Ep. 153 - Does Food timing matter for Weight Loss? | Free Intermittent Fasting Plan for OMAD
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In Today’s episode, Does food timing matter for weight loss?We discuss a recent study on the links between the timing of eating and weight loss in calorically restricted healthy adults.
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Research Article Links:
Does food timing matter for weight loss? • Stronger by Science
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0531556522001450?ck_subscriber_id=1630804431
Fasting For Life Ep. 153 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. Everyone, real quick before we hop into today's Episode one to let you know that the last seven fasting lifestyle challenge of 2022 is upon us. It is December 7th through the 13th. You can head to the show notes for more information.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Click the link challenge dot the fasting for life dot com forward slash registration. Yes, the last challenge of the year is here. The next challenge is not until February 1st of 2023. So if you've been thinking about it now is the time. Don't miss out. You cannot only get massive momentum in your weight loss and health journey starting 2023, but you can get results now strategically place this challenge right between Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So we hope to see you on the inside. Head to the show notes, click the link, and now today's episode. Everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Water and I'm here as always, and my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good afternoon, sir.
[Tommy Welling]
Hey, Scott, how are you doing?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Fantastic, my friend. I am excited about today's conversation because we are going to unpack some interesting studies that we just came across a calorie study. I love what they did there. Right? Right. Yeah. We're going to talk about an article written by Stronger by Science. Does Food Timing Matter for weight loss? And then we're going to have some takeaways on how this applies to a fasting lifestyle and what it is that we teach preach and live here on the Fasting Flow podcast.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So welcome in to all of the new listeners. If this is your first couple of episodes with us, please feel free to head back to episodes here in episode one to learn more about why we're here, why we're doing it, what we're doing, how we ended up here, what our results were, and what we've been doing since. You got plenty of podcast episodes catch up on as well.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
I appreciate you guys giving us a shot here. And for all of the long term listeners, we appreciate your continuing ability to show up and engage. Send us questions, leave us reviews, and let the podcast gods know that we are doing something good and bringing value to the podcast world and this fasting lifestyle slash weight loss. So Tomi, today, a couple of things got this article right that I came across and it was written and it said, Does food timing matter for weight loss?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And it references a study that the associations between the timing of eating in weight loss and calorically restricted healthy adults. And it was an article that was written and really to discuss the findings from the calorie study. Now going down the rabbit hole. The calorie study has an entire website calorie diet duke dot edu and it is a two phase study funding provided by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So the idea here is we've got a lot to unpack in terms of framework, but then how are we going to digest all of this down into what I'm doing with fasting? Is this a sustainable, long term, healthy approach to weight loss and more importantly, a healthy metabolic state.
[Tommy Welling]
In the body? Mm hmm. Yeah. Especially if if we have a history of looking at a calorie and maybe potentially tracking them or counting calories, trying to build in some sort of caloric restriction, especially so that I can potentially, you know, get better balanced with my hormones or reduce my overall body fat or something along those lines, which, you know, most of us in the general population have been there or are still there now.
[Tommy Welling]
And so oftentimes these kind of questions come up because circadian rhythms are oftentimes implicated in things like hormonal resistance, weight loss resistance, other things like that. And so when we start to talk about fasting, then there's there's so many ways to skin a cat as they say. We can we can, you know, restrict that to a number of hours potentially.
[Tommy Welling]
We see some longer fasts where people do multiday fast, but even even just within like a six, eight or eight, six kind of window. Where do I put that window? Does it matter? Should I eat in the morning versus the evening? Is a calorie just the calorie? If I bring in 500 calories at 8 a.m., is that the same in my body as 8 p.m.?
[Tommy Welling]
Well, you know, that's what this study was was looking to do and to answer some of those questions.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, and it was interesting because it was it was kind of getting into the nitty gritty, like small details of where the variance or the percentages, what was the outcomes. Right. But the bigger picture was that I love that it kind of referenced up to that calorie study, which is that phase two study that we shared from Duke.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And it was looking at calorie restriction, right? Well, is normal calorie restriction versus fasting, you know, which one's viable? Time restricted eating, time restricted feeding, however you want to word that. Right. Right. So when we look at the comprehensive assessment of long term effects of reducing intake of energy, that's the calorie model in itself. And that clinical trial was the first study to focus specifically on the effects of sustain S.R. calorie restriction in humans.
[Tommy Welling]
Mm hmm.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So the two different phases. Right. So phase one was three single pilot, randomized controlled studies looking at different levels of caloric restriction, looking at BMI as between 25 and 30. And then the second phase of the study was the two year study, which is really cool because now we're talking about long term, right? So I'm sure some of you have heard, you know, and we do not endorse this for long term maintenance and sustainability.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Being eating 800 to 1200 calories a day for long periods of time will absolutely wreak havoc right on your weight loss and your health over time. Yeah. We don't want to be. Yeah. And your sanity. Okay. We don't want to be in that. So if you're a chronic dieter or a chronic weight loss repeat offender. Right, as we used to be, I was there.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yep. Raising our hands ends.
[Tommy Welling]
Up.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
It gets more difficult because you know, the work, the body starts to push against you. You're in a chronic state of restriction and your body's going, know, I got other important stuff to do here. So I love that this calorie study is zooming out to look at this long term kind of approach to can we what does it look like to be in a 20 to 25% deficit?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And is that going to increase our healthspan and our lifespan? And does it have long term effects on some of the metabolic health factors like BMI, total cholesterol, LDL, triglycerides, blood pressure, etc.?
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. And what is it doing to our overall waistline, too? Because just that 25% deficit, for example, like if you're out of 2000 calories and then you punched into your app that you wanted to lose £1 a week, well, it's going to tell you that that's going to be a 500 calorie deficit per day. That's a 25% reduction.
[Tommy Welling]
You should be at 1500 calories and then you'll be right on track. Right. Just a just a straight line linear graph. Here's how it's going to look. £1 per week. Of course, we all know that's not how it ends up. And the interesting thing was that this study started to separate those results, to start to explain some of that, because what we see is that it's absolutely not going to to predict.
[Tommy Welling]
In fact, only 41% of the overall results of calorie restriction were being predicted by the level of calorie restriction. And when I when I read that it.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
No, that's gone backwards. That's right. Right. Yeah.
[Tommy Welling]
Well like because I remember feeling that so many times but also feeling like, okay, am I broken? Am I, am I lying to myself somehow? Is this app that far off? How are my results so far away from what's being predicted? But this this study is absolutely showing that that's to be expected. 41% prediction rate in in the caloric restriction model.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
There was a point in time when MFP myfitnesspal for me, the EMF would really stand out. Some folks like I don't I don't even know I don't even know if I want to deal with you today. Right. And hopefully that resonates with some of you because it's like, well, screwed up today, Miles. Just open the window. Right. Doing it right.
[Tommy Welling]
I'm not able to predict anything anyway. Like I feel like I'm on my hands up every morning.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Never mind. Just talk about what the scale does to me every day. Right. Which is something we unpack a ton. I mean, that is like two whole days on that during our seven day challenge, right? Like that is we're going to free you from that and actually show you why it's a bad tracking metric. And so yeah, if you've only got a 41% confidence interval in what if you're doing it perfect and sticking to the plan.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, the best outcome is to know that 41% is going to be related to that calorie restriction. So yeah.
[Tommy Welling]
So where's the other 60? Where's the other 59%? Where is it coming from? And like, can we do better than that? And like, can we can we actually predict what's going to happen? Well, in some cases, we might be able to, but some of it's kind of built into to the method of caloric restriction in and of itself.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. So the the article, you know, does food timing matter for weight loss? And the the article that was in science tracked the associations between the timing of eating and weight loss and calorically restricted healthy adults discussing the findings from the calorie. Sorry, this was the phase one discussion, right? So this had those three different models that they were looking at and these were all looked at in, you know, healthy weight, individual because they want to know health span, life span changes and metrics.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. And the cool thing was that in this phase one, when they were looking at, you know, some of the middle age subjects, the BMI, the total cholesterol, the LDL, the triglycerides, systolic BP, the diastolic BP all increased dramatically with the calorie restriction. But some of those small percentage is right. So we had 41% due to the restriction.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Where were some of those other small little hitting percentages and did they even really matter? Hmm.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. What are those levers say?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Why so shorter eating intervals? 1% facilitate additional weight loss. Yeah, we're really going to land the plane here, everybody. I promise. 6%. Who is less day to day variation in your first mealtime.
[Tommy Welling]
Okay.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
If you've ever done our Fast Start Guide with our mini masterclass, choose your meal. Stick to it. We're going to talk about consistency here in a minute. Right. Choose your meal. 2% was regular first meal timing. So not just variation, but that consistency over time. Right. And then regular timing of the last meal, 1% and then also an increase in or greater increase in the caloric restriction was another 1%.
[Tommy Welling]
Mm. Yeah. And whenever you increase your caloric restriction it feels like that's kind of your only lever at the time or one of the big ones. Like it feels like it should do a lot. But just the fact that it was only 1% there is, is very telling if you've ever done it and then seen no difference in your results.
[Tommy Welling]
Right.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right, right, right. So we're sitting here going, all right, well, we got timing, we've got calorie restriction. Some of you are going, man, you guys are talking a lot about calories on a fasting podcast, right? Well, calories and hormones, they both matter. Right. You can you can outdo a nice 24 hour fast by making some poor food decisions.
[Tommy Welling]
Sure.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah.
[Tommy Welling]
In a matter of an hour or less, too. Yeah. It doesn't take, you know.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, it might not feel great but yeah you can do it right.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
The cool thing, another one of the percentages here was the time to hit your 50% of your daily caloric intake, right? So that amount of time that took place like so if you started, if you open, say you're fasting, you're doing a four hour window, you open your window at 12, you hit 50% of your intake for the day by two versus you open your window at eight and you hit 50% of your intake by ten.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Hitting your 50% intake by ten was an additional 2%. That was explained in terms of the results of that caloric restriction and outcome of weight loss. So the earlier the window, right. So if we're going to form some some like takeaways here, Tommy. Mm hmm. What would it look like in terms of of application for long term sustainability when it comes to fasting?
[Tommy Welling]
Well, I think a couple of things to to highlight are the fact that, you know, we basically still have, you know, between 40 and 50% of the of the variation kind of left out. So apart from those two things, what I would say is that making sure that, you know, the 41% being the caloric restriction, controlling what's in my window, being very intentional about it and that consistency over time, meaning that if I if I pick an earlier eating window or an earlier nomad, that's going to give me a bit better results over time versus a later amount.
[Tommy Welling]
It's really easy to kind of settle into a dinner amount, but it's also very easy if you get used to dinner, it can be more difficult to close your window too. And we hear that a lot because it can lead to a slippery slope. Some nighttime snacking, maybe there's a drink or two involved. There are some social opportunities in the evening.
[Tommy Welling]
It can be very difficult to like draw a line in the sand and then, you know, just just actually start your fasting timer at that point. So the earlier eating window is going to be better results wise and could lead to better habits as well as, you know, just just picking the foods that I can stick with consistently and, you know, the time of the meal that I can actually stick to consistently versus feeling like every day, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do today.
[Tommy Welling]
And it's it's different every single day because that that leads to a decrease in the effectiveness of what we're doing.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. So simplicity is what I'm hearing. Yes. Like what is the simplicity of this going to look like for me today? So you got to put a little bit of planning into it, too, right? Yeah. And you know, if you've been fasting for a while, you know that they even mention it here in the article. They say some might find the strategy with time restricted feeding offers the appetite attenuating benefits.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. Yeah. And, you know, modest benefits coming from alignment between nutrient intake and when you're eating those foods that circadian component, right? Yes. So we talk a lot about how do you feel with the meal and the food choices. Never mind about are you mentally restricting too much? Are you trying to eat kale salads when you hate salad?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. Like that's not a long term solution.
[Tommy Welling]
Right. And then you get some rebound effect.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, yeah. That's not that's not going to work. Right. So the strategy is viable for you, but it's that consistent application that's really key. So I want to highlight a couple more conclusions that came out of the the health metric needle moving kind of outcomes from the calorie model and then summarized from the Science Direct article what they recommend, which is directly applicable to what it is that we do in a in a fasting lifestyle.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So a couple of things that they saw. And one of the cool takeaways was that they had a maintenance phase, right? Because the study was over two years. So significant, the caloric restriction, despite normal body mass, had huge impacts on blood pressure, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, fasting insulin. Yeah. Homa I r wow. We don't know what that is.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
We did a podcast episode on it, right? It's like the industry standard for insulin resistance measurement, insulin sensitivity and insulin response. But interestingly enough, not so much on the glucose measures, but a huge increase decrease excuse me on your metabolic syndrome score. So decreasing your chance of metabolic syndrome, right. So huge takeaways after a two year and in the maintenance phase still during the weight maintenance phase.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. It's something we talk a lot about. Only 5% of people can keep the weight off for two plus years. So why start something if you're not going to finish it? Like, wait, what's my goal line? What's my goal weight? What do I do that that's a whole nother maintenance component outside of the weight loss component, right, that we're talking about with this conversation.
[Tommy Welling]
But do I really want to lose the same weight over and over again, too? Right.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. No, because, you know, if you do that cycle, then you're going to gain more fat mass through those repeated cycles. Right. Right. Which has been proven time and time again in an article.
[Tommy Welling]
So negative psychology, too.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, right. The harder it gets because you look at it like, well, I've climbed this mountain and I know the other side's not so fun.
[Tommy Welling]
With this mountain. Yeah.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. And it had enhanced effects on HDL insulin response in your CRP levels, which is that little tricky inflammatory marker that blocks leptin from having the normal effects on telling your brain that you are full and that you, you know, it tells your brain excuse me? It tells you that you need more food. It's either the leptin signals get blocked by the CRP levels so your body doesn't have a normal hunger satiety type balance.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And you're always you're on just this chronic cycle of like, I need to consume more, consume more, consume more and do more, you know, always. So, yeah, you always feel hungry, right? So really cool. Two years of moderate restriction significantly reduced the cardiometabolic risk factors and it's really cool. It reduces in young non obese adults. So if it's doing that in young non obese adults, what is it doing for the lot of us that is trying to lose the weight for good, right, Tommy?
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's absolutely going to be there. So in summary, the secondary analysis on the calorie data suggest in order to maximize your your S.R., your calorie restriction or weight loss future protocols. Here's the magic sauce. AMI should encourage participants to adopt consistent timing of their first and last meals all on drum roll. A shorter eating window. Yeah. And earlier consumption of food, which is something that we have shifted our perspective on here in the course of the last two and a half years.
[Tommy Welling]
Sure. Yeah. And I remember so many times of caloric counting, caloric restriction, talking myself, just assuming that everything was going to come out in the wash, assuming that if I counted every calorie, even if I was counting all my macronutrients as well, that whether I had something at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. or or 1 a.m., if that was the case, that it should overall balance out because again, the assumption was a calorie is is a calorie, which is a calorie, but there's a 59% of variance here that says a calorie is not always just a calorie.
[Tommy Welling]
And then there's also the fact that, you know, the proof is in the pudding right here, that meal timing matters, timing of the first and last meal matter and consistency absolutely matters.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, never mind the lifestyle component. Right. So as we wrap up today's conversation, tell me a couple of things that you guys can do. We've created a community group on Facebook that has just an incredible amount of loving, caring, encouraging people. And it is the coolest group and I am biased a lot support. Of course I am biased for that lifestyle.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
How do I make this stick? Should I be eating later? Should I be? What's your experience? Just hearing from other people that are on the same journey as you has been incredibly powerful on my fasting and now yeah, attack on my last remaining few pounds of visceral fat journey and having that soundboard and we joke a lot like the first two rules of fasting or don't talk about fasting.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Absolutely all if you're on an island doing it by yourself, it can get lonely. So I want to invite you all into the Fasting for Life Community. It is a group of like minded individuals that we're in there, we're moderating, we're talking, we're encouraging. And it's just a really cool place to be around like minded people on this journey as well.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And then second thing is you heard in the Open for today's episode, we have our last seven day fasting lifestyle challenge coming up at the end of this year as we wrap up 2022, Tommy and we move into 2023, here we are, Thanksgiving to Christmas. We're in the Gulf. It's coming right. So strategically place this challenge right now, December 7th, right through December 13th, the last challenge of the year, Tommy.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So a lot of the stuff that we talk about and I've alluded to, you know, kind of breaking down these different the calorie study and then the study talking about these different association between the timing of your eating and weight loss and calorie restricted adults. We talk a lot about that nuance stuff in between on what happens when they're, you know, your fasting body isn't responding or your spouse isn't on board or your coworkers just keep going to the taco truck every single Tuesdays, right?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Like all of that stuff. So I'm just excited because we've got some really cool stuff planned for this challenge. And if you want more information on the join the community group or the fasting challenged army, you can head to the show notes, click the link and you will get all of your questions answered. And Tommy, final thoughts as we wrap up today?
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, it's just it's all about finding the things that help make it work for you, that are effective and that you can continue to do that, that you can actually make easier over time. So it doesn't feel like you're you're clawing your way upstream all the time because then then I mean, what what other what other choice, like long term do you do you kind of have like you start to get repelled away from it.
[Tommy Welling]
So we have to find the ways to to make these things easier and stick and more repetitive over time so that they can be effective because getting the weight off is is literally be the highest correlation for any of the of the effectiveness of the rebalancing of the hormones and the sustainability piece too. So I just encourage you to keep doing what's working.
[Tommy Welling]
And if what you're doing isn't working, it's time to do something different.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Let us know how we can help. Yeah. See in the community group, see you guys instead of the challenge. Tommy Awesome conversation today, sir, as always. Thank you. Appreciate you. And we'll talk to you guys soon.
[Tommy Welling]
Thank you. Bye. 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]
Fasting.
[Tommy Welling]
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[Dr. Scott Watier]
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