For a couple of years now I’ve been experimenting with time-restricted eating.
I guess I really started about a year and a half ago, after I got my Oura ring. One of the first things I noticed was that the early hours of my sleep were disrupted unless I had finished dinner at least 4 hours before bedtime. (This in contrast to the “common wisdom” that you want at least three hours between the last thing you eat and bedtime.)
Once I notice that I started pushing Jackie to arrange things so that we could finish supper at least 4 hours before we went to bed. The issue here was that while working at the bakery Jackie had gotten into the habit of getting up at 4:00 AM—because that’s when she needed to get up if she was going to be able to have coffee, breakfast, dress for work, and then spend most of an hour walking to work. As she has been so far unable to break herself of that habit, she finds herself very sleepy starting at about 8:00 PM. If you work out the math, you can see that we need to finish supper no later than 4:00 PM.
Jackie found herself somewhat daunted by the prospect of having to prepare lunch at mid-day, clean up the kitchen, and then prepare supper to serve at 3:00 PM so we could be done by 4:00 PM.
We experimented with various lunch/supper timings with limited success. But back in December, when Steven brought Lucy and his boys to visit, we fell into the habit of just having two meals a day. I went to his hotel for the breakfast that the hotel served to guests (Jackie made her usual breakfast at home), and then one of us (often, but not always, Jackie) prepared our main meal of the day sometime in the afternoon.
This turned out to work great, and Jackie and I have continued the practice since Steven and family departed. Jackie gets up at 4:00 AM as usual. (I tend to sleep until closer to 6:00 AM.) We linger over coffee, then have breakfast at 7:00 AM or so. Whatever we hope to get done in the day happens between 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM, at which point we have “dinner” consisting of our main meal of the day. We finish it by 3:00 PM or so.
(In these pandemic days we follow that up with a virtual happy hour with Steven and Lucy via Zoom, so we’re still consuming cocktails until 4:30 PM or so, but I try to make sure to limit both the carbs and the calories that late in the day. I’m hoping that eventually we’ll be able to arrange things such that happy hour doesn’t extended until so close to bedtime.)
Jackie and I usually enjoy some video entertainment in the evening, and then retire to read for a bit before 8:00 PM and time to go to sleep.
I’m sure that’s way more detail than a stranger could be interested in, but the gist is that our eating window is compressed to just 9 hours a day or so (from 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM), putting us within striking distance of a 16:8 time-restricted eating window.
And I have to say, it’s working pretty well. Jackie especially appreciates not having to prepare both lunch and dinner every day. Keeping my weight stable has been especially easy—if I’m hungry in the morning I fix a bigger omelette, if I’m hungry at mid-day I take a bigger serving of whatever Jackie is fixing, or just have something more (peanut butter, cottage cheese, jerky, protein powder, whatever). And if I’m not extra hungry, I just eat a regular breakfast and a regular mid-day meal.
The result has been that I easily get enough food, don’t overeat, get done eating four hours before bedtime, and spend nearly 16 hours per day in a fasted state, with all the attendant benefits described in the post linked just above. And as a bonus, Jackie doesn’t have to prepare two meals after breakfast.
Time-restricted eating: Highly recommended.
A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention:
Weather’s been pretty erratic this week. We also had a mild dusting yesterday out of the blue! Might consider heading out for a hike later today.
I nudged Meena to write more. We’ve had some interesting discussions on Yoga and other things over the past week and I do think she has a ton to share! She’s also planning to train for a 50miler which I am super excited about! Oh and beyond all that marketing ploy, Happy Mothers’ day.
Shasta’s talking a lot more now. Pretty sure her verbal diarrhea is soon going to start soon too! The other day, while sitting with Appa she said something to the effect of ‘i-pae’ pointing to the ipad. Grandfather and daughter are totally connecting on these gadgets!
Git: I agree on many levels with what Kev posted recently about Github. I enjoy working on and deploying software tools. What I do not enjoy is the whole git pull, push, fork thing!
Sessions: I am running a session later this week for the Khat-pat folks on self hosting. Planning to keep it mostly hands-on and crisp. The idea is to get them started on taking better control of their presence on the interwebs! I’d also love to join the Indieweb folks one of these days. They have one coming up on the 20th!
Tools: Earlier this week, I came across e-mail cloaking services – Simplelogin and Anondaddy. Love the idea and I might give them a shot the next time I subscribe or sign-up for a service.
Feed Readers: Over the past few years, I’ve used multiple feed readers – Netvibes, TheOldReader, FreshRSS and Fever. They were all good in specific aspects but I didn’t really find them to be that one tool which I could use to consume the inter-webs my way. Earlier this week I decided to self-host one and narrowed down to FreshRSS, miniflux and selfoss. After a few iterations of deploying and testing, I stuck with selfoss. It’s super light-weight and has all the specific features I was looking for. To deploy it on docker, I used the boiler-plate template that I created earlier when setting up my known instance. The gist file for the docker-compose is here. The install should take you at most 10 minutes assuming you have the base framework setup. What I do love about selfoss is the ability to push articles over to my wallabag instance.
Trilium: I’ve moved most of my notes over to Trilium and I am absolutely loving it! While it’s hierarchical, it is also setup not to be one.
Interesting reads this week:
Time-restricted eating: Philip referenced this article recently and I think it’s brilliant! Also went ahead and signed up for Rhonda’s podcast.
Tracking using ultrasound frequencies: Whoa! This totally blew my mind! If google uses it to connect your devices with chrome cast, what’s really stopping them from using it to track what you are watching? And now how do you block that invasion?
Workplaces in the era: Firms will have additional pressure from (or will be incentivised by) their insurance companies to have monitoring in place. Over the span of few months, this will be the new normal. Looking back, haven’t we all got used to keying-in and out at our workplaces?
We kill people based on metadata: Quite a lot is changed since 2014. What hasn’t though is how fragmented and withdrawn several government and private entities are even in times of crisis.
The mystic veil of End-to-End encryption: Interesting read on the data sharing between these apps. The other day I was wondering how Bark‘s able to access messages from these apps. Likely they have something on these lines drifting underneath? While I love the concept of the app and the benefits it provides, I did cringe and walk away because I just wasn’t sure how they’d be handling the data.