My boyfriend and I had been doing a lot of research on this concept, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a bandwagon everyone was hopping on. It wasn’t until I attended a Personal Training conference until I fully understood what this meant.

We had a doctor (I wish I remember her name, but I can’t at the moment – this was years ago) speak about the importance of limiting your eating hours to at least below 12 hours per day. I think the name of it can sound a little intimidating and misleading, but all you do is work on fasting an appropriate amount of time to help balance out your metabolism.

Before I looked into this research, there would be days that I would eat as soon as I woke up, say at 7:30am, then I would be eating throughout the day until about 11:00pm before I went to bed. That’s 15.5 hours of letting your insulin go all over the place. I can’t even imagine how messed up it would’ve been in university… binge drinking all night then having pizza at 4:00am? Yikes. Insulin is meant to come in and do its job by lowering your blood sugar levels, then leave and carry on with its day. It is similar to when we think of the hormone, cortisol – the stress hormone – where it is supposed to enter the body when you are stressed (being chased by a tiger) and then leave as soon as you are safe. But with our lives that we live, it’s quite often that cortisol stays in our bodies in small doses all of the time.

Anyways, back to insulin. What I learned from this keynote speaker, is that your metabolism works like your circadian rhythm, our biological clock letting us know when it is time to sleep or wake up. Eating for long periods of time completely throws off your metabolism and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to while you are sleeping. You want to make sure there is a set period of time when insulin enters the body and has time to lower for at least 12 hours.

An interesting study that she told us about was when they tested this on rats. They gave the same amount of calories, same food, to two different groups of rats. One group ate within 9 hours, and the other group ate within 15 hours. The first group who ate in a shorter amount of time actually gained lean muscle mass and lost fat mass, whereas the other group lost lean muscle mass and gained fat mass. She said eating in a shorter time interval is MORE IMPORTANT that WHAT you are eating. There have been studies showing that eating in short time intervals has incredible benefits on the body and can even help add years to your life.

My experience with intermittent fasting

I have always been someone who eats breakfast immediately in the morning. I couldn’t think of a good time period to choose in the day because I also like snacking after dinner. They say that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, but after learning more about this concept, it’s more so that “your first meal is the most important meal of the day” which is also technically a ‘breakfast’ because you are breaking your fast. So I decided to try and keep my eating hours between 12:30pm and 8:30pm.

The first day was tough just because I had always thought I would pass out if I didn’t eat immediately after I woke up. I was definitely feeling hungry, but thankfully I was at work and could focus on that while I was secretly starving. My first meal was my lunch at 12:30pm and from there, I packed more snacks than normal because I thought I was going to die or something. I found I was more hungry because I was missing about 300 or so calories that I would normally have in the morning. I also found it difficult to stop eating at 8:30pm, so a couple of times I would eat a bit later and felt okay about it. As long as I at least stayed with eating in less than 12 hours, I knew it would benefit me.

The next few days became easier, but I was struggling to remember to eat snacks throughout the day. I was only eating lunch and then dinner, so I would be hungry for the rest of the evening. I think a big part here is to still consume enough calories, but just in a shorter amount of time. I watched a few YouTube videos on people who are into this, and I found the big body builders who would eat 4000 calories in 2-4 hours… That was not very motivating and seemed terrible. So I did my best to make bigger meals and add more snacks in between.

The end result

What I noticed is I actually felt more focused in the mornings. I read up on this and apparently this is because your body enters “survival mode” from the long period of fasting, so it’s as if I’m on high alert to find food. I thought that was pretty cool. The first meal also always tasted so amazing, so I enjoyed my lunches a lot more. I lost about 10 lbs doing this and found that I was sleeping better. I feel liberated knowing that I won’t pass out if I don’t have breakfast immediately after waking up. I remember being at friends’ houses after staying the night and no one would even think about breakfast for 1-2 hours after waking up. I felt pressure to not complain, yet all I wanted to say is “so what are we having for breakfast?”

I still to this day make sure I am eating within 12 hours. I know that it is a better idea to start eating early and finish early so you aren’t consuming calories right before bed, but that just hasn’t worked for me. Ideally I would eat at 8:30am and finish eating at 4:30pm, but I find this difficult because it’s hard to eat snacks sometimes while I’m working… it can get very busy. So on most days, I will just have a black coffee, head to work and have my first meal at lunch. On days that I have off, I still enjoy making a nice breakfast, but it’s usually a bit later in the day around 10:00am.

I would recommend that everyone try to at least keep their eating to below 12 hours per day, and if you are already doing this – good job and keep it up!