Twenty-five years ago, before I knew anything about intermittent fasting, I always told my personal training clients not to eat anything after 8 p.m., and then when you wake up in the morning, don’t throw food in your mouth. If you’re not hungry, don’t eat or wait a little bit, have a cup of coffee before you start throwing food within your body. And at the time, I didn’t realize it, but that was a form of intermittent fasting. A 14 hour intermittent fast has numerous benefits.
Just think about it. If you stop eating at 8 p.m. and then wake up in the morning, say six, seven o’clock, and maybe you don’t have breakfast or don’t eat anything until about 10 O’clock. You have gone 14 hours without any food (14 hour intermittent fast), which is incredibly healthy for you.
Now studies are showing that it minimizes your cancer recurrence, just fasting 13 to 14 hours a night. Another study talking about people who delay breakfast 90 minutes and eat dinner 90 minutes earlier lose weight and have improved blood work. They automatically reduce calories without trying.
If you want to lose weight and improve your health, you have to go through periods within the day where you’re not eating food. You have to be in a fasted state. When you’re in a fasted state, what are you doing? You’re burning stored calories; you’re burning stored energy; you’re burning body fat. And there are also so many incredible hormonal health benefits of being in a fasted state, and the main one is insulin.
See, when you eat food, whatever calories you’re not burning right then gets stored away with the storage hormone insulin. See, insulin’s produced in the pancreas to store away excess calories. It accumulates carbohydrates in your muscle and your liver; it helps store fat in fat cells. It does a lot of great things too. It helps synthesize protein, but if you’re constantly munching and snacking and always eating something and constantly spiking insulin. It’s going to be incredibly hard for your body to burn body fat even if you’re not eating an insane amount of calories; it will be so much harder for you to lose weight.
Studies show that people ate the same amount of calories, but some ate it in a shorter eating window. Say, an eight-hour eating window, compared to someone who ate throughout the day, in a 12-hour eating window. The people who took in the calories, the same amount of calories in the restricted eating window, lost weight, improved insulin sensitivity, had better blood work. So, being in a fasted state is incredibly healthy for you, so give it a try.
This is my recommendation if you want to ease into a 14 hour intermittent fast.
- Eat breakfast a little later.
- Don’t wake up in the morning and throw food in your mouth. Wait an hour or two.
- Have a black cup of coffee, have a cup of green tea.
- Try to eat dinner a little bit earlier or make it a rule that once you’re done eating dinner, say, eight o’clock, do not eat any more food for the rest of the night. No drinking alcohol either. If you want to have a glass of wine or something, have it before dinner, but eight o’clock comes, no more food. You can drink Seltzer, herbal tea, and take liquids with no calories but no food with calories after 8 p.m.
I’m pretty sure within two, three weeks, you’re going to be a few pounds lighter. You’re going to feel better. You’re going to be on the road to better health.
