JJ Virgin4x NYTimes Best Selling Author, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer

What Time Should You Eat?

8 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:00

In this instructional video, JJ Virgin explains how meal timing can be used to balance blood sugar, emphasizing intermittent fasting as a primary tool. She describes the physiological basis: each eating episode raises blood sugar and insulin, so creating a prolonged “food gap” gives the body a break. Virgin recommends starting with a 12‑14 hour overnight fast, stopping eating at least three hours before bedtime, and gradually pushing breakfast later to extend the fast. She provides concrete schedule examples—dinner at 7 pm, bedtime at 10 pm, wake‑up at 6 am, breakfast at 7 am (12‑hour fast) or 9 am (14‑hour fast), and further adjustments like a 6 pm dinner with a 10 am brunch to achieve a 16‑hour fast—demonstrating how small shifts can lengthen the fasting window and support blood‑sugar control.

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What does meal timing look like when you're trying to balance your blood sugar? Well, one of the best tools ever for this, it's intermittent fasting. And the reason is, is that it creates a food gap. It gives your body a break from digesting. Because every time you eat, think about it, you eat, what happens? Your body's blood sugar comes up and your body raises insulin. So we want to give your body a break from that. Now there's different kinds of intermittent fasting. But they all focus on when you eat. The first thing you wanna do is go 12 to 14 hours between meals. Next, stop eating at least 3 hours before bed, then push your breakfast a little bit later. So let's think about it. You ate dinner at 7, you went to bed at 10, you woke up at 6, you ate breakfast at 7, that's a 12-hour. You ate breakfast at 9, that's 14-hour overnight fast. Then maybe you push breakfast to brunch, at 10 and maybe you dropped your dinner to 6, all of a sudden you've got a 16-hour fast. See how easy this is to do?