The 8-Hour Diet (5 page)

The 8-Hour Diet Success Story

“I’M MORE COMFORTABLE IN MY OWN SKIN!”

Laura lost 12 pounds in 6 weeks—without sacrificing her favorite foods

Laura Qualley, 28,
ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

OCCUPATION:
SUBSTITUTE TEACHER
     HEIGHT:
5'7"

STARTING WEIGHT:
152
     WEIGHT AFTER 6 WEEKS:
140

Laura was thrilled when she and her fiancé bought a house together, but their shared love of cooking in their new kitchen was causing her weight to creep up. She started to feel uncomfortable with her body, but she didn’t want to sacrifice her social life to slim down. “I love to go out with people, and I don’t want to be the person at the table saying ‘Oh, I can’t eat that!’” With the 8-Hour Diet, says Laura, she was able to make her weight-loss plan fit her life, and not the other way around.

SLIMMING DOWN—SANS SACRIFICE

“Clothes weren’t fitting right, so I thought, if I could just slim down, then I’d feel a lot better,” Laura says. But she didn’t want to cut out her favorite foods. “There are just certain things that I love that I’m not willing to give up,” she explains. On the 8-Hour Diet, Laura was able to keep eating favorite foods like cheesesteaks and wings by timing her meals, while tweaking her habits by adding in lean proteins, fruits, and vegetables.

SMALL CHANGES, BIG RESULTS

Laura saw results on the 8-Hour Diet almost immediately—friends and family started commenting on how good she looked within the first 2 to 3 weeks, and by the end of her third week on the plan, Laura had already dropped 8 pounds! “If you’re looking to shed pounds and feel better about yourself, this is an easy change to work into your life,” Laura says. “I saw the payoff in a few weeks!” Her quick losses helped motivate her, and now she’s happier than ever with her body. “Twelve pounds may not be a lot for some people, but for me it was. I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. That’s always been the ultimate goal—not a number on the scale, but just feeling good about how I look. And over the past few weeks, [the 8-Hour Diet] has definitely helped me reach that point.”

T
he Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, is the epicenter of a research movement that has rocked conventional weight-loss thinking to its core.

The prime mover and shaker of this research is one Satchidananda Panda, PhD, a diminutive, energetic man whose discoveries about the new science of intermittent fasting are on the cutting edge of cutting weight.

At the moment, Dr. Panda is sitting in a dark conference room, going through a research paper that’s about to be published in the journal
Cell Metabolism.

The opening slide contains a statement as revolutionary as any in the history of weight-loss science:

When we eat may be as important as what we eat.

He lingers over that for a while, to make sure it sinks in. And it does: For the last weight-obsessed century, we may have been asking the wrong questions, and therefore getting the wrong answers, about why we’re so darn fat, and getting fatter. But Dr. Panda, and researchers like him, have discovered that there is a cure for obesity. And it’s not what anyone expected.

Ask the average man or woman on the street why America has such a weight problem, and you’ll inevitably get answers with some combination of these factors:

IT’S THE JUNK FOOD.
Too much fat, or carbs, or processed foods, or high-fructose corn syrup, or fast food, or packaged food … you name it, if it tastes good on your tongue, it makes your belly bigger.

IT’S THE PORTIONS.
We’ve supersized our meals and our bodies with them. From New York City’s attempts to ban biggie sodas to the pleas of many nutritionists to avoid “portion distortion,” everyone is fed up to here with being fed up to here.

IT’S THE INACTIVITY.
Remember how we used to play soccer, instead of Playstationing soccer? Surf on skateboards instead of surfing the Web? Ride bikes instead of riding the sofa? Of course our sedentary lifestyle is making us fat: Remember all the calories we used to burn getting up to change the channel instead of just using the remote?

And yet …

We’ve tried to eat healthfully, going low-fat, low-carb, sugar-free, and organic.

We’ve tried to cut our portion sizes, count calories, follow diet plans that limit our food intake to a miserly sum.

We’ve tried exercising, forking over more than $20 billion a year to gym chains that promise to burn off more than just our disposable income.

And we just keep getting larger and unhealthier.

But finally, there may be an answer—if we just start asking the right questions.

Dr. Panda is fairly glowing here in the dark as he clicks over to a pair of US maps. The one on the left shows the night sky over the continental United States. The one on the right: diabetes incidence, county by county, in the population. The charts have been adjusted to control for the greater population numbers in city areas, but still, the two are mirror images of one another.

“Where there are more lights,” he says, “there is more diabetes.” The more nighttime light there is, the more midnight oil that’s burned, the greater the risk for the number-one health scourge of our age.

He goes on to explain what may be happening: “My hypothesis is that staying up and eating late may be the cause. In the history of human civilization—millions of years—we didn’t know how to use fire. In the daytime human beings would hunt something, eat something, but in the nighttime they had to protect themselves against predators. It was only 200,000 years ago that we learned how to control fire, and only a few people could afford to use fire to stay up past sunset. But in the last 50 years, we’ve had light at night. And that’s where we see the rise of weight problems.”

His theory: The advent of artificial light has also led to an artificial extension of our feeding times. There’s a natural stop sign built into our circadian rhythms, and we run through it almost every day. That throws our digestive system, and the many hormones and enzymes that manage it, off-kilter. We can’t process the food we eat, and as a result it ends up where it shouldn’t—around our bellies and butts.

Not convinced yet? Hang in there.

Dr. Panda continues his presentation, describing the ingenious study
his laboratory devised to test his thesis in mice. They were divided into two groups: One group was given the freedom to eat anything they wanted at any time of day. The other could eat as much as they wanted, but only within an 8-hour time frame. The test study lasted for 100 days.

With this setup, Dr. Panda called upon the mouse next to his laptop. The screen flashed the image below.

Guess which mouse had the run of the house for 24 hours?

“Simply limiting food intake to 8 hours gives you all the benefits—without worrying about food intake,” Dr. Panda explains.