I wanted to wrap up this short series on exercise by talking about that T-word, timing. The timing of various issues around our physiology can help our mental state, can help our digestion, and can help our exercise to be more beneficial and to get better results in a quicker amount of time.

Let’s start with sleep. I had mentioned in a previous video about the circadian rhythm, about winding down, when you’re getting ready for bed, not using the TV or screen devices for the last one or two hours before bed, if that’s possible. The alternatives are you can read a book or you can have a conversation with your family members, things like that. And even with the lighting in your house, you can have certain lamps with a lower lumen rate. There are different bulbs you can buy that have less blue light and more red light, which is better for the evening hours.

Blue lights fine during the daytime. When the sun’s out, your circadian rhythm, you’re moving towards that forward motion, and you’re creating serotonin, and melatonin is depleted during the daytime. In the evening you want to start switching back from serotonin to melatonin, and we do that when it gets dark outside, and we dim the lights in the house, and we don’t watch television just before bed and things like that. That’s going to help you to get better sleep. We’ll talk more about sleep in another video. But there’s another issue about timing and that is when to eat. You may know, or you may have heard me talk about intermittent fasting and I’m going to say this clearly right now, that you are intermittent faster. You fast every day. That’s the time when you stop eating in the evening, or the late afternoon or early evening, and then you don’t eat again until you break your fast in the morning with breakfast.

Those are… Generally, people get eight to 12 hours of fasting, which allows the metabolic process, allows especially the pancreas to take a break, to take a chill, and not have to produce insulin, since you’re not eating.

In intermittent fasting as a way of life, as a methodology for losing weight, staying fit, having increased energy, we just lengthened the intermittent fast to 16 or 18 hours. Now, that sounds like a really big deal, but all we’re doing is skipping breakfast. That’s all we’re doing. And, I know that there is the saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that could be true, could certainly be true. But breakfast doesn’t have to be at six in the morning, or seven in the morning or eight in the morning, breakfast can be at 11:30 in the morning. It could be 12:30. It could be two in the afternoon.

Breakfast is when you break your fast. In order to give your pancreas a break from producing insulin, you just stop eating. You can drink water, you can have black coffee, you can have various vitamin drinks that will not produce calories for your body to have to deal with, that’s metabolic intermittent fasting. And, it doesn’t have to be every day. Now, I’m a person that once I create a habit, I want to do it every day, that’s just my personality.

And, I’ve been doing intermittent fasting pretty much, six, seven days a week, I’ve been doing that for almost two years. I lost over 30 pounds and I feel a lot better living this way. That’s the timing issue of food.