74: Circadian Rhythm Feeding and Fasting
There are three big takeaways I want you to get from this week’s podcast:
God designed our bodies to work according to a Circadian Rhythm - this includes when we eat and when we fast.
Ideally, it is better to break your fast earlier in the day than it is to break it later in the day.
It is 100% ok, natural and even helpful to vary your feeding and fasting times and patterns. There is metabolic magic in variation!
EPISODE 74: Circadian Rhythm Feeding and Fasting
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
Welcome back to the club!
I get a lot of questions about fasting:
How long should I fast?
What are your goals: weight loss? Stomach issues? Longevity? Brain clarity?
If stressed with adrenals, we don’t want to over-stress body.
(1:40) Benefits of fasting are well established:
Fasting helps the body to burn fat = weight loss
Digestion:
Helps your body “hear” hormones better - insulin, leptin, ghrelin
Rest and digest:
Very good for prescription for stomach issues— even short fasts between meals instead of grazing all day long, eating every 2-3 hours demands constant activity from digestive system, go longer between meals,
Anti-aging:
Boosts mitochondria (the energy maker in your cells)
Renews cells, replacing bad part with good parts
Fasting helps extend telomeres:
Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes.
Think of it like the plastic piece at the end of your shoelace protecting it. If that shoelace cap cracks and falls off, the shoelace gets frayed and basically doesn’t work right anymore.
The more damaged and shorter telomeres get, the more you increase the incidence of illness and disease AND it’s a marker for being closer to death. Fasting can help protect and extend those telomere caps.
Boosts brain health, mental clarity and cognition:
I hear from so many women that they live in constant brain fog.
We don’t have time to be 10 beats behind! We need clear sharp energetic brains right now AND as we age. If we’re already having trouble with our brains in our 30s and 40s, it doesn’t bode well for where we’ll be in our 60s and 70s. Getting alzheimer's is not something that randomly hits in your 70’s, it’s a slow progression that can start 20 years before it fully manifests. We need to recognize that and take care of our brains now and fasting is wonderful for that.
(6:01) Spiritual benefits to fasting:
Fasting has its roots as a spiritual practice, a discipline that is meant to draw us closer to God.
It’s one of those things that helps close the gap between the physical and spiritual realms, we deny ourselves physically so that we can strengthen ourselves spiritually.
In the book Eat Fast Feast, author Jay W Richards said:
“There is one thing Satan fears even more <than prayer>: prayer and fasting.”
When you pair fasting with prayer, you release a supernatural whip on the enemy and stir up the supernatural power to overcome worldly, earthly, physical problems.
Fasting is a true foundation of integrating our spirit, mind and body health.
(7:22) Fasting lengths:
When it comes to length I think many of us think that we’re only spiritual if we’re doing longer fasts (like 24 hours or more) and that intermittent fasting is mostly about physical and mental health and not so much about connecting with God.
But today I want to talk about how we ARE connecting with God when we intermittent fast because we’re tapping into our body in relation to Creation and when it comes to eating and fasting, we’ve got to consider this bigger picture of the way God designed our bodies to work in sync with it.
So let’s dig in to this concept of Circadian Rhythm Feeding and Fasting:
Most of the advice we get on intermittent fasting is to stick to this very static window of fasting - a lot of the programs and teachers out there recommend a daily 16 hr fast with a 8 hour eating window.
You’ll hear this reference to the fasting window and the feeding window, which is pretty straightforward.
The fasting window is that time period of the day that you don’t eat, the feeding window is the time period of the day that you do eat.
The feeding window is often referred to as Time Restricted Eating (TRE) and it’s the intentional hours of the day that you eat all your meals. It’s the flip side of focusing on the fasting window, it’s focusing on optimizing the time of day that you eat.
One thing that is becoming more clear in science is that the magic of metabolic health is based on variation. If you remember the podcast I did on Busting Through Metabolic Plateaus, the key strategy is the variation, the change-up.
In the same way your body down-regulates the effectiveness of the same exercise you do every single day, it will down-regulate the dietary strategy you do every single day. That’s why feasting and fasting is such an awesome and effective strategy.
If we look historically, our ancestors were not getting the exact same number of calories every single day; they weren’t eating the exact same foods every single day; they weren’t fasting the exact same amount of time every day.
Their eating patterns, their fasting patterns, their movement patterns were determined by what was going on with the Earth. They ate based on what was available seasonally; they fasted according to the light and darkness. There is variation within Creation and our ancestors were in sync with Creation.
It would have been intuitive to fast less when the days were longer and more when the days were shorter.
So, shorter fasts in the summertime, longer fasts in the winter time.
(12:19) All about light:
What determines how we qualify a long day from a short day? Light.
Light is longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.
Who made the light, who is the light, who made our bodies? Who made the food that grows for our bodies? Our Lord, our Creator, our Great Provider.
God made our bodies to work with and respond to light. It’s called our Circadian Rhythm and it naturally follows a 24 hour cycle that controls our cells’ metabolic activity - including digestion, hormone productions and detoxification.
The functions within our bodies have their own internal clock, their preferred time of day or night for activity, what signals these functions is the light or the dark.
For instance, leptin (our put down the fork sister hormone) generally peaks at night to shut down the eating train, while ghrelin (the pick UP the fork sister hormone) normally rises to its highest level during the day to encourage eating.
Bowel movements are also influenced by an inner clock through the production of a different set of hormones, which promote gastrointestinal movement soon after you wake up.
Scientists have shown circadian clock disruptions are linked to numerous human diseases, including obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, sleep disorders, depression and even cancer.
As Humans, we are diurnal beings which means that we are most active during the day and designed to rest during at night. This is opposite of a nocturnal being which is more active during the night - like a rat...or a teenager. haha
Eating is meant to be a daytime activity: our body is set up to best receive and process food during the daylight hours. That’s going to be a little longer in the summer and a little shorter in the winter.
Our eating window is going to naturally vary based on the time of the year and, therefore, our fasting window is going to vary based on the time of the year.
The WAY we EAT:
Is going to also vary naturally based on the time of the year - in the summer when carbs are more abundant, it’s natural to eat more carbs, in the winter when the ground is frozen and plant foods are less available, it would be natural to eat less carbs and more fat and protein.
I hate to tell you but summer is supposed to be the fattening up season so that we can store up fuel for the winter.
More carbs in the diet means more stored fat = more stored energy.
(16:22) In modern times:
We take this too far because we have all foods available year round including all of the processed foods our ancestors did not have plus we have light available at all times of the day.
While this progress and convenience is wonderful on one hand, on the other, we have taken carb eating, night eating, and night light to the extreme and it does create confusion for our inner clock and disrupts the synergistic way we are supposed to sync with the earthly elements.
It’s good to be aware of this, it helps build the case for understanding our natural feeding and fasting windows and how that can vary based on the time of the year.
(17:35) There are a few main points I want you to take away from this information today.
The first is that - our bodies best utilize food in the daytime as it aligns with our circadian and diurnal clock.
Now, along with that is that an earlier time feeding window is more beneficial health-wise than a later in the day feeding window.
Now don’t freak if you’re someone who breaks her fast and starts eating late in the day - in the grand scheme of things, getting a good fast in is fantastic in and of itself.
But if we’re talking ideally and how to best support the circadian and diurnal rhythm, then breaking your fast in the morning would be better.
An instance that I might suggest a change is for someone who has adrenal issues and a dysregulated cortisol pattern. Eating at a more traditional breakfast time, like say between 7-10, would be one of the ways you could help restore the cortisol pattern.
Just like getting light into your eyes in the morning tells your body where it is in space and time, food can do that as well. Light and eating are inputs our bodies associate with daytime, our bodies are set up to receive and utilize those inputs in the daytime and they signal other mechanisms in our bodies like hormones.
Finally and mostly what I hope you’re taking from today is that it is 100% natural, ok and even helpful to vary your feeding and fasting times and patterns.
I would love at some point down the road to tweak Feast 2 Fast® to sync up more seasonally with these feasting and fasting patterns based on the light and time of the year. Maybe that’s like next level, Feast 2 Fast 2.0
But the way we do it now and I think it’s a really good way, is that we keep that fasting window flexible. I recommend 12-16 hours and you can do the same fast every single day or change it up over the week based on what works best for you.
(23:23) Closing thoughts:
I hope that sharing this information with you today is giving you some perspective that changing things up is OK whether is seasonally or weekly and that you are not a failure if you’re not hitting a 16 hour fast every single day.
Again, I am purely fascinated by this as it relates to how we are meant to work in sync with God’s creation. It lends even more spiritual meaning to practicing intermittent fasting and honoring the way God designed our bodies work.
I hope that you are joining us for the next round of Feast 2 Fast® - we start August 17th and I am looking forward to my annual transition from summer to fall eating and I’m looking forward to getting to work with you, my friend. You can click here to sign up!
(24:55) Outro & Disclaimer
Additional reading:
Why you should wake up at 6 a.m., work out at 5 p.m. and be in bed by 10 p.m. every day
EATING IN 10-HOUR WINDOW CAN OVERRIDE DISEASE-CAUSING GENETIC DEFECTS, NURTURE HEALTH
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!