By now, you’ve surely heard the term intermittent fasting, which can encompass everything from skipping a meal each day to fasting a few days a week.
But what about simply limiting your daily eating window to 10 hours? This means that if you take your first bite of food at 8 a.m., you’d need to take your last bite of food that day by 6 p.m.
A new study published in Cell Metabolism offers some evidence that the approach can be beneficial.
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Dr. Pam Taub, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Medicine, is an author of the study. She and other researchers tracked a group of overweight participants who followed this plan for three months. Participants were encouraged to stay hydrated with water, and each day they logged the times of their meals and their sleep. She explains:
“Typically, people would go for an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. eating window. We saw a 3% reduction in their weight and a 4% reduction in abdominal visceral fat.”
She went on to say that they didn’t ask the group to change what they ate, but they did eat about 8.6% fewer calories, most likely due to the limited eating window. Many had improved sleep and more energy. Taub added:
“We saw that cholesterol levels improved and blood pressure [levels] also improved.”
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Co-author of the study, Satchidananda Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, indicated she and Taub have some theories that may help explain the reduction in belly fat and weight loss. They said:
“We are surprised that this small change in eating time would give them such a huge benefit. When you go into a fasting state, you start to deplete the glucose stores in your body and you start to use fat as your energy source. You can enter a low-grade state of ketosis. And once stored fat is fueling your body, “that can lead to a good amount of weight loss.”
The study was small, with just 19 people. Each of the participants was overweight and had a cluster of risk factors (elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol levels and high blood pressure) that put them at higher risk for Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. A more extensive study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is underway to examine daily fasting in people with metabolic syndrome.
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For now, the new findings offer some preliminary support of the benefits of daily fasting. According to Taub, you can think of a few extra hours of fasting each day as a way to give your metabolic organs a rest. Just as your body and brain feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep, the researchers say fasting can help restore and rejuvenate your organs. She added:
“When you’re constantly giving the body calories, you’re constantly making your cells work.”
And as scientists learn more, it’s evident that our bodies are timekeeping machines. Not only is there a master clock in our brains. There are clocks in all of the organs in our body, from the pancreas to the stomach and liver. Daylight is a primary cue to reset our master clock each day, but it’s the first bite of food we take in the morning that may be an essential cue to reset other clocks in our organs.
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Frank Scheer, director of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told NPR several years ago:
“When the timing of meals does not match with the sleep-wake cycle well, there’s a disconnect between the different clocks that we have in basically all the cells of our body.
According to Panda, when the clocks in our body are out of sync, our bodies don’t work as efficiently, and this may lead us to store more fat. Over an extended period, this can lead to Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and increased risk of heart diseases.
