Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman explains the most efficient way to burn fat is through the use of...
Video Transcript:
intermittent fasting impacts weight loss fat loss in particular muscle maintenance and loss and gain inflammation sickness recovery and healing from sickness exercise cognition mood and lifespan time restricted feeding it's very clear from both animal studies and human studies can have a very powerful and positive impact on everything from weight loss and fat loss to various Health parameters if I can emphasize anything today it's that what you eat and when you eat it set conditions in your body and those conditions can be very good for you or very bad for you depending on when you eat in fact when you eat is as important as what you eat I'll repeat that when you eat is as important as what you eat think of it this way blood sugar and Insulin go up when you eat they go down when you don't eat and other hormones go up when you don't eat so there are hormones associated with a fasted State and there are hormones associated with the eating and having just eaten State now the most important thing to understand is that insulin and glucose go up when we eat and it takes some period of time for them to go down even if we stop eating they will remain up for some period of time and then go back down it takes time this is very important because if you look at the scientific literature on fasting it's absolutely clear that the health benefits not just the weight loss benefits but that the health benefits from time restricted feeding occur because certain conditions are met in the brain and body for a certain amount of time now an important point about when the feeding Window Falls within the 24-hour cycle it is very important that the feeding window fall during the more active phase of one's day so for humans that's typically in the early part of the day or the later part of the day but not at night put very simply there are a lot of data now pointing to the fact that eating during the nocturnal phase of the 24-hour cycle is very detrimental to one's Health in this study they saw something really interesting which was that not only did restricting food to a particular phase of the 24-hour cycle benefit things like lean body mass and fat loss and a number of Health parameters that I'll talk about in a moment but it also anchored all the gene systems of the body and provided a more regular stable so-called circadian rhythm or 20 24-hour Rhythm this has now also been shown to be true for humans so if you want to be healthy you want your organ Health your metabolic Health to be entrained properly one of the most important things you can do is to eat at the appropriate time of each 24-hour day the short takeaway from this is you probably want to think about and perhaps even engage in time restricted feeding one of the key pillars of intermittent fasting is that for the first hour after you wake up and potentially for longer to not ingest any food the second major pillar that's well supported by research is that for the two and ideally three hours prior to bedtime you also don't ingest any food or liquid calories for that matter it's very clear from the research in humans that not eating any food or ingesting any calories liquid or otherwise for the first 60 minutes after waking up each day and for the two to three hours prior to your bedtime that's ideal for the parameters that we've discussed earlier so let's deal with this first question of when is the ideal feeding window so it turns out that the answer to the question when is it best to eat is actually best answered by thinking about the other side of the coin which is when is it best to fast because we are fasting during sleep it's very clear that it's best to extend the Sleep related fast either into the morning or to start it in the evening when we sleep our body undergoes a number of different processes in the brain and body in order to recover the cells and tissues many of you have probably heard of autophagy which is essentially cleaning up a gobbling up of dead cells and cells that are injured or sick and this is a natural process that occurs and it occurs mainly during sleep although not only during sleep fasting of any kind does tend to enhance autophagy so you're already fasting when you're asleep and how deep you are into that fast depends on how long it was since your last meal so if you fast early in the day and you've been asleep for five six seven eight hours I would hope somewhere between six and eight hours for most people is going to be beneficial I mentioned earlier that you don't want to eat for at least the first 60 minutes after waking but were you to extend end that fasting to say 9 A. M 10 a. m 11 A.
M or even 12 noon or later you are taking advantage of the deep fast that you were in during sleep and certainly toward the end of sleep so one thing is certain that you want your eating window to be tacked or attached to your sleep-based fasting in a way that makes it easier for you to get into the fasted state for a period of time so if you are like most people and you sleep at night you're waking up somewhere around 6 30 7 A. M or maybe even 8 A. M let's say you were to push your fasting window out such that you started eating at noon and then you stopped eating at 6 PM well then you're not eating from 6 PM until let's say your bedtime is 10 pm but from 6 p.