Read Online The 8-Hour Diet by David Zinczenko - Free Book Online
Authors: David Zinczenko
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in a bisque-like liquid in the sink. The denuded carcass of a once-proud fowl rests in imploded squalor on the dining room table. And sprawled across assorted sofas and chairs is your family, strewn about the living room like plane crash survivors in a stuffing-induced stupor. Asyou survey the damage and contemplate the task of wrapping the leftovers, you feel about as energetic as a tortoise on Benadryl.
What’s happening here? Why are we so lethargic after a big meal? And more important, why won’t anyone help you clean up?
Contrast that scene of Turkey Day torpor with a scenario that Professor Ron Evans from the Salk Institute conjures out on the primordial plains of Africa, where all the animals are on high alert and looking for dinner. Like Cassius in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, they have “that lean and hungry look.” Here’s how Dr. Evans characterizes those animals that have been searching for dinner for a while: “They’re aroused, always moving and alert, looking for where the food is. When they see potential prey, they’re even more attentive.”
Indeed, research shows that when you extend the period of time between meals—eating whatever you want in your allotted 8-hour time frame, but allowing your body the benefits of resting longer between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next—the benefits go beyond the mere physical. (And those physical benefits—rapid weight loss, slashed diabetes risk, dramatically lowered chance of heart attack—are nothing to sneeze at.) In fact, the 8-Hour Diet may make you sharper, smarter, and calmer in the short term and make your brain healthier as you get older.
“A lot of people like to fast because they’re alert and motivated,” says Dr. Evans, himself an alert, motivated, intermittent faster. “That’s because we’re predators. When you fast, you’re more attentive. Your senses of smell and sight are enhanced. Everything is heightened; your breathing, your vision, your coordination. In attack mode, animals need to be physically running so they can do the job. We do that, too. We’re good at that.”
So now let’s become alert and attentive to one of the most profound ways that this plan can improve your life: sharpening, and extending the warranty on, your mind.
Eat Smarter, Think Smarter
It’s not easy to find the fountain of youth, even if you have GPS.
If there’s a secret key to unlocking eternal vigor, it’s located in the laboratories of the National Institute on Aging, a short drive from downtown Baltimore. But the main drag to the research campus is under heavy renovation, so drivers lurch and bump down the strip, avoiding a pothole here and a leviathan earth-moving machine there, following detours nobody bothered to tell the folks at Garmin about, and watching flag wavers on every corner, flailing in contradictory directions.
It is, in other words, a terrific metaphor for the path that all of us are on. The road to a ripe and healthy old age is indeed populated by giant, machine-like entities, confused flag wavers, and detours that are as likely to lead to a ditch as they are to golden years that are truly gold.
But if you can read the signposts, you can find your way. In fact, there is a small one bearing the institute’s initials—NIA—and it leads around the corner and down the hill to a tower so tall and so new that it is in itself a metaphor of the most promising kind. It’s an emblem of the way that the best researchers, when given the best tools (thanks to the National Institutes of Health), can make progress with mysteries that have been bedeviling us since the dawn of human consciousness: Why are we destined to die, and how can we postpone that destiny for as long as possible?
If you’re looking for answers—or simply looking for a way to shed weight and add energy, mental acuity, and years—there’s no one better to turn to than Mark Mattson, PhD. He’s been working his entire career to find
What’s happening here? Why are we so lethargic after a big meal? And more important, why won’t anyone help you clean up?
Contrast that scene of Turkey Day torpor with a scenario that Professor Ron Evans from the Salk Institute conjures out on the primordial plains of Africa, where all the animals are on high alert and looking for dinner. Like Cassius in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, they have “that lean and hungry look.” Here’s how Dr. Evans characterizes those animals that have been searching for dinner for a while: “They’re aroused, always moving and alert, looking for where the food is. When they see potential prey, they’re even more attentive.”
Indeed, research shows that when you extend the period of time between meals—eating whatever you want in your allotted 8-hour time frame, but allowing your body the benefits of resting longer between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next—the benefits go beyond the mere physical. (And those physical benefits—rapid weight loss, slashed diabetes risk, dramatically lowered chance of heart attack—are nothing to sneeze at.) In fact, the 8-Hour Diet may make you sharper, smarter, and calmer in the short term and make your brain healthier as you get older.
“A lot of people like to fast because they’re alert and motivated,” says Dr. Evans, himself an alert, motivated, intermittent faster. “That’s because we’re predators. When you fast, you’re more attentive. Your senses of smell and sight are enhanced. Everything is heightened; your breathing, your vision, your coordination. In attack mode, animals need to be physically running so they can do the job. We do that, too. We’re good at that.”
So now let’s become alert and attentive to one of the most profound ways that this plan can improve your life: sharpening, and extending the warranty on, your mind.
Eat Smarter, Think Smarter
It’s not easy to find the fountain of youth, even if you have GPS.
If there’s a secret key to unlocking eternal vigor, it’s located in the laboratories of the National Institute on Aging, a short drive from downtown Baltimore. But the main drag to the research campus is under heavy renovation, so drivers lurch and bump down the strip, avoiding a pothole here and a leviathan earth-moving machine there, following detours nobody bothered to tell the folks at Garmin about, and watching flag wavers on every corner, flailing in contradictory directions.
It is, in other words, a terrific metaphor for the path that all of us are on. The road to a ripe and healthy old age is indeed populated by giant, machine-like entities, confused flag wavers, and detours that are as likely to lead to a ditch as they are to golden years that are truly gold.
But if you can read the signposts, you can find your way. In fact, there is a small one bearing the institute’s initials—NIA—and it leads around the corner and down the hill to a tower so tall and so new that it is in itself a metaphor of the most promising kind. It’s an emblem of the way that the best researchers, when given the best tools (thanks to the National Institutes of Health), can make progress with mysteries that have been bedeviling us since the dawn of human consciousness: Why are we destined to die, and how can we postpone that destiny for as long as possible?
If you’re looking for answers—or simply looking for a way to shed weight and add energy, mental acuity, and years—there’s no one better to turn to than Mark Mattson, PhD. He’s been working his entire career to find
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