What Is Time-Restricted Eating? Is it Good for Health?

Time-restricted eating is a type of fasting based dieting, which limits food intake to a certain number of hours each day. That would mean, if a person decides to eat his meal for the day in an 8-hour period, such as from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, the remaining 16 hours he will go without any food and it would be his fasting period. He will have to stick to this routine each day. 

Satchidananda Panda, Professor in Regulatory Biology Laboratory at Salk institute found that, in mice which ate within a set amount of time like 8-12 hours resulted in a healthier version of mice than those who ate the same number of calories over an extended period of time. This proves that when one eats is as important as what a person eats. If this relationship is proved in human beings too, it could open up a new way to manage obesity and weight gain problems.

Is Time-Restricted Eating same as Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a blanket term used to explain a way of eating, wherein people won’t consume food for a certain period of time. Time-restricted eating is a form of intermittent fasting.

What is Leangain diet or 16:8 diet?

Leangains is a form of Time-Restricted Eating, where a person fasts for 16 hours and only eat during an eight-hour window period. This can be between 12 noon and 8 p.m or 10 am to 6 pm. The time frame might vary, but whoever follows this schedule must stick to the 8-hour  time frame.

What is the Warrior diet?

The Warrior Diet was created in 2001 by Ori Hofmekler. In this form of Time Restricted Eating, people only consume food during a 4 hour period. During the 20-hour fasting period, people can eat in small amounts of hard-boiled eggs and raw fruits and vegetables, non-calorie fluids, etc. And during the 4 hour period, they can literally eat anything.

4 Incredible Benefits Of Time-Restricted Eating

1. Helps to keep blood sugar in check: Since most of the eating part happens during the day when the body is active, the body is able to break down the food and use it up in performing various functions.

2. Helps to keep weight gain and insulin resistance under control: When a person continues to eat during late hours, those calories get stored as fat, setting the stage for insulin resistance, weight gain, and diabetes. But With TRE feeding mostly ends by 6 or 8 p.m. This gives the body plenty of time to burn off calories.

3. Helps to keep gut in a healthy state: Research indicates that if the body is fasting, the microbes in the gut get some time from doing their digestive business to work on repairing the gastrointestinal tract and thus prevent chronic diseases like leaky gut and Crohns disease from happening.

4. Though it’s a form of dieting, it offers a lot of flexibility: The best part about TRE is that it can help in gaining control over food intake and prevent cravings from happening.  Also, it can help night owls in quitting their late-night eating habit and help them to move into a more natural way of falling asleep. Time-Restricted Eating could be followed for a week, a month or a couple of weeks; one could choose the best option based on their schedules and lifestyle.