option and then we save our money.

When I first implemented TRF into my lifestyle, I found so much more time and dollars lying around. You are essentially wiping out one meal from your old schedule. Gone were the Cheerios in the morning or the late night pizza. Want to be creative? Need more hours? Implement a time restricted feeding schedule and watch yourself come alive.

Eating Timings

That is, if you started eating breakfast at 8 am, you didn’t, on average, stop eating until 10:45! Practically the only time people stopped eating was while sleeping. This contrasts with a 1970’s era style of eating at 8am breakfast and dinner at 6pm, giving a rough eating duration of only 10 hours. The ‘feedogram’ shows no let up in eating until after 11pm. There was also a noticeable bias towards late night eating, as many people are not hungry in the morning. An estimated 25% of calories are taken before noon, but 35% after 6pm. This is quite possibly the most popular eating schedule in the intermittent fasting world. It allows for an 8 hour eating window usually starting with a late lunch and dinner. Skipping breakfast is easier for most because lunch and dinners seem to be the most social times for each together.

My own Experiment

During the first 3-4 days, I was hungry for a few hours right before bedtime. After that, my system adjusted. I suffered no further discomfort except after especially intense exercise. On those occasions, I doused the pangs by drinking extra water or going to bed early. This is my own experience. I hope, is that you are your own experiment.

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