It’s Not What You Eat but WHEN You Eat that Really Matters
Chrono Fasting
Syncing Intermittent Fasting with Circadian Rhythm
I, monks, do not eat a meal in the evening. Not eating a meal in the evening I, monks, am aware of good health and of being without illness and of buoyancy and strength and living in comfort. Come, do you too, monks, not eat a meal in the evening. Not eating a meal in the evening you too, monks, will be aware of good health and….. and living in comfort.
Fasting is obviously not a new thing. The quote above comes from the Buddha dates between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. I mention that only to preface that nothing that follows is in any way new. It is, however, a bit unorthodox in modern life.
This entire post is a bit different from anything I have put out, it comes directly out of my own fitness journal unedited. What I am sharing is an experience of something I myself am trying out. Normally when I am sharing information it is around things that I have already seen run out many times. Keep in mind this for me is just an n+1 anecdotal experience so to speak. That being said, there is a significant volume of recent scientific literature and historical record of everything I have been doing with my recent fasting experiments. That’s also the only link that will appear in this post, bad for SEO and “engagement” but ironically good for reading comprehension, let’s optimize this towards the later.
When most people hear intermittent fasting, if they are familiar with the concept, they generally think of skipping breakfast. However, not only the Buddha was telling us to skip a different meal. His observation syncs up with modern science around circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms being natural internal processes synced to our sleep and wake cycles. If we are to follow everything we know about these it’s actually dinner that we would be skipping.
This is exactly what I did after a deep dive into the history of fasting and the latest science surrounding circadian rhythm. I am not writing so much as an “expert” no matter what my tone indicates as someone going through this process for the first time himself. I am sharing this because in my relatively new role as a father this approach is helping me in more ways than one and I suspect I’m not unique, this will not be for everyone but I imagine there are some this will be a game-changer for. I’ll also admit upfront it is not the most orthodox approach as it pertains to modern life, but I have had a great experience with it and that is ultimately why I felt compared to share it without having applied this with any of my own clients yet.
Without further ado, here is a slightly different post than what I usually share, here is my on-going first-hand experience with Chrono-fasting, I think there are valuable lessons in here for everyone…
My first forays into intermittent fasting were in my twenties. Truth be told, my goals & motivation have changed a lot since then. Back then, I lived like most twenty-somethings, as you should in your twenties so you don’t grow up into an old woulda shoulda kinda man. My goal with IF was honestly to look great while partying. Just skip breakfast bro! I used IF to eat junk food, drink, and minimize the effects of my partying on my physique. To be honest, it worked great. My lifestyle slowly & organically started changing but I kept IF as a tool for “cheat” days holidays and parties. It was a staple technique I would apply with many of my clients not willing to drop alcohol or significantly change their lifestyle. At least I could get them losing weight while still committed to making the most basic faux pas’ of all. One caveat, it worked great for maintaining a superficial goal. How your blood work looks is another question- crap in crap out can not be avoided.
For myself, I moved back to more “normal” feeding patterns as I drank & partied less. Balanced nutrition became more of a focus & the level of activity I engage in “early” hours was always a bit abnormal & made typical IF protocols difficult. Performance & strength were important & my workouts at my preferred time were not possible on IF. I tried. I even tried all the “biohacks” to boost performance in the fasted state. Don’t waste your money. I did so don’t take it as condescension, learn from my mistakes, most biohackers are charlatans selling feelings to a willing audience, the oldest trick in the book. I’ve bought their books and listened to their podcasts until metaphorically seeing Oz, don’t meet your gurus if you want to uphold their image, many are just sad little men behind the curtain, literally. Living in Los Angeles had the same effect on me with actors, they are all much shorter & less impressive in real life, if you enjoy the charade, don’t dig deep. Back to the topic at hand.
Recently I have dusted off fasting once more. This time around my goal is very different. I am in my mid-thirties, a fact that most people using millennials as a catchall for “young person” still can’t wrap their aging gray matter around. That’s right, I’m what they used to call middle-aged before 60 was the new 20, right boomers?! LMAO. Age gracefully if you can, our present elders teach me this in their futile attempts to be forever young. That is not my goal. Mine is simply to still be my best at any age. The demands of life as a father & small business owner start to take a toll. In short: more stress, less time, more responsibilities, less sleep, etc…
The student of human biology in me understands how these changes create a cascade of effects that alter one’s hormones. As someone who does not use anabolic steroids, no judgment if you do btw, we just lack transparency on this in the space generally & moral questions aside, the physiology of natural & enhanced lifters are just not the same. I needed something suited to my lifestyle, I was not about to embark down a rabbit hole I had avoided for decades, it’s not like I don’t know where to get gear, I live in LA remember?
I remembered reading studies showing IF increasing anabolic hormones & the idea was getting attractive to me again as I was operating under less and less time. Any parent will relate, but often meals were getting skipped anyway, just too busy & not taking or making time for myself. I knew this wasn’t sustainable & figured I should use these gaps that were naturally popping up for me toward something good. However, I was not going into the same approach I used in my twenties.
As available time was one of my most important determining factors, I drove down the rabbit hole of circadian rhythm and built a program optimized completely around time. For the uninitiated, circadian rhythms are patterns tied to sunlight that influence a number of functions in organs, systems, and throughout the body. When most people adopt IF they do it as I did in my twenties. It is synonymous with skipping breakfast. As I have recently learned & practiced, this is not the best way for many reasons.
Studies of night-shift workers show decreased markers of health & increased likelihood of death & decreased cognitive function. Some will maintain they are night-owls, and sure, to an extent, there is a spectrum of how these things affect each individual, but the range is not as wide as many of us, me in my twenties, want it to be to rationalize our lifestyle. If you eat late, it more likely to be stored as fat. If you sleep late you’re less likely to get into a deep restful sleep. It is circadian rhythm dictating these, not your preferences. Lots of people like to say fuck your feelings to other people’s feelings while constantly rationalizing their own. When I say fuck your feelings, I mean mine. Learn from my example by ignoring your rationalizations & calling your excuses excuses.
If we're “skipping” a meal, the literature suggests it should be dinner. This doesn’t set up well with why most people get into IF, if you’ve read this far I am starting to suspect you’re not like most people so I’ll keep going. If we’re being honest, we should finish eating by about 3pm if we’re adhering to everything we know about circadian rhythms. Sleep quality will be improved by not digesting during sleep, two-fold if you go to bed before midnight & take advantage of the most useful hours of sleep before melatonin decreases into morning hours.
One of the main reasons I got back into IF was hormones. Father time & fatherhood are conspiring against mine. Fasting does increase HGH production naturally but here’s another inconvenient truth for twenty-something Simon, you need to fast about 16 hours to begin to get that boost. While I cited this fact to myself & my clients through my twenties, none of us were fasting long enough to get those benefits. More accurately we were using time restriction to create a caloric deficit. Valid technique but leaving lots of progress off the table. I knew this time around I wanted to get into a longer daily fast tied to circadian rhythm to get the most out of my effort. I don’t have time for anything else to be honest.
The biggest surprise so far, about 4 weeks in, has been how easy my current regiment is to maintain. I thought it would be difficult, but difficult was actually maintaining habits not coordinated with my circadian rhythm. Currently, I am on the 20:4 warrior diet protocol, one I always thought too extreme for me, but I am finding it the easiest & most intuitive nutrition concept I’ve used to date.
A typical day I wake without an alarm sometime between 4 & 4:30, if my daughter doesn’t have other plans. In the old days, I did a hard workout first thing in the morning. The science of circadian rhythm taught me otherwise. My morning workout is much easier by my standards. Water, coffee & a dog walk or animal flow or some original strength. You’ve got google I’m not going into all those here, just know these are not intense or difficult things. My clients start earlyish, 5:30‐6:00 am most days. It is not at all challenging to get through my morning workload on black coffee & fatty acids my body begins shuttling for energy as a result of my caffeine, fasting, and movement all contribute to. I actually have to move & lift at work so I feel like most people’s jobs wouldn’t be difficult in a fasted state either but you’ll have to give it a shot yourself & get back to me. Maybe I’m special, I seriously doubt it though as everything else in my life points to the opposite conclusion.
My first meal winds up being around 11 am. I go big, but here’s another difference between my current strategy & my twenties experience, nutrition matters. Many people adopt IF to “eat whatever” they want. They cite improved insulin resistance as justification. At this point, however, I will argue the opposite, on IF I think nutrition matters MORE, not less than a “normal” eating pattern. I keep putting normal in quotes because it’s truly an arbitrary pattern more synced to hyper-technological industrial societies than anything else. The default eating pattern most settle into has no basis in human biology, hence “normal” but that’s beside the point. The number one cause of obesity & countless other ills of the Western diet is, believe it or not, malnutrition. For all the calories we eat, most do not meet basic nutrition guidelines consistently, day after day, and this is what compromises their health more than any other singular factor.
Don’t eat what you want. My breakfast is a big nutrient-dense affair. Eggs, vegetables, lean meats, V8, greens etc… instead of cramming as much junk in, I cram as much nutrition in. If you do this, you will find your hunger diminishes greatly as your body will not be screaming at you to give it nutrients you keep failing to supply. My daughter’s nap is conveniently after my lunch, I head outside to my gym & hit my big workout. One major drawback for me on IF is decreased performance. I like being strong & I can not train to the same level fasted. Some swear they can, studies would argue against them & my experience is the same as the studies. Some days I’ll have a post-workout shake, but not always. A large early dinner usually does the trick & I am satisfied & satiated throughout the evening.
One of the least helpful ideas I grew up on in fitness was to eat 5–6 meals a day. Planning & preparing this much food isn’t possible for most & why it has been a failure for most people. Believing this became an impediment to me trying other things. When I sid it successfully in this mode, I lived a life few would envy or aspire to. Want another full-time job? Eat 5–6 meals every day. Already busy enough? As weird and unconventional as everything I have described here must sound it is a far easier & more sustainable way to live & eat. There’s nothing magic about it, it’s far closer to how our bodies were designed to function.
“Eat to live, and not live to eat. To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” Ben Franklin
This is the point where the gurus invent a perfect pastoral past we decadent moderns descended from. That’s bullshit. There is no paradise past but the default positions we have arrived at in modernity are connected to nothing but modern conventions. They lock people into habits completely out of sync with their biology & consistently set them up to fail.
My way won’t be conducive to everyone. It wasn’t for me for many years. If however, you want to get the greatest return on investment for your investments in your health, organizing your effort around your biology, not arbitrary conventions will help. Here is one way, as for THE way, it does not exist. If you use what I’ve learned to find your own way you’ve understood me, if you dogmatically copy my schedule you have not listened to me, merely passed your eyes over these pixels.
This ends the stream of consciousness ranting section on the post. This will probably be the first and last time I copy and paste something out of my journal but I do hope that it is helpful.
One part I did not address that does come up and is a challenge for me is timing this with my daughter’s meals. Being a father is my top priority and sometimes I have to be flexible. I shouldn’t have to mention it, but I have read my comments before so I know how uncharitably someone will attempt to interpret all this, my daughter is NOT intermittent fasting, only I am. That being said, if it is 4 or 5 and my daughter wants to eat with me, I do not stick with my fasting protocol. If it winds up being a 16 or 18 hour fast because I had dinner with my daughter so be it. Maybe I move my first meal time the next day to accommodate but being a dad comes first in everything I do now and this is no exception. In fact, this approach makes being an active and present father easier for me and that’s a huge benefit.
This change did move dinner time up for everyone in my family as we do like to eat together and that has elicited some surprising changes. We make a point to exercise and be active after dinner, nothing crazy, it’s not a workout per se, but anyone who has played with a toddler knows you have got to move! Being outside and active without having to come back home for our normal dinner time leads to more predictable sleep for our little one. We always got out in the afternoon but had to cut activities short to get home for dinner. Now that we eat an earlier “dinner” it has made the evening sleep routine even easier.
Needless to say, I am continuing my experiment with time-restricted feeding. It is frankly funny it took me this long to connect the ideas of circadian rhythms to intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting teaches us that it matters less WHAT one eats, and WHEN one eats makes a big difference. It only follows from acceptance of that to sync consumption to the times when the body is best suited to eat. These times are admittedly not “convenient” in terms of modern life, but as many of us are experiencing massive time distortions in the post COVID world, I think that many may be able to try discarding our old arbitrary times and schedules for something more suited to their biology.
Many people will read this, which I must commend you on as the number of literary minds is in retreat so thank you for your time and attention, and go right back to their eating patterns carved out by modernity. All good I get it that this is not for everyone. However, if you are one of the few intrigued by this and interested in experimenting yourself, feel free to either reach out to me before for some tips and suggestions of how to mold this to your life, which invariably looks different from mine- or please tell me how it has gone for you if you have already attempted it.
While this is one of the oldest ideas in nutrition, syncing intermittent fasting with circadian rhythm is still new to me and I’d love to hear from others who have tried the same. Stay strong my friends!
