JJ Virgin recommends a 10-12 hour eating window as a baseline, with an optional 8-hour window for those interested. She suggests eating between 9-10 am and 5 pm, waiting two hours after waking and stopping three to four hours before bed to improve insulin sensitivity and metabolic health.
So it's interesting that we have this phenomenon of time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting. I, I, when I think of intermittent fasting, I'm thinking of time-restricted feeding. And when I'm thinking of time-restricted feeding, to me, what we must do is make sure that we're eating in a 10 to 12 hour window each day. That's like a non-negotiable. And to me, I can't believe we're calling it something that should be normal eating. We just got so far away from that by eating right when we wake up in the morning and eating right till we go to bed at night. The average person, it turns out, is eating 14 times a day. That's just like insanity. We should be having, you know, 3 meals a day, maybe a snack. That's the first thing is I think of that as normal eating, but let's call it time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting if we wanna be cool. You can narrow that window down to 8 hours if you want to. And the research is kind of all over the place with this. First of all, they talk about using intermittent fasting to trigger autophagy and to trigger stem cell production. There's some other ways to do that too. Called exercise. But I think there is definitely seems like some benefit to maybe doing a little bit of a longer time-restricted feeding. Maybe on the weekend you can push your breakfast to a little later, like 10 or like 9 or 10 o'clock and have your dinner a little bit earlier. That's what we like to do on the weekends is sleep in a bit, do a longer sauna, then have breakfast around 10, then have a family dinner around 5. And all of a sudden we've pulled it off and now we have an 8-hour feeding window instead. So see if you can throw that in a day or two a week. I think it's great. And then see how intermittent fasting works for you. Again, I think the biggest thing here is to wait a couple hours before you eat in the morning. I really think 2 hours is the sweet spot. See where you feel best. If I'm gonna work out first thing, I will do a hit of my essential amino acids, my Reignite Wellness Amino Acid Power Powder with my chiatine and electrolytes. And I do a little collagen in my coffee so I have something on board when I'm going to work out. I feel better that way. See how you feel. Some people feel great doing fasted workouts. I don't. I tend to feel better with a little something that I can't eat if it's 6:00 AM. So if I'm working out early, that's my hack. But see how you feel. But again, in my perfect world, it's, it's about 2 hours after you wake up is when you eat. And the big key one is to stop eating 3 to 4 hours before bed and really give your body that time because As you're preparing for bed, just think your body's kind of slowing down, shutting down. It shouldn't be the time that has to start to think about pumping out insulin, right? And your pancreas should be slowing down too. The only exception I will tell you is I used to work with a lot of pro athletes and we had to get this little protein hit at night before bed. And so probably you're not a pro athlete. I'm not one either. It's not an issue. If you are dealing with sarcopenia and you are concerned about that, hit yourself with some of that Amino Acid Power powder at night before bed. That can help with avoiding some of that. But if you're getting your protein in throughout the day, you're getting your good solid meals, you're eating within that time-restricted window of 9 to 10 hours, I think you're doing great. And you can play around with, with less if you want to, to help restore blood sugar balance and insulin sensitivity and trigger some potentially some stem cell protection— production and autophagy. Although I will tell you, I I've never seen the research proving that we know when autophagy actually starts with fasting. We know it happens with exercise though. That's very predictable.
