Why Time-Restricted Eating Is A Modern Alternative To Fasting

And while I’m sure you could do a 4- to 7- day fast, even the idea of starting and enduring the first two days is more than a bit daunting.

That’s where Time-Restricted Eating comes in.

Time-restricted eating is a form of fasting.

But instead of fasting all day for almost a week, you block out a solid amount of time you refrain from eating and a solid amount of time that you will eat.

Now here’s the “missing secret”:

If you follow a long-term time-restricted eating plan, the health benefits have been found to be the equivalent to fasting for 4-7 days!

How do you do that?

It has been shown in multiple studies to work by fasting every day, for a minimum of 12 hours.

You eat during the day, stop eating by no later than 7pm at night. Your goal is to stop eating with the sun, but 7pm would be the ultimate cut off time.

4-( https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/08/785142534/eat-for-10-hours-fast-for-14-this-daily-habit-prompts-weight- loss-study-finds)

Continue fasting the rest of the night, drinking only water until you go to bed. When you sleep you will be fasting automatically.

3-( Biochemistry: 5th edition: Section 30.3 Food intake and starvation induce metabolic changes [textbook article; ungraded])

When you wake up you go about your routine as regular, except you will continue to fast, drinking only water or a no-calorie beverage, until at least 8am. When you actually start eating depends on whatever works for your schedule – be it 8am, 9am or noon.

The point is your schedule needs to be consistent and therefore you would eat the rest of the day until 7pm and so on.

In this way, you are fasting at least 13 hours but the length is up to you. Some regularly practice up to 18 hours of fasting.

“Typically, people would go for an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. eating window,” explains Dr. Pam Taub, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Medicine, and an author of the study.

5-( https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/08/785142534/eat-for-10-hours-fast-for-14-this-daily-habit-prompts-weight- loss-study-finds)

Partially paraphrased from Emily Aprea’s BBetter, Inc. Facebook video

To read the beginning of this series, “Improving Health”, click here.

To read the next Article in this series, go here.