Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health | Episode 41

Drinking water will not break your fast. Drinking tea will not break your fast. Drinking coffee, provided it is black coffee, will not break your fast. Ingesting caffeine in pill form will not break your fast.

It pays off, in the metabolic sense and in the health sense and in the weight maintenance or loss sense, to not ingest any food in the first hour after waking—and potentially for longer ... One of the key pillars of intermittent fasting is that, for the first hour after you wake up and potentially for longer, to not ingest any food.

Even if you have a very short feeding window, if it's drifting around from day to day, that actually offsets a number of the positive health effects of intermittent fasting.

80% of the genes in your body and brain are on a 24-hour schedule. That is, they change their levels going from high to low and back to high again across the 24-hour cycle. And when those genes are high at the appropriate times and low at the appropriate times... your health benefits. When those genes are not expressed at the right times—when they're high or low at the wrong times of each 24-hour cycle—that's when you get negative health effects.

Extended periods of time-restricted feeding, meaning 8-hour feeding window or 10-hour feeding window, that's obeyed for several months or more seems to allow the system to shift toward burning more fat—or, rather, using a higher percentage of fat—when in a caloric deficit.

Simple sugars, including fructose and fruit but also sucrose... will raise your insulin and blood glucose more than complex carbohydrates—things like grains and breads and pastas and so forth. And grains and breads and pastas and so forth will raise your blood glucose more than fibrous carbohydrates, like lettuce and broccoli and things of that sort. Protein has a somewhat moderate or modest impact on insulin and glucose. And fat has the lowest impact on raising your blood glucose and blood insulin.

Put very simply, there are a lot of data now pointing to the fact that eating during the nocturnal phase of the 24-hour cycle is very detrimental to one's health.

Many people find that the kind of lightheadedness, the shakiness, that's accustomed with having slightly low blood sugar can be offset by taking a half-teaspoon or so of sea salt, or even just a tiny pinch of salt, and putting into some water and drinking it.

If one's main goal is simply to lose weight, then it really does not matter what one eats provided that the number of calories burned is higher than the number of calories ingested.

Restricting your feeding to a particular window every 24-hour cycle has clearly been shown now, in mice and in humans, to enhance liver health.

Almost everybody underestimates their feeding window. Meaning, people who think that they are on an 8-hour feeding window or 6-hour feeding window, when their data are analyzed, it almost is always the case that they're actually on a feeding window that's 1 or even 2 hours longer than they think.

Relatively short feeding windows of, say, 4 to 6 hours do produce a number of positive health effects—things like increased insulin sensitivity... improvements in beta cell function in the pancreas, decreased blood pressure, decreased oxidative stress, decreases in things like evening appetite. So, positive health effects and psychological effects, in general. However, they either produce no change in body weight, or they tend to produce even increases in body weight.

I don't think that we can fairly say that artificial sweeteners break a fast. I think that would be incorrect to say.

In humans, higher blood glucose is associated with mortality. And, in fact, if you look at blood glucose (resting blood glucose) across the lifespan, what you find is, as people age, resting blood glucose goes up.

When you eat is as important as what you eat. I'll repeat that: When you eat is as important as what you eat, at least as it relates to health parameters—in particular, liver health and mental health.

It does appear that muscle tissue is better able to undergo hypertrophy by virtue of the fact that there's better or enhanced protein synthesis early in the day because of the expression of one of these particular clock genes called BMAL ... BMAL regulates a number of different protein synthesis pathways within muscle cells such that eating protein early in the day supports muscle tissue maintenance and or growth.

People have asked, 'Will brushing your teeth with toothpaste break your fast?' I think, unless you're swallowing the toothpaste, no.

If your goal is weight loss, it really does not matter what foods you consume provided that you consume a sub-maintenance caloric diet.

Blood glucose levels will actually increase if high-intensity interval training is performed early in the day and will decrease if high-intensity interval training is performed later in the day.