Ep. 160 - 4-hr vs. 6-hr window: which is best for fat loss & cardio metabolic health? | What is fast cycling and why it might be the missing link you need for better results | Time-restricted feeding for weight loss | Blueprint to Fasting for Fat Loss | Intermittent Fasting Challenge | Free Intermittent Fasting Plan for OMAD

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In today’s episode, we discuss a great study on 4 and 6 hours eating windows! This study is the first human trial to compare both of these eating windows and their effect on cardiometabolic health metrics. The other wonderful part of this was that out of the 82 participants, 72 of them were women!! Listen in and hope you enjoy!

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Research Reference Links:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9407646/ 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11502822/

Fasting For Life Ep. 160 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's Dr. Scott Water and I'm here as always, and my good friend and colleague, Tom Welling. Good afternoon to you, sir.

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

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You're in. Fantastic, my friend. It is week two of 2023 and we are coming at you today with an incredible article that we have been wanting to talk about for weeks. And we're like, Man, every time we opened it up, there is just more good stuff in there. So now it's going to coincide today with an exciting release from us here at Fasting for Life as well of a new downloadable digital resource that we think is going to be really impactful for all of you guys and gals this year in 2023.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So first and foremost, welcome in to the Fasting for Life podcast. If you are new, thank you for giving us a shot. We hope you find value in today's conversation and of course a lot of our other episodes too. If you're an OG, thank you for joining us again for another year. We have a lot of incredible stuff planned for 2023 that we're going to continue to bring weekly episodes.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We have some new creative ideas on content, there's new research, and we just want to continue to bring value each and every week to all of you that are on this fasting for life journey with us. So new, old and in between. Let's kick off 2023 with a really interesting conversation in of a study that came out of the Journal of Cell Metabolism.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And this study was published in July of 2020. And I'm not sure how we haven't talked about it previously because like we double checked and triple checked. And you sure we haven't talked about this one because it is like right up our alley, especially with the fasting lifestyle in mind. So the title is Effects of four and six hour time restricted feeding on weight and cardio metabolic health.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So man, that's like in our wheelhouse, right? Right. And the great part is, is this is a randomized controlled trial in adults with obesity. So this is not a animal study. Right. This is like the gold standard. Like this is what we want to see to be able to extrapolate some key components on how we can continue to level up our fasting on a day to day basis, which then most importantly, results in weight loss.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And more importantly, and even that is that long term health benefit, right? Fasting is so powerful and so many people come to it for weight loss, but it does so much more than that. And for you and I, tummy fasting gave us our life back. It gave us our health back and that is why we do what we do.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So I am excited to unpack this study in the conversation and then also coinciding it with the new resource, which is the blueprint right to intermittent fasting for fat loss. So it is the blueprint to intermittent fasting for fat loss. If you if you heard in our intro, on our podcast, we talk about the science of lifestyle design.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So creating a lifestyle designed in a way that gives you simplicity, freedom, confidence and most importantly, long term weight loss and health results. Right? So we spend a lot of time, you know, thinking about this and how we can level up our support to the majority of you that listen on a week to week and month to month basis right now that we're over 2 million downloads.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yes. It's it's like what resource can we provide to the majority of folks? Right. So we have our fast start guide that's up there on the website and that was our first resource that we ever made because that's where you and I found a lot of Yeah. Results in not, not just starting with the intermittent type, but how do we, where do we start to see some of the magic happen in the weight come off and the pre-diabetes reversal and the blood sugar changes and the blood work and all that.

[Tommy Welling]
Feeling so much better.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Yeah. And it came at that mad mark, that 24 hour mark, that one meal a day type mindset. But is that a sustainable weight loss health strategy? For most people, the answer is probably not. So that is a fat loss strategy. So we were able to take intermittent fasters like myself and you who'd done keto, and I often just hadn't been able to get it to translate right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Well, yeah. And everything else. On the dieting weight loss spectrum, right. We tried it in the one meal a day was like taking people from a beginner skill set and getting you to that physiological or insulin depleted point where you can get some really cool health changes, scale changes and some really good momentum. Or we realized we can do better, right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
That's just one small piece of the puzzle. And that's what this blueprint to intermittent fasting for fat loss is all about. So I am pumped to see the impact that this is going to make because it's been something we've been talking about for a long time, and it's finally time to rip the Band-Aid off me.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, it absolutely is. And it's all about like how can I get myself to the next level? How can I do a little bit better? And then how can I do it in a way that that makes sense and doesn't feel like? I'm just trying to use all this willpower or this I won't power. Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And it pushing the boulder up the hill.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah it's it's starting to tap more into that. I want power and we can do, we can like reverse engineer the process better. So I love it. I'm super excited too. It's something I wish that we had like three years ago or four years ago, right? Get us started faster and like, hey.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I read Dr. Fong's books and some of the giants in the fasting.

[Tommy Welling]
World.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
That we now have come alongside of. Right. Fasting has been around forever. Right. Feasting and famine. It's how meat is better.

[Tommy Welling]
House food was invented.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
All right. Since the dawn of time. Right. So Upton Sinclair, 1911, the fasting cure. Yeah, right. It's in most historical texts in form of different religions and religious beliefs and cultural things. Right. So it's been around for a long time. It has a lot of powerful effects that are not just weight loss related. Right.

[Tommy Welling]
So absolutely.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And we're looking at this study and it is like the perfect pairing with this new resource so you can grab it at our website. The fasting for life dot com forward slash resources. Yeah, the fasting for life dot com forward slash resources is in the show notes. Go ahead and click it. And the study is cool because it talks about four and six hour time restricted feeding, right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So intermittent fasting by definition is a period of eating and a period of fasting. And that window is usually separated by colon. Right. So yeah, intermittent fasting is usually you start off with a 14 or 16 hour window. 16 eight is the most common definition of intermittent fasting. Well, what's really cool about this study is that from 16 hours of fasting and then you go to 18 and then you go to 20, then you go to 22, then you go to 24, which is where our first resource, the, the, the fast start guide right comes into play.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
There's some really cool stuff that happens when we're looking at these windows, which is what this study highlights. And the biggest like takeaways are going to be in the in between, right? Yeah. And I want to start unpacking them by describing the study and then going through the results. And we're also going to mention some of the limitations as well.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So sure, one of the coolest things about this was it was mostly in females, middle aged females that were in the obese BMI category. So the category of 30 to 35. And there's not a lot of studies out there, human randomized controlled trials in women with obesity. And we've had different conversations about hormones and weight loss and fasting and time restricted eating and, you know, early time restricted eating versus light time restricted eating and all and everything in between.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We've compared 16 hour windows to ADF to add, you know, all of the previous episodes dove into different nuanced in-betweens, right, in the fasting lifestyle. But this one really hits on a couple of the big starting points of those times, right? That 18 hour window and that 20 hour window. And it was really cool to see that we finally have some rock solid data with some really cool outcomes in women that fall into this category.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And I say that because the majority of response that we get from our challenges and our coaching and our podcast is from women. Sure. And when I was in clinical practice, women are much more likely to take action and take care of their health, in classically speaking, than men who are much more stubborn and don't, you know, need a little bit more.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, a little bit more prodding and hey, yeah, you're fine. Your legs not it's not bleeding, you're dragging it behind you, but it's still attached. It's fine, right?

[Tommy Welling]
So when we get the sniffles, you know, like. Like you're not going to hear the end of it, right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right, right. So hopefully we're getting some amens out there. Right. Right. On the other side of the audio medium here. So tiny, really cool study, really cool outcomes. And it was a ten week excuse me, an eight week study. Yeah, a four hour and six hour window. So 18 hour fast eating windows and a 20 hour, which is in the fasting.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We're known as a warrior fast. Yeah. That 20 hours of fasting and 4 hours of eating both regimens reduced energy intake by about 550 kilograms per day, so about 550 calories without calorie counting, which is something that I really like because a lot of.

[Tommy Welling]
People ended up there.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. No, you're fine. And they both produce similar reductions in insulin resistance, which is like, aha. Like that's what we want because insulin is at the forefront of so many disease processes and there's something that grows beneath the surface because our system is designed to look at the blood sugar and the blood work, but not necessarily the insulin.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So just the highlights of this alone to begin are really, really cool and I want to start unpacking some of them.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, I just keep coming back to the population that was included in this study because at an average for for the US of the average female over 20 is about five foot four and £171. And so that falls right at that 30, right at that obese mark if you look at the BMI chart. So so just the fact that this this was, you know, obese, you know, people that's where we are.

[Tommy Welling]
As far as as far as the average it was the average person fits into this. The average female fits into this this this study. So, you know, when we're talking about what kind of what kind of action can we take, what kind of results can we can we conclude from it? It's very widely applicable. And I love the fact that that we're starting to see this these come out in the designs of some of the studies where they go time restrictive eating obviously has a lot of potential.

[Tommy Welling]
So what do we need to understand better about it? And so when we when we take this and we have the six hour feeding window versus the four hour feeding window, it's not all that much different, really. Like it's not something that I just 2 hours. Yeah, it's just 2 hours. I mean it is, it is a 30% change, you know, 33% change within within that.

[Tommy Welling]
But it's still it's not that difficult to, to see myself doing doing a four hour versus a six hour. It's not like, oh, man, like the my reality is kind of like crumbling based on that. I can I can definitely see myself doing it. And so, so that's a cool thing. And then I love the fact that they ended up with that 30% calorie reduction as well that that would just that wasn't by design.

[Tommy Welling]
They just ended up there. But the control group that they compared it to was was no restrictions. And then they weren't told what to eat at all. So it was just go about your normal day, no, no food or.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Send us some data that tell us what you did.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, tell us what you did.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Basically don't change it. Well.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. And then, but to keep that in mind, these were, these were individuals who were already at the obese mark. So the interesting thing to me is that by the end of the eight weeks, some of the markers had already started to tick up a little bit within within the control group because they had already been on that way, ticking up before.

[Tommy Welling]
And we saw it even over these just short eight weeks, even on some of the stuff that we got, you know, we started reversing. We started moving in the right direction, you know, within the experimental groups here that were that were using the time restricted windows.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And hey, man, I don't want to think, you know, all the guys out there listening, you're not off the hook either. Okay? Your statistics aren't any better. They're probably worse as a whole as a country. We're trending in a very scary direction when it comes to obesity levels. You know, when you add obesity and overweight levels, that's anywhere between 72 to 75% of the population.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
At any given time. Wow. Yet 50 to 60% of us are actively trying to lose weight. Right? In the world of information, right in our pockets, we have more access to info than ever before and we're going in the opposite direction when it comes to weight and more importantly, those cardio metabolic aspects. Right. So that's why I love this study because it's like these windows and the differences between them, which is staggering when we go over it, are they healthy, sustainable approaches to interventions for weight loss because we need something right now.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But the way the statistics are right, eight or nine out of the top reasons why people lose their life here in the United States is due to blood sugar related issues and insulin. Right. And then you have the trends of the numbers, right? We're getting bigger and bigger and bigger and we have more information and more access and more people are trying to lose weight, but it's not working.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So something's got to give and take away from here is never mind. Are you going to get all the additional physiological benefits? But there's a really cool fat loss things that stick out here too, and I'll say it again without having to count calories.

[Tommy Welling]
I love that part.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's so anybody else out there, the awkward silence of a of a podcast, right. Where I just let everybody respond quietly in their head. Yeah. Like, yeah, some of us do need to track at different points and times, but if you've counted and failed, do you really want to go back and track again? Is that a sustainable practice for you?

[Tommy Welling]
Did it work?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Results speak for themselves, right? Did it.

[Tommy Welling]
Work? It didn't work.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
No. Me either. Even with all the knowledge and information and support and paying tens of thousands of dollars for testing, you know, world renowned nutritionists here in Houston, because I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get results, but everybody else could.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, well, so when we're looking at the the actual results for it, it was cool to see that both the four and the six hour time restricted feeding over the eight weeks without the calorie counting had a 3% reduction in their body weight, which was really cool. And then the control group slight, a slight tick up at the same time, which okay.

[Tommy Welling]
So they were they were unrestricted but tend to be long term, you know, trending in the wrong direction here. So that was that was a really cool thing to see. But what I was really blown away by was the fact that in just shrinking from the six hour window to the four hour eating window, instead of it being £3 of fat in the six hour window, it a £6 reduction in actual fat mass in the four hour window.

[Tommy Welling]
Like we're starting to like knock on the door of some some serious potential here.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So what I just heard was there that there was a small in eight weeks, the average loss was about 3%. 3%. Yeah. So statistically relevant. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But the difference between a two hour window resulted in a2x fat loss.

[Tommy Welling]
Yes, two x.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Okay. So one of the limitations of this study, when we first read it was like, okay, it's relatively small, right? There's been I believe it says there, quote, here that there is 12 other human trials with time restricted eating that have been done. Right. And we first looked at this and said, okay, great to see that it's done in women first and foremost.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, the average Joe. Right, the average Jane based on statistics, but it's a smaller study. The length of the study is relatively short. Eight weeks, right. Kind of a limitation. And then the difference between the windows they studied. At first I was like 2 hours.

[Tommy Welling]
Like you even see anything.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Maybe they should do this like in a you know, they can increase that to maybe 4 hours.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Why would they do a 16 eight versus a warrior, right. Which is at 24 split. But it's incredible when you start looking at the visuals from the actual results here in the study. I mean, you can just see the stair step, right? Yeah. Like when you look at that fat mass, it's like, yeah, the control group was ticking up a little bit, but two X loss with a two hour difference and we know.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So if you're intermittent fasting and we get this question all the time, well, especially when our challenges are going on or we're ramping up for a challenge and people are, you know, we're sending out emails and promotion and let everybody know the dates and etc.. Now, by the way, the next one is coming up on February 1st. Shameless plug.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We're excited because it's just far enough out from the hangover from the holidays. Yeah. And to distance yourself from the New Year's resolutions and jump in so if you got.

[Tommy Welling]
Caught up on what happened at Christmas or let us know if you're here, right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, yeah, we're here. So but one of the things, again, as well, you come into the challenge, what's your fasting experience? Well, I've been doing 16 or 18 hours. What have your results been? Well, I'm really having a hard time keeping it consistent. Okay. Well, our number one free resource over here is here's your own ad plan. There's a big gap between six, eight and Nomad.

[Tommy Welling]
Sure.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, there's a big gap there. Right. And then so what I'm seeing here is that visually, this is why we created this new resource to go concurrently with. This is that stair step. How do we step from 16 to 18 to 20 and create consistency? Because I don't know about anybody else listening, but a two hour change in my window for a2x result in fat loss.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I think I can skip breakfast back up. Yeah, I think I could probably say no to the donut in the breakroom. Yeah. Grandma's cookies, whatever it was over the holiday, that's going to motivate me. Yeah, right. And then there's a lot of cool other ones in here as well, so I don't want to just harp on the fatness, but you know.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But it's. Yes, you've gone.

[Tommy Welling]
It's awesome. Yeah. And you know, the crazy part about that was we saw the same trend in the visceral fat as well, which is not just your typical fat cell. That's the most important, the most correlated with cardio metabolic disease, the fat cells that are sitting right in between my visceral organs, right around the heart, right by the lungs, right around the liver, the kidneys.

[Tommy Welling]
Those are the fat cells that really, really matter. We see the same stairs up. Even though that one didn't reach statistical significance, we saw the same trend in the results. So potentially with more statistical power, like if this was a longer study, if it was utilizing windows that were a little further apart or a greater sample size, then we could have potentially seen statistical significance in that speculation, of course.

[Tommy Welling]
But the trends are very, very promising, even for the ones that were like, well, it was it was a small change. But you can see the four hour was a better change than the six hour, which and then the control group was either no change or may have been even moving in the wrong direction.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right, right. Right. And so a couple more here. The fasting glucose, same trend, same stair step. Right. So control group elevated slightly at the end of the eight weeks, six hour time restricted feeding rate was decreased compared to the control. And then the four hour obviously was decreased even a little bit greater. Yeah, the fasting. But even more important to me and to us and to the fasting lifestyle is the reduction of insulin and the removal of insulin resistance and the more effective category of insulin sensitivity.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We want to see an increase in our insulin effectiveness here. We did see statistical.

[Tommy Welling]
Significance.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Significance in both of these categories when compared to the control. And you'd mentioned this earlier in both of the eight week studies, we saw a slight increase in the fasting insulin and the insulin resistance categories. And now this is the lurking beneath the surface blood sugar conundrum that happens when you go get your yearly bloodwork and the blood pressure is slightly up.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We're going to talk about LDL, HDL, triglycerides and blood and triglycerides. It's a mouthful and blood pressure here in just a second. But this was me. My liver enzymes were off a little bit. My blood sugar was was was in the air quotes normal range. Right. I didn't know about insulin resistance for now. Insulin resistance. But my blood pressure was slightly elevated.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
My triglycerides were slightly off, my LDL profile was slightly off. And I'm sitting here going, Well, I'm eating less, moving more. I'm not eating processed foods. I still feel like crap all the time. I'm tired, I've reduced my alcohol like, yeah. So the interesting, interesting thing here is that this is getting to the root cause of disease right now, looking at the downstream system, which is like, oh, let's check your blood sugar.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Let's look for one. See, yeah, those are great. But the insulin, right. So there was.

[Tommy Welling]
Without a change in weight.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right.

[Tommy Welling]
Over just eight weeks. Right. It's already ticking.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Up. Ticking up.

[Tommy Welling]
It doesn't take a year to tick. Oh, this is 161 seventh of a year right here.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
This could be this could be the year blood work where you go in one year and the next year you go back and now you've trip. You've trip the wire.

[Tommy Welling]
Trip the wire. Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right now you've you've heard the pin click and the hand grenade and you're like.

[Tommy Welling]
Oh yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Here I am. And now all of a sudden it's, well, here's your medication, here's your option, go lose some weight. And it's like, what? I've been trying to do that for decades. Okay, yeah. Like, give me something a little bit more. So that's what this category right here with these two is not a grand difference between the six hour and the four hour short study.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. Only eight weeks, but a considerable statistical difference between control and fasting groups.

[Tommy Welling]
Mm hmm. Yeah. Can we get into the lean mass for a second here? The. Sure.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Before we go into the blood pressure. Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. So, so going back to it overall, there wasn't a very big difference in the total amount of weight that was lost between the four hour and the six hour window. Right. It was about three, three and a half percent of of total body weight. Great. On the surface. Sounds good. But when we looked at it and we see the fact that the four hour window a little tighter, tighter window on my eating was a little longer fasting.

[Tommy Welling]
The insulin gets to come down a little bit lower. And so what we saw was twice as much fat mass lost. So then we go, wait a minute. Well, how does that add up? And so if we if we actually look at the the lean mass changes, we see we see the largest dip in lean mass coming from the six hour time restricted feeding window group.

[Tommy Welling]
And we go like, well, okay, wait a minute. Like, why? Why might that be? What's what's happening under the surface? Is that real? Is that is that kind of an anomaly? But when we when we go back to what we've we've previously talked about, there was a really cool study that that showed abdominal visceral fat predicting 24 hour growth hormone release and how that correlated with insulin.

[Tommy Welling]
So what we know is the fact that how how high or how low our insulin level is determines what our growth hormone release will be when we're fasting. The growth hormone we know is not anabolic, but it is skeletal, muscle protective. So if we are keeping insulin levels higher, that means it's suppressing the growth hormone release that we need to protect our skeletal muscle while we're doing things like dropping fat consistently through fasting or any other means.

[Tommy Welling]
So this means that the six hour group actually had higher insulin levels, so they got less of a growth hormone response which which absolutely corresponds with this this drop in the lean mass, even though overall body weight change appeared the same, but their their fat versus their muscle change was absolutely different between those two groups.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. So for long term metabolic health, we want lean muscle tissue, right. So we want to do we want to use techniques that allow us to get the weight off, keep the motivation up, feel better because you want to do more once you feel better, right during your fat loss phase and then use the same tools and habits that you developed through the fat loss phase and adapt them to a maintenance lifestyle long term plan.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right.

[Tommy Welling]
So yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Interesting. When I personal experience, people coming to us have done intermittent fasting 16 hours, 18 hours. There is a concern of lean mass, you know, retention.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
That study the abdominal visceral fat and fasting study. Right. The one that you mentioned about growth hormone. Mm. Explains the potential difference of why, like you said, insulin didn't get low enough for growth hormone to increase enough.

[Tommy Welling]
Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
To be able to protect right. And you saw see here in the study that in the four hour, the warrior fast rate, the four hour eating window. Yeah, it's very, very close to the control group.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. And I would surmise that if we did a 24 hour right that it would actually be above right now. One thing we will say is a limitation of this is we also don't know because bigger window potential for more insulin, because you have a potential for more intake, right?

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. A bigger eating window.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. But we also don't know the food variability here through food, which so how do you insulate yourself if you are mixing in some of these six hour, eight hour type intermittent fasting windows? Well, to promote growth hormone, to promote lean mass protectiveness. Right. To to keep the lean mass tissue that you have is prioritizing protein. Yes. Minimum 0.6 grams per pound of body weight.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Minimum of your goal weight minimum. Mm hmm. Increase your resistance. Exercise your weight bearing, exercise, walk, move. Do a few resistance training workouts a week. You don't need to go crazy. Right. And then most importantly is those that nutrisse kitchen. It's not an eating opportunity is your fasting. It's a nutrition opportunity because now yeah, now you have less opportunities to get good nutrition.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And so those decisions actually for the long term, those decisions become more important, especially when we're talking about a maintenance or maintaining a significant amount of weight loss.

[Tommy Welling]
They absolutely do. And like, just to put a fine point on that, if you compare two plates and one was just full of, you know, like highly indulgent foods that we know are like fattening type foods, highly processed carbs, you know, desserts and and things like that. Maybe just some like fast food type foods and pizzas and things like that versus a very well balanced plate.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
The insulin response with prioritized protein.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, the the insulin response, even at the same caloric value is going to be a very, very different insulin response. And so but that insulin response that I had when I broke that fast, it's going to matter to carry me through on next 16, 18, 20 hours, whatever it might be, till I break my next fast. And that insulin response is going to dictate the level of growth hormone, which is then going to going to affect my results from day to day and from week to week, as we can see in the study.

[Tommy Welling]
So like, it's incredibly powerful. And I say that because, you know, we want to be looking at that using the I want power and knowing what what I'm doing, what I want to be doing and the fact that we hear a lot it well, if I'm fasting, can I just eat whatever I want, right? You you could theoretically always just eat whatever you want.

[Tommy Welling]
But fasting is not your fasting is not a silver bullet against nutrition.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You know, it's not a magic weight loss pill right now.

[Tommy Welling]
It's not.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, for sure. One of the thing I wanted to mention your time, it was those other markers that they looked at. Right? So when we first looked at this study, if you just read the the paragraph headers, you don't really get other than the change in fat mass, it's like, oh, similar reduction in this or no, that didn't change this.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right? So this one is four and six hour time restricted feeding windows do not affect blood pressure, LDL, HDL or triglycerides. And all I heard in my head was like the screeching breaks, right? And I was like and it's like, oh, wait a minute, that's not. We've done so many episodes on how that does show there are benefits.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So absolutely actually mentioned here in our extrapolation again is length of study as well as the the food that was consumed. Again, what does your plate look like? Because a lot of other studies out there, they even say the studies in this one are contrary to what has been reported previously. In 2 to 3 months of AIDS fasting or five to fasting, you'll see systolic and diastolic blood pressure come down.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Personal example It's one of the things we hear the most right is how my blood pressure decreased, right? Especially if you're using trace minerals or therapeutic salts. Right. You'll also see the changes in the LDL panel as well. So typically in the short term, you might see an elevation in LDL and triglycerides. But if you go out to greater than eight weeks to 12 weeks, 16 weeks, six months, you'll see an increase in HDL, a decrease in LDL and a decrease in triglycerides as we get that body fat off and we burn through some of those long term stores.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, the same thing happen with the inflammatory markers because we do know that there are studies that show that you will decrease your inflammatory markers like TNF Alpha and IL six in this study we did see oxidative stress reduction, but not that long term. So again, just back to the limitation of the study, a longer study would show those changes that have been seen in other studies that that have that length that this one does not so sure.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
One last piece of the conversation puzzle today to me is the adverse events conversation, right? So no serious adverse events were reported. So your doctor but.

[Tommy Welling]
Of this stuff in.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Here, your sister, your brother, your spouse, your social circle, your class reunion, your training, your your trainer, your nutritionist, who else? Your coworkers. So just you can say this with confidence, not just from this study. No serious adverse events were reported. You did not die because you did not eat right. You're not starving yourself. You're not taking your metabolism.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. But there are some mild events that we hear a lot, especially with people wading into the waters of, well, I did 16. It's not working. Let me try 18. That's hard. Let me try 20. Oh man, I can't imagine. Go in a whole day. How that could people do two and three day fast and why would I do that?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Well, guess what? The blueprint to intermittent fasting fat loss is going to unpack that for you and these adverse these these little mini stumbling blocks. Right. These these symptoms that we see are exactly the same symptoms that you see when you transition from a glucose burner to a ketone producer. So transitioning into ketosis and flipping that metabolic switch where you can burn your stored body fat for energy and not have to worry about taking carbohydrates or sugars or those types of.