New Life Plan alert

I’ve made another change to my eating habits based on information from a couple of podcast* episodes I’ve listened to recently. First, I heard Rhonda Patrick talk about intermittent fasting, and then Art De Vany on why he generally eats only two meals a day. I’m not going to be able to summarize all the science for you here—I feel like it’s not so important for me to personally understand every detail as long as there are other people diligently working on these issues and sharing their knowledge—but the upshot is that both of those habits seem to have profound anti-aging effects. Not to mention fat loss, disease prevention, and a bunch of other good stuff.

So lately I’ve been holding off on breakfast for an extra hour or so, eating until I’m pretty full, and then having nothing but water until another big meal at dinner. It would probably be ideal to have dinner around 4, but it’s important to me to eat with the rest of the family, and that’s usually at 6. It ends up being about a 10-hour daily “feeding window” with a 14-hour fast. I drink coffee and tea, take vitamins, etc., only with the meals. And I also try to get all my “workouts” (yoga, running, walking, cleaning house, mowing the lawn, or whatever) done before breakfast so that I am moving around in a fasted state and then can “rest and digest” (as they say) when I sit down to work for the day.

I’ll let you know if this seems to have any effect on my health, but so far it has not been hard to do. I often will get hungry between breakfast and dinner, but it lasts for only about a half-hour or so. It’s like my body is saying, “Just wanted to let you know you haven’t eaten for a while! No? OK, no problem! Just checking in!”

* Tim Ferriss has a pretty interesting podcast. It’s not my favorite (tie there between the RobCast and The West Wing Weekly), but it certainly yields the most actionable information for a self-experimenter.