Authors: David Zinczenko
But that’s only part of the story behind the 8-Hour Diet. Maybe you don’t care about preventing aging, stopping heart disease, or reducing your risk of cancer—you just want to look good in a swimsuit, and fast. (That’s a little short-sighted, but hey,
any
motivation will do.) In that case, there’s another scientific angle that you might find even more exciting: This plan completely changes the way in which your body burns body fat.
Your body stockpiles calories in two ways: as quick-burning glycogen, which is contained in the liver and muscles, and as slow-burning fat, which is stored, well, pretty much everywhere else. What makes weight loss so difficult is that your body is programmed to hold on to that fat; tapping it for energy is hard. But it’s exactly what this program will encourage your metabolism to do.
The first thing your body does when you wake up each morning is to start looking for energy to burn—hey, that snooze button isn’t going to hit itself! And it goes right for that fast-and-easy glycogen in the liver. “There’s about 1,500 to 2,000 calories in there,” says Dr. Mattson.
But then you get up and pour a bowl of cereal, or you grab a coffee and Danish on the way to work, or maybe you skip breakfast altogether and simply start snacking around 11 or so. Regardless, your body now has a brand new source of glycogen to burn—food! And if more food comes in than your body can burn, it starts to break it down and store it—putting some of it back in your liver as glycogen, and some of it you-know-where as fat. Day after day, this goes on, until you wake up 10 years later and look nothing like your high school yearbook photo.
Now, what if you could torch all that glycogen early in the day and program your body to start burning fat instead?
That’s what the 8-Hour Diet does. With the most moderate bit of exercise—a mere 8 minutes a day before your first meal—you’ll begin to burn through these glycogen stores like a 13-year-old girl through a Justin Bieber fanzine and spend more of your day in fat-burning mode. (More about this in a minute.) And by not snacking late at night, you’ll further deplete these glycogen stores, so that when you wake up the next day, fat burning will start even sooner. “You’re switching to using fats instead of what’s in your liver,” says Dr. Mattson. “There’s going to be a reduction in the size of your fat stores.”
This technique—limiting the time period in which you eat to tap your body’s fat stores—is known as “intermittent fasting.” And that’s what the 8-Hour Diet is all about.
There’s something appealing about the figure 8—broad at the top, solid at the bottom, lean in the middle. It’s a perfect metaphor for the fit and healthy body we all aspire to.
Unfortunately, I spent most of my early life looking less like an 8 and more like a big, fat 0. You know what I’m talking about—that creeping middle spread that doctors call “apple shaped.” Belly fat—the most insidious form of fat there is—increases your risk of all the major diseases of our time, from heart disease and diabetes to cancer, stroke, and even sexual dysfunction. And our open-all-night eating style creates dysfunction at the cellular level, literally confusing the mitochondria that are supposed to keep us young, healthy, and lean.
The 8-Hour Diet is designed to counteract that growing expanse around your middle and carve you back into the lean, strong, shapely 8 that screams out young, fit, and healthy. And it’s designed to help
you do it without spending hours in the gym, without spending hundreds of dollars on fitness classes, and without leaving a trail of sweat behind you as you jog down the road. In fact, you don’t actually need to “work out” at all. You just need to get moving for 8 minutes a day, a few days a week.
Screeech! Hold up! Did the health and fitness editor just tell you not to work out? Well, not quite. I’m an enormous fan of exercise—I run and lift weights nearly every day because being in the best possible shape is part of my job. I strongly recommend you work out, too, because strenuous exercise not only boosts the effects of your weight-loss plan but also helps to beat stress and sculpt a leaner, fitter form. But if you want rapid, sustainable weight loss, you don’t need to sign your paycheck over to Nike. Just 8 minutes a day, before your first meal of the day, is all you really need.
How is that possible? Doesn’t it take hours on the treadmill just to burn off a Twinkie? (Actually, it would take a 155-pound man about 15 minutes of jogging to burn off a Twinkie. Which is a lot of time to spend burning off something you ate in less than a minute.)
And that’s exactly why I don’t want you to try to burn off calories through exercise—I want you to program your body to do that, automatically. You’ll do that by depleting those glycogen stores I mentioned earlier in this chapter. Because your body doesn’t have food calories to burn first thing in the morning, it’s going to tap into the glycogen stores in your liver.
Here’s the great news: If you did nothing but press numbers on the remote for the 16 hours you’re not eating, you’d still come close to tapping all the glycogen in your liver. A 185-pound man in his late 40s would burn about 1,275 calories just sleeping or sitting still for those 16 hours; a 160-pound woman of the same age would burn about 1,073. That’s your resting metabolic rate—the number of calories your body burns while at complete rest. And that’s assuming you didn’t do the dishes, walk the dog, take out the garbage, tuck in the kids, chase the cat off your favorite chair, climb the stairs, get undressed, hang up your clothes, roll around in bed with your partner, or do any of the physical things you would normally do after you finished eating dinner.
Now remember, there are only between 1,500 and 2,000 calories total in your glycogen stores. So by the time you wake up, you’re already getting close to finishing off those stores. The 8 minutes you spend doing light exercise—even just a brisk walk around the block—before your first meal accelerates that glycogen burn, and once those stores are depleted, you’ll turn into a fat-burning machine for the rest of the day.
And you’ll keep burning fat, even while you eat—no matter what you eat. Meanwhile, you’re further helping the mitochondria in your cells generate energy more efficiently, cutting down on your risk of disease.
Okay, a quick reality check: I know I said that you can eat whatever you want, in any quantity you want. And that’s true. But I’m not going to tell you that you can live on a daily regimen of nothing but Slim Jims and tequila. Yes, all of your favorite foods are allowed—from mashed potatoes to meatball heroes to Mississippi mud pies. But at the same time, your body needs enough real nutrition to go about its daily business, like breathing and digesting and making your hair grow.
To ensure you get all the nutrients your body needs—so you can go back to the mashed potatoes, meatball heroes, and mud pies—I’ll introduce you to the 8-Hour Powerfoods. Foods high in protein, fiber, and healthy fats (the Fat Busters) will help your body build and maintain lean muscle, burn off flab, and fend off hunger. And foods high in vitamins and minerals (the Health Boosters) will improve your mood, ward off disease, and even help you think faster and more clearly. (I’ll go into the science of these foods in
Chapter 5
.) Indeed, award-winning chef and food journalist Matt Goulding, my coauthor on the Eat This, Not That! series, has even created a collection of delicious recipes that incorporate the 8-Hour Powerfoods, making it that much easier to fuel your body with the nutrients it needs. See
Chapter 8
.
Eating one serving of each 8-Hour Powerfood every day is easy: Heck, a bowl of yogurt with some berries and cup of chili with a side salad and you’re done! In fact, there won’t be a day that goes by when you won’t find it easy to say, “I ate my 8!”
Excited? To learn more about how the 8-Hour Diet is going to make weight loss effortless, let me take you on a field trip in the next chapter …
Why you don’t have to eat all the time to burn fat and build lean, strong muscle.
I used to work with a guy who was obsessed with building muscle. He lifted weights a lot, and he got pretty big, but the body part that got the most working out was his jaw. See, my friend bought into the well-established—but newly debunked—theory that to build and maintain lean muscle mass, you had to be constantly eating, so as to “feed your muscles.” And you’ve probably been told, like he was, that “grazing” during the day is key to keeping your metabolism high and your body burning calories.
My friend was so obsessed with feeding his muscles that he used to come to work every day with a whole roasted chicken under his arm. He’d stick it in the office fridge, and all day long, he’d walk back and forth from his office to the kitchenette to tear off a hunk of fowl. He’d even show up in meetings with a thighbone in his paw. I was afraid we’d come to the office one morning and find a horde of cats howling outside like 13-year-old girls at a One Direction concert.
Problem is, all that eating made him a pretty large guy, and not just in the muscle department. (Also, gnawing on a chicken bone in the middle of a staff meeting is just not a great career builder, unless you’re in Henry VIII’s inner circle.) And more and more research has been showing that the theory of eating six times a day—three meals and three snacks—to burn fat and build muscle just doesn’t hold water. In fact, your metabolism will run hotter and your muscle-making factories will work overtime when you eat less frequently. Consider:
EATING LESS FREQUENTLY HELPS YOU KEEP OFF WEIGHT.
A 2010 study in the
British Journal of Nutrition
found that participants who ate three meals and three snacks per day had no greater weight loss than those who ate just three meals per day, calories being equal. “Grazing” did nothing for weight loss.
EATING LESS FREQUENTLY BOOSTS YOUR STAY-YOUNG, LEAN-MUSCLE HORMONES.
Scientists at the Intermountain Medical Center in Utah asked participants to fast for 24 hours and then compared their blood samples to those taken after a day of normal eating. They discovered that the male participants’ levels of human growth hormone (HGH)—which protects lean muscle and regulates metabolism—were 20 times higher on the days when they fasted.
EATING LESS FREQUENTLY MAINTAINS MUSCLE FUNCTION.
A 2012 research review in the
Journal of Sports Science
found that athletes who maintain their total energy and macronutrient intake, training load, body composition, and sleep length and quality are unlikely to suffer any substantial decrease in performance during fasting for Ramadan, the Muslim religious observance. And a 2011 study in the journal
Obesity Reviews
found that while intermittent fasting had the same effect on weight loss and fat loss as simply cutting calories, intermittent fasting seemed to be more effective for retaining lean muscle mass.
This is actually great news, because being able to eat whatever you want, in whatever quantity you want—and not having to make sure you’ve always got the right food on hand to “stoke your metabolism”—takes a lot of pressure off. (Studies have even shown that the more rigid your “diet” plan, the higher your BMI was likely to be and the more depressed you were likely to feel.)
And besides, who wants their desk to smell like a drumstick?
The 8-Hour Diet Success Story
“I DIDN’T THINK I COULD LOSE WEIGHT THAT FAST!”
Andre dieted just 3 days a week—and lost 15 pounds in 6 weeks!
Andre Charles, 21,
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
OCCUPATION:
STUDENT
HEIGHT:
5'11"
STARTING WEIGHT:
200
WEIGHT AFTER 6 WEEKS:
185
Late night snacks. A crazy-busy schedule. Constant stress. The daily life of a student isn’t the most conducive for weight loss. But with the 8-Hour Diet, Andre Charles was able to shave off excess pounds without losing his academic edge.
A LIFETIME OF BAD HABITS—GONE!
Andre had always struggled with his weight, a problem compounded by his sedentary lifestyle. As a teen, he was more likely to be found playing video games than playing hoops. But when he tipped the scales at 240 pounds, he knew he needed a change. “I feel as though I’ve been eating wrong my entire life,” he says. On the 8-Hour Diet, Andre added smart food choices to his grocery list, loading up on new healthy favorites such as Greek yogurt and fruit. He also kicked his greatest vice: after-hours snacking. “[At first I didn’t like] not being able to eat late at night,” Andre says. “But it was a habit the diet helped me out of.”
8 MINUTES TO LEAN
Andre increased his activity level by incorporating some of the optional 8-Minute Workouts into his morning routine. “Once I started doing it consistently, it increased my metabolism,” he says. Plus, it gave him the incentive to find more time in his schedule to devote to exercise. The result? Fifteen pounds gone in just 6 weeks, plus a slimmer waist and smaller gut. “I didn’t think I could lose that much weight that quickly,” he says.
A SIMPLE PLAN FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
Andre is not the only person who has noticed his transformation. “People say they see a difference in how I present myself,” he says. “They say I seem more confident now.” When he reveals the remarkably simple plan he followed to change his body and his life, “[everyone] wants to try it immediately because of my quick change,” Andre explains. And the ease of the plan has become the main selling point: “There isn’t one reason why you could ever fail at this,” he says. “Planning meals between certain hours instead of restricting or eliminating your normal meals made it very simple to follow. I didn’t have to make an extreme change to what I ate, just when I ate it.”
PURSUING A BETTER BODY
Andre’s rapid weight loss was so easy, he’s determined to keep going. Although he started off by following the 8-Hour Diet just 3 days a week, Andre says he wants to continue on a daily basis in the hopes of losing even more. “I want to cut down to 175 and build muscle on top of that,” he says. “If I follow the diet, I can make that happen.”