Genius Foods

body’s waking hormone, cortisol, which peaks thirty to
forty-five minutes after waking. This hormone helps to
mobilize fatty acids, glucose, and protein from storage for
use as fuel, which may provide a small added bonus (more
on this in chapter 9) over skipping dinner.
Skipping breakfast also works because it’s often easier to
start eating later than it is to stop eating earlier, since dinner
tends to be our most social meal. But if you’re unable to
skip breakfast, eating dinner earlier is a worthy alternative,
as shown in a recent study from Louisiana State University.
In this trial, overweight subjects consumed all their calories
between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.—the average feeding time for
most folks. But when the researchers told the subjects to
skip dinner and stop eating at 2 p.m., the burning of fat (i.e.,
ketones), as opposed to glucose, was increased. Subjects
also showed improved metabolic flexibility, which is the
body’s ability to switch between burning carbs and fats.
This means that having a light dinner, eating it earlier in the
evening, or skipping it entirely once or twice a week may
help stoke the fat-burning flames. (Eating late also can
disrupt the body’s natural inclination to wind down at
night.)
Other fasting protocols being studied include alternate-
day fasting (which, like the 16:8 method, is another example
of “time-restricted feeding”) and periodic very-low-calorie
diets. The idea behind the latter is that the body reacts to an
energy deficit by releasing stored calories regardless of
whether carbohydrates are consumed. This so-called fasting-
mimicking diet (a term coined by researcher Valter Longo)
may confer significant benefits, including decreased risk