Ep. 151 - 20:4 vs 16:8 Fasting | Is OMAD effective for Fat Loss?| Does eating more at breakfast lead to more hunger or more weight loss?

In today’s episode, we discuss the benefits of different fasting windows on hunger, metabolism, weight loss and other health markers in different groups of subjects. 

Let’s continue the conversation. Click the link below to JOIN the Fasting For Life Community, a group of likeminded, new and experienced fasters! The first two rules of fasting need not apply!

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This week in the community…

New to the podcast and wondering where to start? Head to the website and download our FREE Fast Start Guide, 6 simple steps to put One Meal a Day Fasting (OMAD) into practice!

Maybe you are experienced as a faster and wondering about your results and IF they could be linked to INSULIN resistance? Head over to the website and download our FREE Insulin Resistance Assessment!

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www.thefastingforlife.com/resources

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Research Article Links:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2645638/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9605877/

Fasting For Life Ep. 151 Transcript

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Hello. I’m Dr. Scott Dr. Watier.

[Tommy Welling]
And I'm Tommy Welling. And you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
This podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness, and live the life you truly deserve.

[Tommy Welling]
Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss and health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We started fasting for life because of how fasting has transformed our lives, and we hope to share the tools that we have learned along the way. Hey everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Water and I'm here as always, am a good friend and colleague, Tommy Wellings. Good afternoon to you, sir.

[Tommy Welling]
Hey, Scott, how are you?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Doing fantastic, my friend. I just cannot believe that we just passed episode 150, so just incredible milestone. And we think it was a really fun conversation as, I don't know, 1.5 Centennial I don't know what to call it, but I've said 150. Yeah. So I want to welcome all of you new listeners into the Fasting for Life podcast.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
If you want to learn more about myself and Tommy, how we came to fasting, how fasting has transformed our lives and now how we've ended up here in Episode 151. Feel free to go back and listen to the first couple of episodes. Episode zero in episode one will give you some perspective on our journey, our story, and how we ended up here.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Now living, breathing, talking, teaching, coaching on fasting 24 seven 365 so yep all you long term listeners as well. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for your continued support if you guys would be so gracious if you like what you hear, go and drop us a review. We of course, prefer the five star kind. If you're finding value and, you know, application to the things that we talk about here when you do that, you're going to tell the podcast gods that we are delivering value and something of value to the community.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So please feel free to go ahead and drop us a review. I'm excited about today's conversation, Tommy, as we're going to pull an older article that we came across when I didn't even know what fasting was right, even though fasting has been around since the dawn of time. And if you really want to go down to the history books, go read The Fasting Cure by Upton Sinclair.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
In 1911. You can Google it and it just pops up on your device and somehow you can read this, you know, aggregation of letters and articles that were written and sent to Upton Sinclair back in 1911. It's really cool. But we're going to pull an article from 2007, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition called it controlled trial of reduced meal frequency without caloric restriction in healthy, normal weight middle aged adults.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So that's episode one excuse me, article one, episode 151 two and I did there. The second article is going to be out of the Journal of Cell Metabolism, and this is more recent just from last month, October of 2022. And this one is going to be the timing of daily calorie loading. So the timing of your meals and how it affects appetite and hunger responses without changes in energy metabolism.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
This is my favorite part here, though. And don't worry, we're going to unpack this. And as always, we're going to deliver one or two actionable things that you can take from today's conversation and put into your daily fasting life. The cool thing about this second one is it's in healthy subjects with obesity. Who and there's going to be one big takeaway from this article that I think is going to speak to a lot of things that we hear in our challenges and our coaching group, in our emails and our messages on Instagram and Facebook, etc..

[Dr. Scott Watier]
About your fasting journey and what it looks like and how you set up your fasting schedule. Should I be doing two matter one matt or one meal a day versus two meals a day? What's my window? Should I start with this or that window? Should it be 16 or 18 or 20 year warrior? All of those types of things.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But the article that was back from 2007 really was looking at looking at three meals a day versus one meal a day, sort of. Right.

[Tommy Welling]
Tell me that versus one meal a day? Sort of. Yeah. You know, I really like some of the focal points from from these. But but that was one that that kind of hit me because when, when you when you see citations for four different articles or, or you see like little blurbs or little snippets that are, you know, maybe they're on social media.

[Tommy Welling]
Sometimes they're in the news. You don't necessarily know what they did in the study. Just you just kind of have that that little blurb right there. But it turns out when you start diving into the details and that's where the devil is in the details, is that, you know, sometimes you find like like on one of these, they talk about one meal a day, but one meal a day is actually a four hour nutrition opportunity in nutrition window.

[Tommy Welling]
But even even that for for multiple weeks was delivered as literally two meals per day. But even just taking one meal per day and then expanding it into a four hour window, most people are going to end up doing two meals in that in that given structure anyway. So it's kind of a kind of like a misnomer saying that it was actually studying true one meal, one meal a day.

[Tommy Welling]
Anyway. So when we get to that conclusion, some of them make more sense when we understand that it wasn't truly a one meal a day or like we would normally be talking about, especially for fat loss purposes.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, and that's it's interesting. And I didn't know you were going to start right there, even though we had talked about this like through through each going through the background and the objective and the design and the results. It is interesting that like just as we're about to like, all right, we've got our talking points. Let's, let's make this actionable.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Let's give them one or two main things they can do if this is what they're experiencing. And you reminded me that one of the first things that we created was a one meal a day resource. So the fast start guide, it's free on our website. You can go grab it or email it over to you. It's six steps on how to put one meal a day fasting into your day to day life as a fat loss strategy.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Never mind all the additional fasting benefits, but you're going to be able to lose weight and curb your hunger and balance your hormones and get all of those benefits while you're losing weight and figuring out how to adopt the fasting lifestyle. What we found is what you just described, which we uncovered here in the study, is that for our six hour, eight hour window is not effective for some people.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
This study was done without caloric restriction and healthy normal weight middle aged adults. Right. So we're not talking about the weight loss category here of people that are trying to lose light weight like we were trying to lose the weight for all those decades and failing. But the point is.

[Tommy Welling]
Weight to maybe even obese.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, overweight or obese. Yeah. The BMI keeps going up right as we go through the the later decades in life. Right. So the interesting thing was the results here, couple of them was like, wait a minute, but why did that happen? And then you start kind of uncovering what they did. When we're looking at a true one meal a day and comparing it with that other study that we mentioned, which we'll go back to and wrap up today's conversation with, there's a couple of big takeaways.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I liked some of the design of this study, which was eight weeks on, 11 weeks off, eight weeks on, and everyone was able to maintain their weight, which was cool because after you lose the weight or how do you maintain it? While for some people they're going to do one meal a day, for others they're going to want to ramp back out to doing more of a two meal a day or a 4 to 6 hour window.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. Especially if they're working on body composition type stuff. So what they did, the beginning of the study is what we found out is for the first two weeks it was actually two meals a day. It was lunch and dinner. And then for the remaining six weeks of the eight weeks, it was that four hour window where they were going to be able to get in that 1700 to 2200 caloric intake.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Now, we've had some people that have come through the challenges and they've been like, how am I expected to eat all of my caloric intake in one meal? And the answer is you're not.

[Tommy Welling]
Yet don't.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Or you're going to feel really uncomfortable.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that that kind of gets to the crux of the matter, which would be that if you're doing this for fat loss purposes, you're going to need to have a built in caloric deficit. Right. But there's a lot more benefits to doing one meal a day where you get the lowered insulin response over a prolonged period of time, which is a huge part of the equation, as opposed to just trimming off a few calories here and there from multiple meals throughout the day and and that's where we start to get into some of the additional benefit.

[Tommy Welling]
But like we pointed out, going into a four hour window, it becomes much more realistic and doable to actually bring in, you know, 100% of your calories. Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So I love this in the conclusions, they say normal weight subjects are able to comply with a one meal a day diet. Great, because there's a lot of studies that we know that people put you in time, restricted feeding windows or time restricting eating windows. It's not sustainable like severe low carb for a lot of people. Not sustainable, super strict eater Quito long term not sustainable.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So I love that they're like in but you get to the end of the study though I get 67% of our subjects didn't make it to the completion. So I love that they start out here saying, yeah, everybody was able to do this right and it's a four hour window. So yeah, if you've been fasting for any reasonable time saying, hey, between one and five doesn't seem that outlandish.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
When you first started thinking about one of the outcomes here was that hunger was a significant increase in the, quote, air quotes one meal a day group and that for our group and that is something that we see. But after we started digging in Tommy and looking at the types of foods they were eating and when they were being eaten, well, no wonder that hunger was increased and a feeling of fullness was never obtained.

[Tommy Welling]
Yes. So you know that that four hour window was basically between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. every night with a 50% carbohydrate macronutrient profile. So each meal was was half carbohydrates and going into all the way up to 9 p.m.. From my own personal experience, everybody who who we coach with and go through the challenge and we talked to absolutely there is a huge correlation there with getting into the into the later evening hours carbohydrate consumption.

[Tommy Welling]
Then we have a higher insulin response, which we know comes up more in the evening time, the later it gets on into the day. And then that's going to carry over into the next day. We we're going to feel much more likely to be that that like ravenous, that like deep hunger pangs and just those cravings, especially the carbohydrate cravings, which are particularly really, really tough when we have that sort of breakdown going into the evening hours.

[Tommy Welling]
So I'm absolutely not surprised by that, that significant increase in hunger that we saw in this study.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And that, for me is really going to come down to hydration and the fact that you're not fat adapted yet, so you're still used to burning glucose as an energy supply. Quickest way to get glucose into your bloodstream is to eat some carbohydrates, right? So if the diet, which it was, you know, mainly consumed, it was 50% carbohydrates in both groups, about 35% fat and only 14 and a half percent protein.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Well, one of the most satiating two of the most satiating macro groups out there are protein and its effect on blood stabilization, blood sugar stabilization, which decreases cravings and fat healthy fats. So they were also feeding these individuals energy dense foods. So it doesn't say here whether or not that was processed foods. Right. So if you're getting more calorically dense foods, if you compare a homemade pizza versus a Pizza Hut pizza.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Sure. Right. You're going to see a big difference in satiety fullness and blood sugar response rate.

[Tommy Welling]
So huge even at the same calorie level, right? Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So when we look at the results, it was cool because decrease in fat mass and the maintenance of weight. Right. So increase in hunger, a decrease in fat mass. Really cool to see that there was a greater decrease in fat mass in the one meal a day with equal calories. Right. Just different food timings of when they were eating those meals, you were able to see a more substantial reduction in fat mass, which obviously if you are coming to fasting to try to lose weight, that is something that you are going to be very happy to hear.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, true. True. I did also notice that participants were given unlimited things like let's see, they had water, coffee, but also diet, soft drinks, salt and pepper. So the diet soft drinks as well. That's that was just one one more thing that talk about increasing certain cravings and hunger cues and things like that, especially going into the evening time, you have this four hour window in the evening and that can lead to some slippery slope type of behavior with with salty and crunchy and snacking and all these kind of like high insulin producing things.

[Tommy Welling]
So I love the fact that there were big benefits here, even with some of these things that I would definitely point out as as kind of like very much less than optimal conditions, especially for fat loss purposes.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. One of the interesting things that we couldn't reconcile at first was why there would be an increase in blood pressure significantly higher in the one meal a day group versus the three meal a day group. Right, about 6%. Because typically what we've seen is that people that start fasting, you know, insulin comes down, aldosterone. Aldosterone comes down, tells her kidneys to release the fluids.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. Which is why we talk about curbing cravings, which can be increased due to the amount of carbohydrates eaten later in the evenings. The next day, it's going to make your fast that much more difficult, but also the fact that you're going to be losing those electrolytes, which will increase hunger as well. So then we looked at a little bit deeper and then it said, well, yes, the measurements were taken in the morning before the first meal for the three meal a day group, but they were taken later in the day when blood pressure is normally higher anyway.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Oh, okay.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. And the one meal a day.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
In the one meal a day group.

[Tommy Welling]
And that's after, that's around the time that the, the calories are coming in, the insulin is getting higher. Right. So again, things start to start to make sense. It's not optimally designed to to find what we're looking to actually achieve via one meal a day fasting. Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. And then a couple of other things. Here is the cool results between the three meal versus the one meal. We mentioned the decreased fat mass. Right. And then triglycerides actually come down. Total cholesterol goes up slightly, mostly from the LDL, which is going to be the process, the carbohydrate intake, but also the breaking down of those additional fat cells and becoming more fat adapted.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You will see a slight increase in LDL. Temporarily uric acid between the two groups stayed the same. So folks, we did a whole episode on gout. Can you fast with gout, Dr. Perlmutter Yes, you can fast with gout because after your fast is broken, your uric acid levels return back to their baseline equally in fasting versus non fasting.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So you are able to fast, you just need to figure out where your boundaries are because short term uric acid does increase. But after these eight week sessions of doing the one meal a day, it's actually equal to the three minute group. So more of the lifestyle, inflammatory response, food choice category of things. But the huge one here, Tommy, the last one we're going to mention from the study and then transition into the hunger fullness component of this, which is elevated in the one group is cortisol.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, cortisol was reduced by 40, not serum cortisol by 49%. Let's just call it 50%. That's great in the one meal versus the three mil. And I'm telling you, personal experience 100% because high cortisol, poor sleep, high stress. So short term cortisol, elevation of cortisol helps you burn fat. Long term elevation of cortisol is part of the stress response which can mimic and produce and proliferate insulin resistance, which is weight loss resistance.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So incredible here. This is like the biggest takeaway for me. It was like, wait a minute, 50% reduction in a four hour window.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. Like, is that a typo? Because I mean, like the person.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Said, we had to go back and look, we're like, wait, wait a minute.

[Tommy Welling]
No, I've never seen an almost 50% drop in any like, nutritional study that that I've looked at before. It's it's crazy because I remember cortisol being like your your Achilles heel.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You know, it was, you.

[Tommy Welling]
Know, at the beginning of your fasting journey. And like, that's a huge part because, you know, as we've talked about before, our bodies are are wired for the for the tiger stress. But when we have that that constant cortisol, that constant elevated cortisol that has an insulin resistance building effect in the body, that is that is huge. So the fact that we could cut that down by half just by compartmentalizing the meal timing, even though it wasn't the perfect way to do it, it wasn't the perfect nutrition, but it still had a huge effect, too, to see that means that, you know, you're you're literally making strides over a matter of of weeks on insulin

[Tommy Welling]
resistance, which can be a huge needle mover, maybe not on the scale like right away immediately, but that is going to be a major point of improvement that you have control over right there, which is awesome.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. And so one of the interesting things here as you transition to the timing of daily calorie loading more, explain that other study here in just a second was when we were looking at when some of these diagnostics were taken throughout the day and the most subjects reported extreme fullness after the meal and had difficulty finishing their food in the allotted time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But the subjective hunger and satiety assessments were not made after that evening meal. So it's like, well, we need more research to figure out, does this really help with satiety if you decrease the meal frequency? Well, the non-clinical proven application in what we hear and what we've experienced and taken, however many thousands of people through through the challenge now is that.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It absolutely does. Yeah. And it is shown that way in that other study when we transition into the timing of daily calorie loading affects appetite and hunger responses without changes in energy metabolism in subjects with obesity. So we're looking at ISO energetic weight loss diets. So I equal with morning loaded or evening loaded calories. So the other study mentioned, yeah, we didn't really do it, but what we found is people were more hungry because you weren't thinking about food all day waiting to eat.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And then they were having trouble during the window. Right. Even though out of all the participants, only one person quit because they said they couldn't handle trying to consume all of that in a short period of time. At the end of the day, sure. Yeah. Right. That that 4 hours. So if you are getting to the point when you're fasting and you're thinking about it and you're more hungry as a day goes on.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. But then you don't have the satiety effect and we already unpack why that could be later in the day. More carbohydrates, hydration issues, right. Energy dense foods, possibly eating some of those more.

[Tommy Welling]
Highly.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Palatable, more processed type foods to get the calories in. This other study was showing that the morning loaded versus evening loaded. So in the morning it was 45% of your caloric intake, 35%, 20% versus the flip, because both of these groups had three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The flip group was 20% breakfast, 35% lunch, 45% dinner.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So that second group was me minus the 20%. Like I would got a protein bar. Right? So what's that? Maybe 10% of my it's 200 calories, 10% of my daily intake, right? Sure. I was always starving after that 200 calorie protein bar or, you know, 300 calorie, you know, bulletproof coffee, protein shake, whatever it was. Right. So it was interesting that the morning group found a much better response ance with their hunger if they were putting a majority of their intake in the morning.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So from a fasting perspective, Tommy, how does that how does that look?

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, I mean, from a fasting perspective, it's kind of interesting because we're talking three meals a day. We're still going to have elevated insulin throughout the day, you know. Right. So so that's going to be a big hit for for our fasting, especially for for fat loss purposes. But as far as putting those those calories and actually getting in a meal early in the day, it was cooler to see that hunger came came down probably like thoughts and cravings and things like that did come down.

[Tommy Welling]
So like I looked at this this study design going, they're not moving the needle a whole lot here. I almost feel like we're splitting hairs a little bit to go like 20% versus 45% of calories between those two meals. Because I know from experience, it took so much more than doing just that to actually get, you know, the scale to move, especially after years of insulin resistance, you know, piling on.

[Tommy Welling]
So the nice thing is to to break away from like cravings and like really, really tough hunger in the evening hours, which can be a really slippery slope for a lot of folks. It was for me was right, dad a lot of stuff like that. That could be a really good thing. So if you are eating multiple meals throughout the day, but you don't focus on like a nutritious, good, substantial breakfast and you have trouble in the evening time, like closing your window or like controlling your own habits and behaviors.

[Tommy Welling]
This could be something that could really help if you if you actually did this deliberately.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And not a lot of people talk about intermittent fasting with breakfast and lunch bracketing dinner.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, true.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's a lot of non nutritionist, diet dieticians, registered nurses, health professionals will say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but not a standard American breakfast, which could be, you know, dessert for breakfast, dessert the breakfast, dessert in a box. Right. So there was one subsequent study here that I love that they put in the introduction, and it was out of the Journal of Obesity in 2013.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
High caloric intake. That breakfast versus dinner differentially influences weight loss of overweight and obese women. And they showed that a group of 93 overweight women were fed icicle diets over 12 weeks with morning loaded and evening loaded. Calorie intake runs in a parallel design. Those who consume most of their intake in the morning relatively evening lost an additional 5.1 kilograms of weight overall.

[Tommy Welling]
Wow. Over £10.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Over £10.

[Tommy Welling]
That's cool. Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. And then there's another one, same year, late eaters lost less weight than Early Eaters over 20, resulting in a 2.2 kilogram difference. So one of the things that we say in the fast start.

[Tommy Welling]
Guide.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
That comes with the videos accompanying each step is pick your favorite meal now. Yeah, familial wise like family, relational relationally what rhythm and say that word today so I'm just going to move on don't edit that out is people behind the curtain we don't usually edit that stuff out like this is it. It's a real conversation. Yeah. Real actionable steps with fasting.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
How do we get a fasting lifestyle in right.

[Tommy Welling]
I chose it. Right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, I know who we are. Trust me. Some people out there like to comment on our grammar and all that stuff and I'm like, if that's, if that's your take away from this, probably not the right place for you. But come back and listen. Anyway, it's cool. Is that I want a dinner because that's when I could sit down and eat with the family right?

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So it's like, all right, well, I'm going to do. Oh, man, but I'm with you. Evening. And then the window turns into a grace session in the pantry. Door never closes, and then the snacking comes back. And you had mentioned that you talk about that you. Yeah, I am. Those evening bad habits can come back into play as well.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So it's like, all right well if you're struggling with the hunger and the satiety and the fullness and all of those things, you're not seeing the scale move and you're still having trouble making a better, more nutrient dense, less processed food choices. Right. Well, I think it's probably time to move that meal earlier in the day and try a morning, two midday window rather than that evening.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Oh, man. Slash window is the other study had it set up.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. That's a great point. I really like that because you get the additional benefit of of still dropping the insulin level, especially if you're especially if you're going past like the 68 hour mark on on a lot of those days. Like if you did one day as a breakfast, one day as a dinner or one day as a lunch, just kind of mix it up a little bit rather than just the easy kind of automatic.

[Tommy Welling]
Like every home at dinner is what we find that a lot of folks just kind of settle into like that. That can be a really cool like comfort zone. But at the same time, if it's if it's not serving you or you're not getting exactly what you want out of it, then it's time to mix things up a little bit.

[Tommy Welling]
Right? Let's try to time to to try something a little bit differently and see if we can get a different result out of it. So I really like that. And that could give you enough time where you have those social opportunities. The family and everything else.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And business lunches and friends that are in town and breakfast brunches for special occasions and all that stuff, right?

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. You got more tools in your tool belt now. You're a little more flexible with your fasting, so you don't have to be a fasting monk, you know, to to actually kind of move the needle and be moving in the right direction.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. And there's a whole handful of other studies that they reference here, you know, 2020 study on trf comparing, you know, midday versus later in the day windows.

[Tommy Welling]
And.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Then another TRF study calorie intake window during the middle of the day compared to the evening reduce body.

[Tommy Welling]
Weight and body fat.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You know no results in this one. But there's a consistent thread in all of these, you know, varying from 27 through 2012, 2015, 2018, 2020, this one in 2022 is there's probably something here about eating earlier in the day to avoid the trap of overconsumption.

[Tommy Welling]
In the.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Evening. And that's why we felt that these two studies went really well together. And as an overview or a takeaway, as you wrap up today's conversation, Tommy, and if you're looking for the fast Start guide, feel free to head to the website D Fasting for life become the fasting for life dot com forward slash resources. You will see the fast start guide.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We'll send it over to you. Also get access to the accompanying mini masterclass that comes with that which is six short videos, about 18 or 20 minutes and videos that explain each step and showing you how to put one meal a day fasting into your fasting lifestyle. Now the caveat is, if you're using this as a fat loss method, then don't do what the first study did, which was, yeah, we're going to do one meal a day versus three meals a day.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And the one meal a day is going to be a four hour window.

[Tommy Welling]
All right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Really ease into it. Okay. Ease into it. Right. For our small meals, second meal, that's fine. But really try to focus on that one meal aspect to get the weight off. And if you're like, wow, is that too fast? Well, what do I do? What about my effort? Go check out the slew of podcasts that we have. We've talked about all of those different things at this point, but we've never talked about this specific strategy with Oh man, when it comes to hunger and satiety, which is really cool and how both of these studies kind of came together to highlight some of those pitfalls that we hear from a lot of folks time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So as we wrap up today, any additional final thoughts or.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, I mean, one that really stuck out to me was the fact that these studies, they were looking at what was actually happening within body composition, bloodwork, how hungry you were, you know, all these kind of things. But one cool thing that was shown multiple times was fat mass coming down in fat free mass, staying, staying the same across multiple weeks, losing multiple pounds and, you know, muscle mass, bone density, all that kind of stuff.

[Tommy Welling]
Fat free mass was stable while fat mass was coming down. So there's just just so much to be benefited from, you know, for for getting this right, for getting mad right, for doing something different that moves the needle and, you know, like if you're if you're starting with changing where your calories are coming from beginning of the day versus end of the day, that's great.

[Tommy Welling]
But don't let that be the stopping point, especially if you have more to do. If you need to do more than that, keep going with it. Get that part right and then keep keep pushing so you can keep moving the needle. I just really love where the conversation starts and then where it's heading as well.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. You had said something about the the idea that we talk a lot about and I want to open up another rabbit hole here, but I just want to make sure that we land the point in this, because when you said it to me, it was.

[Tommy Welling]
Pretty much like a cliffhanger. Sounds like a cliffhanger.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yet in next episode no where you said we talk a lot about in the second study where it's like we're not really talking about the needle movers.

[Tommy Welling]
Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We're talking about a lot of the fluff on the outside.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So but.

[Tommy Welling]
Those are the things I used to think about all the time and like split the hairs and, and, you know, like, truly.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Some examples put you on the couch.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. No, the the example was literally like, if I'm counting everything, all my macros, all my calories, then it shouldn't matter one iota if I have them all within a 30 minute window. You know, if I just took in everything in 30 minutes, if that was physically possible, versus all scattered grazing throughout the day. And it also shouldn't matter if I have more of those calories in the morning time versus the evening time.

[Tommy Welling]
But there are real significant differences there. Right. However, I didn't understand at the time that there was more beyond that to that. Like there was a keep going like, yeah, okay, we're 2% of the way there. You got a lot further to go, buddy. Like, keep, keep push pushing.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. So what I'm hearing there is, is keep it simple, right?

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Keeping it simple and focusing on the timing, how you feel, the food choices you're making and how consistent you are in the beginning when you come to fasting. Are some of those main pitfalls that we see that that allow people to adopt the fasting as a diet rather than a lifestyle where it's like, Yeah, it's not working for me.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I'm on or off just like any other diet, right? I'm if I'm doing it, it's world again. Well, how do we adopt that into the lifestyle? And that's one of the things that we talked about today. TIME So I love that you got perspective as we wrap up today's conversation. If you want to continue the conversation, head over to the website.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Grab the Fast Start Guide six Simple Steps to Add One Meal a day fasting into your fat loss journey. Yeah. And then also you can join us in our fasting for Life Community Group on Facebook. It's a great community. It's growing organically. We're in there supporting, answering questions. Everyone that you know of like mind in the fasting world.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I can come in, share your thoughts, share your struggles, share your wins. It's a great group, tons of good energy. So we want to invite you to head over there as well. You can go to the show notes or the website to find out more information. Tommy, as always, sir, as we wrap up today's conversation. Thank you and we'll talk soon.

[Tommy Welling]
Thank you.

[Tommy Welling]
So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering, where do I start? Head on over to the fasting for life icon and sign up for our newsletter where you'll receive.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
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[Tommy Welling]
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[Dr. Scott Watier]
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