The American diet and lifestyle is the perfect model for metabolic disease and weight problems leading to Insulin Resistance, weight loss resistance and obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and more.

The three key pieces of this diet and nutrition lifestyle equation are:

• What we eat. The food on the plate.
• When we eat, The timing and frequency of eating.
• How we eat. The preparation, ingredients, and daily food distribution.

Intermittent fasting has grown in popularity in the last ten years since I have written about the importance of eating less often. 

The problems with intermittent fasting have become more common when people don’t know how to do it correctly as well. 

Skipping breakfast isn’t truly fasting, intermittently or otherwise. 

Those who delay eating in the morning have a higher incidence of weight issues, diabetes, insulin resistance, and early death rates from all causes.

Of the people who do eat within 3 hours of waking up, 60% eat late in the evening, which is shown to cause the same metabolic issues. Only 10% of Americans eat within a 12-hour window or less regularly. 12 hours? 

That’s a long time, and even worse is that only 50% of people will maintain an eating window of 15 hours or less, with less than 25% of the day’s food intake occurring before 1 pm! We are late eating, end of the day food loading!

It only takes eating your daily food in a 6-hour window without changing what you eat or how much to reduce insulin resistance. 

In overweight or obese participants, they also improved insulin sensitivity and production in the beta cells of the pancreas. 

Eating in a 9-hour window can reduce your triglyceride count and lower your blood sugar response after meals and your average daily blood sugar.

People who started with blood sugar over 100 (pre-diabetes) saw significant improvement in fasting blood sugars, lowered their A1c without adding exercise, and were independent of weight loss.

People with metabolic syndrome who ate in a 10-hour window improved their blood pressure, total cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol without changing how much they ate or the quality of their food, all with no exercise and, again, independent of weight loss.

It has been shown to reduce daytime hunger and daily food consumption without trying to eliminate late eating times.

Irregular eating times are shown to produce negative cardiometabolic changes, and eating in a restricted window has been shown to improve cardiometabolic health in people who are obese, type 2 diabetics, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, as well as in healthy college-age men and women of normal weight.

Keeping a tighter eating window improves athletic performance, basal metabolism, inflammation, strength training, and body composition in men and women and people with health conditions in just four weeks.

This is something we can control. Even if you haven’t successfully changed your diet or finished fast, you can start today without changing what you eat, how much, or starting a new workout routine. 

But…. if you upgrade the quality of your food, plan a fast, and get back into exercise, your results will be much better.

To get started, if you are a 15-hour eating window person, start with a shift to 12, and once you have that steady for a couple of weeks, move to 10, then eight if you like all the changes, zone in on 6 hours to eat for the day.

Once you consistently use a 6-8 hour window, you might consider “window shifting” during the day and “rotational eating times” as the next step. 

In the meantime, message me for details on my programs and keep following and joining the “Insulin Friendly Fasting Secrets” Facebook group for more info on this subject.

We can do better!

Dr. Don