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I'm trying the 8-hour diet
I'm road-testing the new diet craze to see if I can make it work for me.
Thu, Jan 31 2013 at 6:35 PM
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Photo: Mark Nye/Flickr
In the fall, I announced a diet plan that I put together myself, which featured lots of leafy greens, an alcohol limit, and some other good ideas. Long story short, it worked, but only to the tune of my losing three of the pounds I'd set out to lose (I wanted to lose 10 in 60 days and 15 overall). The good news is that I've kept them off, I exercise five to six days a week (pretty vigorously), I have been vegetarian for 20 years, and I only weigh 10 pounds more than I did in high school. (I'm 36).
But ... I'm still over where I'd like to be. So in the spirit of chubby-feeling Americans throughout history, I have been lured into trying the latest fad eating plan, the 8-hour diet. I like this plan because it's simple — so simple, in fact, that it can be described in just a sentence: Only eat (whatever you want!) for eight hours a day, and "fast" for 16. Since I regularly get eight to nine hours of sleep a night (yes, I prioritize my sleep!), that's really only eight hours that I have to not eat.
Of course, the original plan (and book behind the plan) by Men's Health editor David Zinczencko goes into more detail than that. He lays out a plan that includes eating healthfully (lots of fruits and veggies, lean proteins and unprocessed carbs), but I do all that already (if you're not, you should be, for a host of health benefits, including weight loss). Probably the most interesting parts of the book are the other health-improvers, besides dropping pounds, that the feast-and-famine plan includes:
"The 8-hour diet works on a cellular level. By making simple changes to one’s daily eating patterns, The 8-hour diet triggers a person’s mitochondria — the energy centers of the body’s cells — to selectively burn fat for energy, while reducing the amount of cancer-causing cell damage caused by the typical American diet. The result: The 8-hour diet trains a person’s body to grow leaner, slows the aging process, and serves as a magic bullet to take down the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s."
What the heck? It doesn't seem dangerous, and if it works, it seems stick-to-it-able. I like that you could eventually (or even from the beginning) choose to do it three or five days a week and still see benefits. How it's going to work for me is that I'm not going to change anything else; I'm going to keep exercising as I do, keep my good eating habits up, and enjoy my weekly treat of an almond croissant. But I'm going to do all my eating between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. for the next two weeks. (I'm usually up at 8:45 a.m. and go to the gym or hit the trail at 9:30). My only rule will to be sure not to eat outside of these times. Wish me luck!
Would you try the 8-hour diet?
Related on MNN: Which diet is right for you? 13 popular plans explained
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All this talking about food is making me hungry. *sigh*
Sounds great - if you don't work. Otherwise, the only way to make this work is to skip a meal - breakfast or lunch. There's just no way to cram three meals into an ordinary 8 or 9 hour workday.
Of course, calling it the "Skip Breakfast Diet" - or worse, the "Skip Dinner Diet" - probably woudn't sell as many books and articles.
Try avoiding breads with lard in them. Also cupcakes, donunts, corn muffins and anything else that is made of mostly flour and lard. Mix salt in your milk and sprinkle salt on ice cream to eat less of it.
Personally I would try avoiding breads with bread in them...
Intermittent fasting. Been around for a long time. I've been doing it for about a year. I love it. Easy to control the weight, less time preparing food and doing dishes.
This diet flies in the face of all the data about eating many small meals to keep your body from going into starvation mode when it goes for long periods of time and thinks it may never eat again. I was rail thin when I ate multiple small meals or snacks all day but my diet now is similar to the 8-hour diet. And the weight just keeps piling on...
Its called skipping breakfast, pretty easy.
Wanna buy a bridge?
So delicious....
Try this diet.
In a large bowl, mix 1 quart of very ripe prunes with one gallon of room temperature prune juice. Season with chile peppers and tabasco sauce.
Pour all ingrediants into a blender and mix on high for one minute and then pour into your favorite glass. Drink 32 ounces for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You will surely love it.
Just eat in moderation....then poop.
It doesn't sound very easy to follow to me either. Even if you started later in the day, say midday, that would mean you stop eating at 8pm, which still gives you a few hours of hunger before you go to bed, making it harder for you to get to sleep. This diet wouldn't interact well with insomnia.
You're body adjusts and you end up taking in fewer calories. No laws of physics are violated. There are some interesting potential benefits to intermittent fasting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting
How's it going? Any updates so far?
David Zinczencko is piggy backing off of the work of others. Martin Berkhan being one of them. I made this comment before and it has "magically" disappeared. Martin in his latest blog post goes into details about getting ripped off by these other guys. I'm not promoting Martin's system, I just want people to be aware that the "8 Hour Diet" was not this guys original idea.
I came across it from something called Fast 5 which is a five hour eating window. That is a free website. Who needs a book for a plan that can be summed up in a few words?