Authors: David Zinczenko
All you need is 8 hours.
The idea of eating as much as you want of any food you want—the idea that calories don’t actually matter in the long run—goes against everything we’ve been told about losing weight. But then again, look at the evidence: More than two in every five Americans say they’re currently on a diet. We spend more than $67 billion annually on diet books, weight-loss programs, and gym memberships. And yet two out of three American adults are overweight or obese. Obviously, what we’ve been
told about losing weight is simply wrong, and all the diets we’ve been following are, in the end, wrong as well.
Well, that’s about to change.
See, every other diet plan out there can be broken down into one of two types: calorie-restrictive diets and food-restrictive diets.
Calorie-restrictive diets
are the most old-school, the kind that packed pantries of yore with rice cakes, cottage cheese, and Tab. As long as you ate fewer calories than your body burned each day, you’d lose weight. Science says that’s the key to weight loss, after all.
But calorie-restrictive diets don’t work, for the simple fact that we are what we are: quirky, fallible, human. Sure, maybe if you have the fortitude of Nelson Mandela, the endurance of Ryan Lochte, and the courage of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, you’ll have no trouble passing up every hot, sticky Cinnabon that tickles your nostrils in the mall, every sizzling fajita that calls to you from a Red Robin, every stuffed-crust pizza that leaps out from the TV screen during a bowl game. But in the end, calorie-restrictive diets break down, because willpower breaks down, and the next thing you know, you’re facedown in a package of Ding Dongs. In the long run, these traditional diets don’t work.
The 8-Hour Diet is different because you can eat as many calories as you want. That’s right: In a study conducted at the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, scientists found that eating the same number of calories, just in a limited period of time, resulted in “a significant modification of body composition, including reductions in fat mass …”
Food-restrictive diets
are the new-school way of losing weight. Eat all you want, just don’t eat any carbs. Or fat. Or meat. Or dairy. Or high-glycemic foods. Or foods that Paleo men didn’t eat. Or foods that aren’t “whole.” Or foods that have holes. From yogurt to yams to Yodels, someone somewhere will tell you that if you just don’t eat that, or if you only eat it in some sort of mystical combination with other foods, you’ll be fine.
Different kind of diet, but the same result: You can try to live on steak and eggs, but eventually you need a slice of bread. And a pat of butter. In the long run, these fad diets don’t work, either.
The 8-Hour Diet is different because you can eat any kind of food you want, in any quantity you want. According to researchers at the Regulatory Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, “When we eat may be as important as what we eat.” They first stumbled upon this stunning breakthrough in animal studies. When they gave mice the run of the house—let them eat whatever they wanted, but only during a set period of time—the mice lost weight. When they put mice on a restricted diet and fed them throughout the day, they gained weight. Their stunning conclusion: You can eat whatever you want because by limiting the period of time in which you’re consuming food, you actually increase the number of calories—especially fat calories—your body burns during the day.
That’s why the 8-Hour Diet is such a paradigm shift. This plan eliminates willpower. It eliminates sacrifice. And it eliminates calorie-counting, glycemic-index crunching, carb-fat-protein balancing, point totaling, and other Einsteinian mathnastics that have turned ordering dinner into an arithmetic problem worthy of Harvard Business School.
Instead, just eat whatever you want, as much as you want.
But only eat during an 8-hour period each day.
And you only have to follow the diet a few days a week.
In the coming chapters, I’ll explain how easy this program can be. I’ll shock you with research that demonstrates how dramatically you can slash your risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and even degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. And I’ll introduce you to eight foods you should eat every day to ensure you’re getting all the nutrients your body craves. (Don’t worry, you’ve probably already eaten most of the eight today! And there’s not a rice cake in sight!)
And throughout this book, you’ll meet some of the men and women whose lives have been changed by the 8-Hour Diet: People like Morgan Jennings, a single mom who dropped 15 pounds in 6 weeks, even while breastfeeding. (“It was the ideal diet for me,” she says.) Or Marisa DeLorenzo, who dropped 13 pounds in 6 weeks and felt more energetic than ever. (“My pants fit better and even my face looks slimmer,” she reports.) Or Billy Long, a Missouri congressman who dropped more than 3 pounds a week and wants to share his success with others: “Man, if you knew about the 8-Hour Diet, it’d change your life!” he says.
Still skeptical? Believe me, you’re not going to find anyone more skeptical of diet trends, fads, and “breakthroughs” than I am. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life following—and sometimes swallowing—every new bit of nutrition and exercise science that comes my way. As a health editor, I spend my days poring over studies and news coverage of what’s happening in the field of exercise and weight loss.
And I know from personal experience how hard it can be to lose that extra weight. As a latchkey kid growing up in a single-parent household, I had no one to tell me when to stop eating. My dad was gone, and my beloved mom worked day and night trying to keep food in the house. I, on the other hand, worked day and night trying to empty food from the house, noshing and nibbling from the moment I got up until the moment I passed out in front of a
Twilight Zone
rerun, with a pack of Twizzlers by my head. By the time I was 14, I had packed on more than 200 pounds. I was one lazy, lipid lad.
Then I got a cold slap of reality that changed everything. I never thought that growing up in a single-parent household struggling to afford college would be an advantage in life, but it actually was. To earn my degree, I had to join the Navy Reserve—and that’s when my life changed. Gone was my 24-hour noshing cycle. You ate when the Navy told you to eat, and my mates and I would descend on the mess hall like hyenas on a wounded water buffalo. But when mess was over, it was over—no continuous snacking when you’re part of a construction battalion, toppling trees and moving tons of earth to build a runway, as we were trained to do in the Seabees.
Soon I began to lose weight. I credited it to the rigors of basic training, and when I left the Navy and joined
Men’s Health
, I remained an avid exerciser, even completing the New York City Marathon. But over the last few years, I’ve come to understand that eating the military way might well have been the breakthrough my body needed. In other words, eating as much as you want of whatever you want, but only during a set period of the day.
See, as a diet and fitness expert, I’m always on the lookout for a foolproof weight-loss plan. And usually I’m disappointed in the long-term results. Indeed, I created the
New York Times
bestselling
Eat This, Not That!
series for exactly that reason—I simply just hadn’t found a diet plan that worked perfectly for everyone.
Eat This, Not That!
taught people how to lose weight without dieting—making simple swaps, still eating their favorite foods but saving hundreds of calories by choosing one brand over another. And millions of people lost 10, 20, 30—sometimes 100 pounds!—following these simple swaps.
But as successful as
Eat This, Not That!
has been, I’ve never seen research that can solve the one missing link of weight loss—how can we make the body burn its own fat stores preferentially? And how can we extend life span, prevent disease, and improve brain function through food? Perhaps, I thought, we never will.
Yet over the last couple of years, a new area of science has emerged, and I’ve been following it—closely, but skeptically—ever since. And now I’m convinced. In this book, I’m going to lay out the irrefutable evidence and teach you how to change your body and your life forever.
We’ll begin diving deeper in
Chapter 1
: I’ll lay out the other salutary effects of the 8-Hour Diet and explain how this program works on a cellular level, turbocharging the mitochondria that fuel your body and rev your metabolism. Then we’ll dive further into some very cool, very surprising science in
Chapter 2
, where we visit the Salk Institute in LaJolla, California, to talk with the foremost researchers in the field. What they’re helping us to understand is that our bodies are something like clockworks, preferring to schedule maintenance and system backup during planned downtimes. You’ll learn why and how weight loss becomes so rapid and so easy to accomplish.
I am a skeptic, just like you. But I’m convinced: The 8-Hour Diet is the easiest, most effective weight-loss plan ever created. And it’s right here in your hands.
Let me apologize on behalf of an entire country full of fitness gurus, diet-book authors, trendy nutritionists, weight-loss clinics, unemployed actors working in gyms, and people who scream at chunky people on TV for a living. Almost all of us have been feeding you a line of bull. And we’ve been feeding it to you for breakfast.
I’m a big believer in science. But sometimes science gets it wrong. Like back in the early 1990s, when we were told by the US government that we could eat whatever we wanted, as long as it was “low fat.”
So we all chowed down on bagels, bread, pasta, and fat-free cookies. Except, that “fat-free” stuff wasn’t free at all; by shocking our bodies with big doses of carbohydrates, the fat-free craze just increased our risk of obesity and diabetes.
Turns out, the same is true of the expert advice to eat a big, hearty breakfast. We’ve all seen the “facts”: People who regularly skip breakfast are 450 percent more likely to be obese. People who go for a period without eating lose muscle, not fat. People who eat a big breakfast “jump-start” their metabolism and burn more calories.
Except it’s simply not true.
Consider a study published in
Nutrition Journal
in 2011. Researchers followed the eating habits of 100 normal-weight and 280 obese participants during a 2-week period. They found that in both groups, the more calories they ate at breakfast, the more total calories they ate for the rest of the day. And when they ate a smaller breakfast, or none at all, their total calorie intake was less.
Conclusion: Overweight people should “consider the reduction of breakfast calories as a simple option” to lose weight.
In fact, more and more research is proving that not avoiding calories in the morning is the way to stay not only slim, but also strong in both body and mind. In fact, this strategy can completely erase the damage of an otherwise “bad” diet.
In a 2010 study in the
Journal of Physiology,
researchers fed a group of active men an unhealthy diet composed of 50 percent fat and 30 percent more calories than they normally consumed. They then divided the men into three subgroups: one group didn’t exercise at all, another group exercised four times a week after eating breakfast, and the third group exercised four times a week before eating their first meal of the day. The no-exercise group gained 6 pounds, developed insulin resistance, and began storing extra fat in their muscle cells. The group that exercised after eating breakfast gained about 3 pounds and also showed signs of insulin resistance and greater fat storage. But the participants who exercised before eating their first meal gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance.
So why have we been lectured to about “the most important meal of the day” for all these years? “There are a lot of forces in our society pushing against” skipping breakfast, says Mark Mattson, PhD, chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, whom you’ll hear more from in the pages to come. “Those forces are driven by money. They include the food industry obviously, and in some respects the pharmaceutical industry.” Breakfast cereals alone are an $11 billion a year industry, and that’s before you get into eggs and bacon, bagels and lox, pancakes and syrup. There are a lot of different businesses relying on your morning meal to make their budgets.
So before we all go hog wild on bacon and do the chicken dance over eggs, let’s take a second look at the research. This book is going to change everything about how you view breakfast.
And the good news: Skip breakfast, and you can set your alarm clock just a few minutes later!
The 8-Hour Diet Success Story
“IT MAKES ME FEEL PRETTY. BEAUTIFUL!”
Morgan lost 15 pounds in 6 weeks—and took control of her life
Morgan Jennings, 32,
GATE CITY, VIRGINIA
OCCUPATION:
ACCOUNTANT
HEIGHT:
5'4"
STARTING WEIGHT:
192
WEIGHT AFTER 6 WEEKS:
177
When Morgan Jennings found out she was pregnant, she knew it was time to gear up and get healthy once and for all. But as a single mother who breastfeeds, Morgan also knew that a low-carb, low-fat, low-anything fad diet was simply out of the question. The 8-Hour Diet gave her the flexibility she needed to lose weight while juggling her schedule as a full-time accountant and single mom.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION—WITH SOME WIGGLE ROOM
Morgan’s day starts at 5:30 a.m., when her 1-year-old son wakes up. Between her rigorous accounting job and playing Supermom, she doesn’t have time to cook healthy meals for herself or the money to invest in expensive weight-loss plans. “Counting calories and carbs is not something I have time for. I looked at Weight Watchers, I looked at Atkins, I looked at a lot of different things, and all of it just seemed so time-consuming. I happened upon the 8-Hour Diet, and I thought, you know what? I can do that!”