Calories consumed in the morning count less than calories consumed in the evening and are also healthier.
Time-restricted feeding, where you limit Eating the same amount during a short period of the night has benefits compared to eating at night and earlier in the day, but it also has adverse effects because you eat a lot and very late, as you can see below and at 0:00. :12 my video The benefits of eating early with time restriction.
The best of both worlds was proven in 2018, when researchers put time-restricted feeding in a narrow window earlier in the day. As you can see below and at minute 0:28 of my video, the people who were random eating the same meal, but only during an 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. eating period, experienced a drop in blood pressure, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance, even when all study subjects remained in the same weight. Same food, same weight, but with different results. The drops in blood pressure were extraordinary, from 123/82 to 112/72 in five weeks, and that is comparable to the effectiveness of powerful blood pressure medications.
Longest Study to Date on Time-Restricted-Only Feeding hard for 16 weeks. It was a pilot study with no control group that involved only eight people, but the results are still noteworthy. The overweight people, who, like most of us, had been eating for more than 14 hours a day, were instructed to maintain a constant eating period of 10 to 12 hours of their choosing, as you can see below and at 1:17 in e video. On average, they were able to successfully reduce the duration of their daily eating by about four and a half hours and lost seven pounds in 16 weeks.
They also reported feeling more energetic and sleeping better, as seen in the graph below and at 1:32 in my video. This may help explain why “all participants voluntarily expressed interest in continuing unsupervised with the 10- to 11-hour time-restricted feeding regimen after concluding the 16-week supervised intervention.” It’s not often you see that after weight loss studies.
Even more surprising, eight months later and even a year after the study, they had retained their improved energy and sleep (see in the graph below and 1:55 in my video), as well as maintaining your weight loss (see in the graph below and 1:58 in my video), all from one of the simplest interventions: sticking to a 10- to 12-hour consistent feeding period of your own choosing. 
How did it work? Although the study “was not overtly asking participants to change the quality or quantity of nutrition,” they appeared to unintentionally eat hundreds of fewer calories per day. With self-selected time periods for eating, circadian benefits would not necessarily be expected, but as they had been asked to keep the eating window constant throughout the week, “metabolic jet lag could be minimized.” The idea is that because people tend to start their days later on weekends, they disrupt their own circadian rhythm. And in fact, it’s like they flew a few time zones west on Friday night and then came back east on Monday morning, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:40 on my video. So some of the metabolic advantages may be due to maintaining a more regular eating schedule.
Early or midday restricted feeding may have other benefits too. Prolonged overnight fasting with reduced food intake at night has been associated with lower levels of inflammation and has also been linked to better blood sugar control, which could be expected to reduce the risk of diseases such as breast cancer. So the data was collected in thousands of breast cancer survivors to see if the duration of overnight fasting made a difference. Those who could not go more than 13 hours each night without eating had a 36 percent increased risk of cancer recurrence. These findings have led to the suggestion that efforts to “avoid eating after 8 pm and fasting for 13 hours or more overnight may be a beneficial consideration for those patients seeking to reduce cancer risk and recurrence,” although we would need a trial randomized controlled trial to know for sure.
Early time-restricted feeding may even play a role in the health of perhaps the world’s oldest population, the Seventh-day Adventist Blue Zone in California. As you can see in the graph below and at 3:55 in my videoThin, vegetarian, nut-eating, exercising, and non-smoking Adventists live about a decade longer than the general population.
Their longer life expectancy has been attributed to these healthy lifestyle habits, but there is a lesser-known component that may also be playing a role. Historically, eating Two large meals a day, breakfast and lunch, with a prolonged overnight fast, were part of Adventist teachings. Today, only one in ten Adventists surveyed ate only two meals a day. However, the majority of them, more than 60 percent, reported that breakfast or lunch was their most important meal of the day, as you can see below and at 4:26 in my video. Although this has not yet been studied with respect to longevity, advancing calories earlier in the day with prolonged overnight fasting has been associated with significant weight loss over time. This led the researchers to conclude: “Eating breakfast and lunch 5 to 6 hours apart and making overnight fasts last 18 to 19 hours may be a useful practical strategy” for weight management. The weight may be worth the wait.
For more information on fasting, click here.
My big takeaway from all the intermittent fasting research I looked at is, whenever possible, eat earlier in the day. At the very least, avoid eating late at night whenever you can. It would probably be best to have breakfast like a king and lunch like a prince, with or without an early dinner for a poor man.
To learn more about fasting, fasting for disease reversal, and fasting and cancer, check out the related videos below.
