Establishing Supporting Habits Part 1: Time Restricted Eating

Instead of eating constantly through your eating window, focus on discreet meals that really satisfy. Quit all snacking.

Today’s post is building on the foundation set in the Three-Week Challenge. If you’re new and are wondering where to start with IF, read that post first.

For the next few weeks, we’re going to cover some tips for building upon the fasting journey.

There are two different ways to think about fasting. One is to view fasting as an excuse to eat poorly. When I first tried IF, I wasn’t successful for several years because I didn't have a coach giving me pointers. This is why I love to help people now.

My single biggest mistake was that I thought of fasting as an excuse to eat anything in my eating window. I heard IF presented as: “You don’t have to change what you eat, just when you eat.”

This appealed to me after coming off of the keto diet which was so restrictive. “Now I can eat all the carbs I want,” I thought, “and still lose weight.” But for me, this didn’t work.

In truth, some people can get results from simply fasting and not changing how they eat. This works for people who already eat a mostly healthy diet, have a somewhat healthy relationship with food, are not emotional eaters, are not addicted to processed foods, carbs, or sugar, and already have solid habits surrounding food in place. For them, only changing when they eat is enough.

But for the rest of us, we need to think of IF in the exact opposite way than I used to. Instead of IF being an excuse to eat all the junk that we deny ourselves on other diets, we should think of IF as the first step to getting all kinds of other things in our lives in order.

PARADIGM SHIFT: THINK OF INTERMITTENT FASTING AS STEP #1 ON A NEW HEALTH JOURNEY

Would you track mud through your house after you had just mopped the floor?

In the same way, don’t undo in your eating window what you accomplished in your fasting window. After all, fasting is hard work. Even though it may not be nearly as hard as counting points on WW or denying all carbs on keto, it still requires discipline. Why would we want to undo all of the metabolic valuable cleanup that fasting just accomplished by eating a bunch of junk in our eating window?

Instead, all the hard work of fasting prepares us for the next step in our health journey: making better food choices. That’s why I came up with guidelines in the three-week challenge such as eating protein first, cutting out all zero-cal sweeteners, and ditching the seed oils. You’ve been so good all day, you don’t want something like stevia or obesigenic seed oils to sabotage your progress. But once you’re in the habit of choosing better foods, you’re ready to incorporate yet another strategy.

Time Restricted Eating (TRE)

Some people use this term interchangeably with intermittent fasting but Jason Fung, whom I hail as the Fasting King, and his coaches at TheFastingMethod.com, use the term to refer to eating discreet meals without snacks. I mentioned this as number 6 in the three-week challenge but I feel it needs elaboration.

Remember that the name of the game with IF is reducing two interrelated modern health plagues: hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.

Just to review, hyperinsulinemia refers to having a much higher level of the hormone insulin in the blood than is optimal. Since insulin is a master hormone with over 200 functions in the body, elevated insulin leads to a cascade of modern ailments from migraines and PCOS to cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and of course T2 diabetes. Insulin becomes elevated from a constant deluge of ultra-processed foods.

The good news: lowering insulin lowers your body’s set weight and allows weight loss without slowing the metabolic rate (as low-calorie diets do).

Insulin resistance is a cellular reaction to hyperinsulinemia where the cells are bathed in so much insulin that they no longer respond properly to the signal to open up and accept glucose. This is the path to type 2 diabetes.

Intermittent fasting is the single most effective way to cure these twin modern ailments. But we want to tackle the demons on all fronts.

There is a giant difference insulin-wise between fasting for 16 hours followed by eating many times over 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours followed by eating one large meal from about noon to 1:00 and another meal from 6:00-8:00.

Although the pancreas primarily releases insulin in response to eating, that’s not the only time. The more carbs ingested in a meal, the more insulin that is released in response. Since the body functions optimally with about 1 tsp of sugar dissolved in the blood (correlates with roughly 85 on the blood glucometer), and since 5 tsp can kill you, if you eat something glucose-heavy, the pancreas will release a flood of insulin to escort all that excess glucose out of your blood to save your life.

But insulin is also released into the bloodstream around the clock to maintain a certain level. We call this amount basal insulin level or more commonly, fasting insulin level. The body keeps a certain level of insulin always circulating in preparation for how many carbs it anticipates you will eat. This is why you feel off when you first cut carbs. Your body is all prepped and ready for the normal daily carb onslaught and when it doesn’t come, your blood sugar can feel a little low despite not actually being low (perceived reactive hypoglycemia).

The two ways you can reduce this background insulin is having a nice long minimum of 16-18 hour fast daily (and some people benefit from occasionally going 24 hours or longer) PLUS also allowing your insulin to fall between meals. This second step is important too. If you’re doing a 16:8, don’t think of noon to 8 p.m. as an open eating window. Otherwise, it’s possible for your body to lower insulin slightly while fasting for 16 hours and then spike it back up during the 8 hours. This will undo all your hard work.

Having fasted both the right way and the wrong way, the biggest difference I notice is that fasting is much more difficult when done the wrong way. If you’re feeling hangry and irritable in your fasting window, that’s a sign that your body is confused.

The confusion comes when your eating habits have made your body afraid to lower insulin as much as it needs to access the fat stores that make you feel good and not hungry while fasting.

Have you ever asked yourself the question why someone who has 100 lbs to lose feels hungry despite having months of fuel stored on the system? The reason they feel hungry is because they are hormonally prepped and ready to store away oodles of extra calories. They are not hormonally prepped to go digging around in the deep freezer for some long-term energy stores. They are in constant energy storage mode, never purge mode. Never forget: insulin is your energy-storing hormone.

Eating discreet meals with protein and fat first and fewer processed carbs allows your body to stay in deep-freezer digging mode even while you’re eating. Eating all throughout your eating window means that the whole “clean out the freezer” mode gets screeched to a violent halt. Now it’s, “repackage food to go down to the freezer” mode. Your body doesn’t switch well between these two modes.

Guage how you feel. You should be entering into an increased energy state where you have greater mental focus. You should feel good overall when fasting even though your stomach may growl a little now and then.

I know IF is often presented as one big, long eating window. But if you’re not getting the results you want, try eating discreet meals only.

Another benefit of TRE is that the foods we tend to grab on the go are not usually healthy foods. The foods that we eat within meals, knife and fork foods, tend to be the healthiest and most nutrient-dense.

Next week we’ll talk about what plating means. Don’t think of these tips as annoying rules to follow but as gentle nudges that will one day become lifelong habits. They’re the next steps to creating the new you.

Finally, before we go, I want to thank my paid subscribers who make this work possible. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but it’s becoming more difficult to get non-mainstream medical information as search engines are increasingly hiding info that doesn’t fit the medical establishment narrative. Substack is one of the few platforms that is vehemently committed to free speech.

If you’ve been blessed by IF, don’t forget to share the info with a friend. It can feel awkward at first, but from someone who has felt awkward many times, I can honestly say, you get used to it. You feel less awkward each time you share.

Until next week, fast well, feast well, and tell someone about your success!

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]