Authors: David Zinczenko
I
’ve been working as a health journalist for more than half my life. You name an issue—absorption rates of minerals, causes of metabolic syndrome, funding for prostate cancer research, omega-3 versus omega-6 ratios—and if it has something to do with health or wellness, I’ll usually have the background on it. I’m not the world’s top expert on everything, but chances are, I know the world’s top expert.
I’m able to stay on top of stuff because new scientific thinking doesn’t usually come out of nowhere. Sure, sometimes during the course of human events an apple falls on
a guy’s head and he’s like,
Whoa, gravity!
But most of the
Holy cow, the Earth is round!
stuff has already been figured out. Nowadays, most breakthroughs in the realm of health and fitness aren’t really breakthroughs at all. They’re just evolutions of conventional wisdom.
That’s why the 8-Hour Diet is so exciting to me. It really does turn conventional wisdom on its head, with an undeniable body of evidence that will change the way we look at nutrition and weight loss, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and brain diseases.
But this is such a paradigm shift that a lot of folks have a lot of questions—from regular people we talk to about it to the experts at
Men’s Health, Women’s Health,
and
Prevention
magazines who work with me on a daily basis. Indeed, when we recruited 2,000 people to road-test the 8-Hour Diet, we were bombarded with more questions than a guest star on
Law & Order
. People want to know: Why is this so different from old-fashioned diet plans? And more important, how can it work so well?
In this chapter, I’ve rounded up some of the most common questions—questions you yourself may share—and explain in detail just what happens when you follow the 8-Hour Diet.
Not at all. The 8-Hour Diet can be easily adapted to any sort of hectic, changing lifestyle. The key to success is simply to alternate 8 hours of feasting with 16 hours of fasting. As long as you stick to that pattern, you’ll realize all the benefits.
So, for example, a 9-to-5 type can break her fast at 11 am and be home in time to eat dinner at 7. Presto, that’s 8 hours, and she can follow that pattern from week to week. But if a work event, dinner date, or party arises, she can just shift that first meal later in the day, so the 8 hours are 1 pm to 9 pm. And of course, many of us are shift workers who may need to eat our first meal at noon on one day and at 5 pm on another. Fortunately, the plan still works, as long as you observe the 8-hour feasting pattern.
Whatever is most convenient for you. For example, some people say they find it easier to wake up late on Saturday and Sunday, enjoy a leisurely morning, and then eat a delicious brunch around noon. (These folks obviously do not have kids.) If that fits your lifestyle, then just slip in one more day during the workweek and you’re all set. But if your weekends are hectic, you might want to forget about trying to follow the diet and instead do it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Or Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Or whatever. As long as you hit your times, you’ll change your body—and your life.
Yes! You’re free to eat what you like, when you like. If you want two big meals at lunch and dinner and that’s it, fine. If you want to graze through the whole 8 hours, that’s okay, too. It really depends on your lifestyle and your favorite foods.
Coffee and tea are absolutely encouraged because caffeine is an appetite suppressant. But it’s also a mild diuretic, so make sure you’re taking extra fluids to compensate. As for the milk and sugar: Yes, that’s cheating, but your secret is safe with us. It’s a minor intake of calories, but if it makes your favorite beverage go down easier, go for it. Just try to keep the additions as light as possible.
Hell no.
There’s really only one way to screw up this diet, and it’s by drinking lots of extra calories during your fasting times. And it’s an easy mistake to make. The average American drinks a whopping 450 calories a day, and many of them come from surprising sources.
For example, let’s say you want to stay hydrated during your fast,
so you reach for a bottle of flavored water—in this case, Snapple Tropical Mango Antioxidant Water. What could be bad about that? It’s got antioxidants, for goodness sake! But in fact you’re drinking 150 calories of pure sugar along with your H
2
O. Drinking just one of these concoctions a day in place of plain water will add 15 pounds to your body over the course of a year. And worse, you’ve broken your fast with these junk calories, so bye-bye health and weight-loss benefits! For the maximum benefit, stick with calorie-free drinks.
It’s not only suitable, it’s encouraged. The fat-burning effects of fasting will be multiplied by strong workouts. Look at it this way: The NBA Hall-of-Famer Hakeem Olajuwon regularly fasted during the basketball season. He was once named “player of the month” during February, when he fasted for Ramadan. If he could play that well at an elite level while fasting, you can, too.
Hunger and thirst are both registered in the hypothalamus, so when you’re tempted to eat, have a drink instead. Hot tea. Iced tea. Sparkling water with lime. Pick your favorite no-cal beverage and tank up. Your belly will be full, and the hunger will pass.
Yes and no. Live your life as you see fit. But if you expect to have results on this diet plan, don’t go crazy on us—slow down, and eat until you’re sated, not stuffed. Unless you substantially increase the amount of food you’re eating each day—hard to do that as long as you’re eating within the prescribed time period—you’re going to see dramatic results. But why not use this plan as a reason to reconsider consumption? Stay within the boundaries of the 8-Hour Powerfoods and the 8 hours. It could be the start of a whole new you.
There are plenty of ways to lose weight, and eating a solid, high-protein breakfast is one of them. But it isn’t the only way. We know from all of the studies we’ve gathered that the 8-Hour Diet will help you lose weight, regardless of when your 8 hours begins and ends.
Skipping breakfast is how most of the experts we’ve spoken to prefer to manage their own weight, but you’re free to schedule your feeding and fasting times however you like. So if it’s easier for you, logistically, to break your fast at 8 am and eat until 4 pm, go for it. And there is an advantage there, because the end of your fast will come when you’re asleep. Plus, the classic breakfast foods—eggs, bacon, yogurt, whole-wheat toast, oatmeal—give you plenty of nutritional support. But fasting in the morning has its advantages, as well. Dinner is often the most sociable meal of the day, and you’ll probably want to join your loved ones at the table. Pick the daily schedule that works best for you, and enjoy your success!
You can have four cheat days a week if you want. Following the 8-Hour Diet 7 days a week is hard to do, so I tell most folks to try it 3 to 5 days a week for starters. Four cheat days will still work for you, promise!
But “cheat days” does not mean “strap yourself to the all-you-can-eat-buffet-until-you-pass-out days.” Try to make sure you “eat your 8” even on days when you’re not following the diet to ensure that you’re getting all the nutrition you need, and be smart about your food choices.
Yes, you’d be breaking the fast, but then this plan is yours to design and retrofit in a way that works for your life. So if there’s no way to accommodate that protein shake along with your workout into your 8-hour eating period, go ahead and break the rules. But bear this in mind, as well: All the scientific evidence points to a strict fast as the best way to
achieve maximum results. So the first, best option is to keep the fast; the second best option is to live your life as you need to and be as careful with your 8/16 pattern as possible.
No, you won’t. Quite the contrary. One of the most surprising aspects of intermittent fasting is that it forces your body to burn fat preferentially instead of muscle.
This is one factor that dramatically sets the 8-Hour Diet apart from other diet plans. Typically, reducing caloric intake—your standard “crash” diet—causes the body to burn muscle for energy. In the long run, that causes your metabolism to slow down, meaning that once you go off your crash diet, you wind up fatter than before you started it. This is why so many celebrities are walking examples of so-called “yo-yo dieting”—they dramatically lose weight for a role or photo shoot, but they come back bigger than ever, and not in a good way.
Why is the 8-Hour Diet different? Among the first pieces of anecdotal evidence that researchers in this field began noticing was how popular fasting had become in the body-building community: It worked to help the overly buff achieve that cut, muscular look that won competitions—and didn’t erode muscle size or quality. In fact, muscle strength and athletic performance seemed to improve. While the exact mechanism is still being studied, we do know that intermittent fasting increases natural levels of human growth hormone, or HGH—the stuff that aging athletes inject illegally to help them stay young and strong.
What it means to you: Limiting your food consumption to 8 hours a day triggers your body to burn fat for energy; standard dieting leads you to burn muscle. Take your pick.
No. It will actually accelerate it. If it didn’t, our species (and other carnivores like us) would never have survived into the modern era.
Think of it: Your ancient ancestor is out cruising the plains of Africa during a time of food shortages. She’s hungry and needs a meal. If her
metabolism slowed down, she wouldn’t be able to chase the prey she spots down by the water hole. But she is up for that chase, because her body, metabolically primed for the hunt, is burning stored fat in the absence of food, just like yours is on the 8-Hour Diet. Her pattern of feasting and fasting, just like yours, also maintains muscle mass—it aids in the hunt but also boosts metabolism for the big charge. Sure, if you try live on rice cakes, grapefruit, and Diet Coke for days on end, your metabolism will slow down—the fatal flaw of traditional diets. But that won’t happen on this plan. You should eat good food, and plenty of it—but just within the allotted 8 hours.
No, but they do store fat in response to standard dieting. Here’s why. When you go on a standard diet, you may lose weight initially. But when your body senses that there’s a real dearth of food available—when you go day after day taking in fewer calories than your body needs—all that deprivation sets off a kind of hormonal panic in your body. Your body starts to reduce its production of leptin, the hormone that suppresses appetite, and boost levels of ghrelin, the hormone that encourages hunger. You become famished because your body wants you to go into calorie-storage mode.
So now you’ve got overwhelming signals of hunger, thanks to your hormonal system. Plus, when you do give in and hit the buffet, your body is primed to store those calories as fat, because it’s been told by your “diet” that food is scarce, and it might be a long time before you eat again, so you’d better pack on some easy-to-store, slow-to-burn fat. And you’d better hold on to that fat no matter what!
Intermittent fasting, however, isn’t based on deprivation. It’s a pattern of eating, not purgatory, and it reinforces to your body that it will get plenty of healthy calories every day so there’s no reason to store fat—in fact, it can start burning fat for energy. Studies show that it also causes a surge in hunger-limiting leptin. So if you really want to ditch the weight, ditch the diet and change your eating schedule instead.
Absolutely not. First, the definitions, which will help you understand why the 8-Hour Diet is just about the opposite of an eating disorder.
Intermittent fasting is a regularly scheduled, planned abstinence from food. There are lots of ways to do it: Some people do it one day a week or on special occasions, not eating from sundown one day until sundown the following day—the common method in religious observance. Others follow a method called alternate-day fasting, which is just what it sounds like. And then there’s the 8-Hour Diet, in which you eat for a set time period—it’s the easy way to accomplish the same goals.