114: Programming Your Ideal Metabolic Rhythm
In this week’s episode we’re dialing in three key ways to best program your metabolism according to circadian rhythm:
Establish a consistent break fast time.
Aim for eating within an 8-11 hour feeding window.
Start your fast 2-3 hours before you go to sleep.
We’re also diving into what technically breaks a fast, how long you should fast for weight loss and why eating too late increases heartburn, fat storage and poor sleep. Listen in for all the details!
EPISODE 114: Programming Your Ideal Metabolic Rhythm
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
Hello my friend! Welcome back to the club. How are you today?
Y’all know how I love to regard our bodies in relation to Creation -
How we work in sync with the earth, the light, plant life, animal life.
The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda PhD
I’ve talked about the importance of light in several podcasts and how exposure to natural sunlight throughout the day really helps set your circadian clock. It tells your body where it’s at in time and space and triggers your brain to message all of the organs in your body about when to do their jobs.
Ideally you get some morning, noon and evening light into your eyes and on your body and the receptors in your eyes and skin take in that information.
As the light changes throughout the day, it keeps signaling your body about what to do.
That morning light reminds your body to make cortisol in the day and melatonin at night, the midday light is best for making vitamin D, that softer, reddish evening light tells your body to wind down the daytime processes and get ready for the nighttime activities of detoxification and repair.
Part of the reason people may have high cholesterol is that they’re not getting out into the sun enough and giving the body the chance to use it to make Vitamin D.
It’s important not to get too much blue light from screens especially at night - which tells your body it’s still day time and to keep producing cortisol instead of melatonin. It confuses all of your body processes.
(3:12) Foundations of our circadian rhythms:
In addition to light, there are two other major inputs that set your circadian rhythm and signal your body about what to do.
Light, food and sleep - these are the foundations of our circadian rhythm and when any of them are off, your whole body will be off.
Every organ in our body has its own clock. Light, food and sleep activate your organs to do their work at certain times and these organs have their most efficient times that they are meant to work in the day or night.
Circadian rhythm by definition are the biological processes that happen at certain times of the day. In Latin - circa means “around”/approximately, diem means “day.”
Within our circadian rhythm there are certain times of the day that are best to eat, to workout, to poop, to get your work done….the whole shebang.
Today I want to talk more about the metabolic part so that you can understand how to better program your metabolism to work at its peak level.
(4:37) Feasting and Fasting:
There was a study done on mice that showed when they ate their food - within a time-restricted 8-hour window -they were more protected from the health problems and diseases than those that ate without time restriction.
Those mice showed benefits from fasting 16 hours and eating within that 8-hour window - even thought they were not eating their best diet.
On the flip side of that, more studies showed that when the mice ate for 15 hours or longer each day, meaning they have this big wide eating window, their body acts as if they are eating constantly - even carrying into the time they are not eating. It puts their internal systems all out of whack. But those that fasted for 8-12 hours stayed healthy.
The optimum eating window is between 8-11 hours and fasting between 13-16 hours.
12 hours is still good - like a 12 hours fasting window and a 12 hour eating window, but the health benefits start doubling at each hour you add on to that - so they double when you fast for 13, double again at 14, double again at 15, and double again 16 - according to the studies I read about in this book.
The best results for weight loss happen when you eat within an 8-9 hour eating window and fast for 15-16 hours. Once you achieve your desired weight loss, you can maintain with an 11-12 eating window window and 12-13 hour fasting window.
(7:31) Eating Window:
Circadian Rhythm Feeding and Feasting - I’m building on that today based on information that I read in The Circadian Code.
Eating in the daylight hours is best for your metabolism and the later we eat, the more the metabolism gets thrown off.
The circadian clocks inside of your digestive organs are fired up to work in the daytime hours. And the later it gets in the day, the more sluggish and less efficient they get.
As the evening and nightime approaches, your digestive and metabolic system is supposed to wind down so that your detoxification system can fire up.
The process of digestion, absorption and metabolism takes a few hours to complete - even a small bite of food takes a few hours to be processed.
It takes about 2-3 hours from your last bite for your body to complete digesting and metabolizing your food.
In order to fall asleep, your body temperature must cool down by almost 1 degree fahrenheit.
When we eat, blood rushes to the gut to help digest and absorb the food and this actually raises your body temperature.
AND on top of that, your detoxification system has to wait for the digestive and metabolic processes to complete before it can really kick into gear.
Your prime detoxification - when your body resets and repairs everything - happens during the night, while you’re sleeping.
You want to try to wrap up your last meal of the day 2-3 hours before bedtime.
(12:24) First meal of the day:
If we’re trying to eat dinner 2-3 hours before bed time, that’s going to naturally shift our eating window earlier in the day.
This does shift seasonally - because daylight is longer during the summer and shorter in the winter.
Our body becomes ready to deal with food in the daylight hours and so we need to consider these three things:
What time we’re going to break our fast, the length of our eating/feeding window and what time do we need to stop eating — to optimize this digestive and metabolic process?
(15:31) What breaks a fast?
What I’ve always told my people, my Feast 2 Fasters is that a fast in its truest form is water. But that we can still get amazing fasting benefits even if we include coffee and even if we include coffee with a little bitta sumpin sumpin in it.
You don’t want to load your coffee up with a bunch of chemical filled creamer or sugar but you can get away with a little bit of creamer that is mostly fat and no carb.
The reason is that when you wakeup in the morning, you are in a fat-burning mode. Your body has burned through a lot of its glycogen (which is stored sugar, and remember the body is going to prioritize burning sugar before fat) so what’s great about fasting overnight is that your body has gone through most of the sugar and has the chance to start burning fat.
In Feast 2 Fast this is one of our primary goals - is training the body to be metabolically flexible - to burn both carbs and fat as fuel.
This book points out and explains is that anything aside from water technically breaks a fast because it engages the digestive and metabolic system. So even black coffee is going to do that.
There are still amazing results of fasting even if it includes your coffee. However, what this book goes on to explain is that the circadian clocks of your digestive and metabolic organs start ticking upon the break of your fast - which is anything other than water.
It kicks off the clock in the gut which determines when to produce hunger hormones, digestive juices, absorb nutrients, activate certain gut bacteria, move waste.
The pancreas gets ready to secrete insulin.
The muscles get ready to soak up sugar.
The liver gets ready to store glycogen (sugar to be used for later) and send fat off for storage.
(22:01) The digestive process:
In the book it says, “Almost every aspect of eating, from craving food or feeling hungry to digestion and elimination, occurs according to strong circadian timing.”
“Eating the wrong foods at the wrong time not only disrupts the digestive clock but creates disease and chronic illness.”
One super fascinating aspect of this is the circadian rhythm of your gut microbiome.
The different bacteria in your gut have different functions and digest different types of nutrients.
Without all the right bacteria we cannot fully digest our food- that’s one big reason it’s important to have good, helpful bacteria and a diverse population in your gut.
Incompletely digested food particles can trigger inflammation, cause leaky gut and trigger food sensitivities.
Our gut lining gets repaired between meals and during the night.
When we sleep, growth hormone secreted from the brain acts on the gut lining to repair itself.
Poor sleep can shift the microbiome to a state that encourages obesity.
In one study, when fecal matter from jet-lagged people was placed in mice, they became obese, but fecal matter from healthy people did not trigger the mice to become obese.
Another study showed that one set of bacteria flourish when the mice ate, one set flourish when the mice fasted.
The composition of your gut microbiome changes with the day and night.
One of the most powerful ways to maintain a strong circadian rhythm as far as the food input goes is eating at the same time of day - especially that first meal.
Your body does get used to eating at the same time and your organs get used to processing food at the same time each day.
Consistency in your eating and sleeping times is really helpful in maintaining a strong circadian rhythm which in turn helps prevent chronic disease.
(28:26) Here is what you takeaway to work on from this episode:
Try to establish an consistent break fast time.
Aim for eating within a 12 hours or less feeding window.
Stop eating - start your fast - 2-3 hours before you go to sleep - finishing dinner up by sunset is best.
As always, don’t let perfection be the enemy of your progress. Don’t make things so black and white that you miss incredible results in the gray.
And, finally thank the Lord for His incredible creation which includes the gift of your body.
(30:38) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!