When You Eat Each Day Important to Weight Loss – Wall Street Journal

The human body is an amazing system in real life and especially when it comes to digestion.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that when you eat may be as important as what you eat.

If you are one of those readers who ate up The 8-Hour Diet, you have a running start on this discussion. It’s all about fasting.

In a test run by Dr. Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, CA, one set of mice were allowed to eat only in periods of nine, 10, 12 or 15 hours. The other set could eat any time or all the time.

The Journal reported, “The benefits of restricted eating times were proportional to the amount of time fasted, said Amandine Chaix, a Salk researcher who works with Dr. Panda. The narrower the window for eating, the more weight the mice lost.”

In addition the time-restricted mice also had better muscle mass and lower cholesterol.

Before you start setting your alarm clock or smart phone to segregate your day, listen to what obesity expert Christopher Ochner, a director of research development at Mount Sinai Hospital has to say,.”The old idea of “calories in, calories out” matters more for health than how many hours someone eats, or what time of day they are eating,” The Journal reported.

Ochner warns that these studies may be the latest in a long line of mice studies that don’t translate to people.

In case you are getting the idea that this is an easy question, Journal writer, Angela Chen concludes with Krista Varady, the author of The Every Other Day Diet who says that people fasting every other day can lose up to 30 pounds in eight weeks. That is far more than what would be expected on a typical calorie restricted diet.

My own understanding, based on the Mayo Clinic, on weight loss is that you shouldn’t lose more than a pound or two a week which is only about a third of what Varady claims for her people. So, whether it works or not, it’s not healthy to take off that much weight in so short a time.

My own conclusion from all this is that I want to continue to exercise every day and eat a reasonable amount of healthy foods while avoiding the junk. Although retired, I don’t want to get into fasting entire days or even large segments of entire days. Check out my post How I Lost 50 pounds in 52 Weeks for more details on extended weight loss.

If some of the ideas here appeal to you, please share your experience with this blog. I would like to know the results and how you feel about them.

Tony