Jonathan Steedman (00:01.016)

Hey food groupies, we are gonna talk about eating windows today. I kind of emphasized that weirdly, didn't I? Kind wanna make a dad joke about eating windows. It's not that, it's about eating windows, the timeframe within which you eat throughout the day. Essentially your eating window would be defined as the time between when you start eating in the day and when you stop eating in the day. So for example, if you had breakfast at 7 a.m. and you had lots of...

you had your food and you had a snack at 10 p.m. or dessert at 10 p.m. or whatever at 10 p.m. you would have a, oh no math is hard, 15 hour eating window, is that right? Yeah, 15 hour eating window. Cool. The way that we move this eating window around, the way we manipulate when it starts and how long it is can be quite influential on the way that we eat. Even...

subconsciously or with, you you change your eating window and your eating habits can often change without you intentionally trying to change your eating habits. So it can actually be quite a powerful tool. It's one that we use a lot inside the group program, weight off to help people get into a calorie deficit, see that weight start to come down, but also manage their hunger and their energy levels in a really effective way. So they don't feel like they're in a deficit. And so it really does come from, you know,

quite a few other strategies we use underneath this, but eating windows is probably one of the most powerful ones. Okay. And so there's a whole host of different ways that you can play this. There's no right or wrong either. What I wanna give you is just some ideas and some principles. You can apply them if they're relevant for you. I'm largely going to be talking about weight loss in this podcast because that is typically where the eating windows can shine. But honestly, if your goal is weight gain, you can just kind of flip everything I'm about to say and do the opposite.

and it will help. So essentially, we see people tend to eat a little bit less firstly, with shorter eating windows. And that kind of makes sense, right? Taking to its extreme, let's say that I only allow you to eat for four hours in the day versus someone else who has 14 hours to eat. That's just like the physical reality of you're get full, you're not going to be able to eat as much food in four hours as you are spaced out across 14 hours, right? Or you'd have to.

Jonathan Steedman (02:22.062)

You'd have to give it a good go and try really hard and probably pick really energy-dense foods and all these things that if you're not intentionally doing that, just naturally a shorter eating window is probably gonna lend itself to you reducing your calories a little bit. Now that's kind of where something called intermittent fasting comes in and intermittent fasting is a bit vague because there's so many different ways to do that. I would say the most common, most popular way to do it is something called 16-8. And that's where you have

an eight hour eating window and a 16 hour fasting window. Okay. And so it's just the same sort of concept. And it's, if you've ever had someone do 16 eight or some form of intermittent fasting and they raved about how great it is, it's not because it changes your metabolism or changes anything other than you only have eight hours. So usually what people are doing are skipping breakfast. So they're dropping an entire meal. And so even if their lunches and dinners are bigger, and even if they do snack a bit more in the afternoon,

unlikely that they're going to get back up to the same amount of energy that they've pulled out by dropping breakfast. I hope that made sense. Now you absolutely can. I've had clients put on weight doing intermittent fasting because still in that eight hour window, they ate into a surplus. Okay. Sure. is less likely to occur, but it totally can occur. And intermittent fasting doesn't break the calories in calories out rule. I'm also not

pro or anti fasting, to be honest, for some people it's flippin' awesome. I personally love it, because it works really well with my natural appetite, my times of training, my work, my family. So I do it, but I have plenty of clients who it would be a terrible idea for. But there seems to be this, because everything's black and white in my industry, you're either doing 16, eight, i.e. you either can't eat until midday, or you eat breakfast as soon as you get up.

and those are the only two possibilities, which is obviously not true. And what I've seen people have a ton of success with is just delaying their breakfast a little, right? And a little or a lot, depending on your definitions of those things. And so you can play around with that anywhere between from when you wake up till lunchtime. I would say the most common pattern I've seen clients have success with is particularly if they commute to work.

Jonathan Steedman (04:43.027)

and or have kids school, you know, routine to deal with. They get up, they don't eat breakfast until after they've dropped the kids at school and or they're at their desk or they're at their job. Now, obviously that's, you know, if you're a concrete or a teacher, you can't eat while you work or nursing and all that kind of stuff. But if you're able to get that to work, I have found delaying breakfast till even at eight or nine AM for those people can be really helpful. Cause all of a sudden,

getting from 8 a.m. till midday at lunchtime is you can suddenly, that morning tea snack is really easy to just drop. You don't need it so much. Or maybe you go breakfast at nine or 10 a.m. and lunch at one or even 2 p.m. and then all of a sudden that window from lunch to dinner, which can be really difficult for some people, becomes heaps easier because it's much closer together. So I guess the take home message for the eating windows is just don't eat like you're at school. Because I think a lot of us do. just, lunch is.

Breakfast is when I first wake up. Lunch is at 12 because that's when the bell goes. And dinner is when I get home and everyone said, oh, six or 7 p.m. And that's just the routine that we stick to because that's just what we've always done. But it doesn't have to be that. You can move these things around and you might find that there's impactful impacts. Oh, man, there's pretty powerful impacts on your appetite. A few caveats to that. If you're training hard in the morning,

don't delay your breakfast till 10 a.m. unless you're training at like eight. Basically, if you've trained hard in the morning, you need to eat within like 90 minutes of finishing. So, whatever time that is, eat. And if that's 7 a.m., you can't delay breakfast that day and that's fine. Also, if you are recovering from an eating disorder or even have a history of eating disorders, disorder, disordered eating.

Sorry, all of that, that came out wrong, but you know what I mean. Then like going long periods of time without eating is not a good idea. So also don't do that. And then the last thing would be if you just like breakfast and you like eating when you first get up or you feel like I'm shaky and I need to eat. Okay, cool, that's fine. You can manipulate your day in other ways. But for other people, might find it really helpful. Oh, that's the last group I wouldn't recommend this to. If you're trying to gain weight, like I said at the top, flip it on its head because like I said, smaller eating window, it's harder to eat more.

Jonathan Steedman (07:03.306)

And that's your goal. If you're trying to gain weight, you're trying to eat more. And so the less time you give yourself to eat more, the harder that's going to be. So play around with that. You can also pull dinner earlier for similar benefits, right? So maybe you're, instead of eating dinner at eight, you eat dinner at five or 6 p.m. I know, grandparent time, but like, it could work. And then all of a sudden, even if you do have to eat breakfast at 7 a.m., but you have like dinner at 5 p.m., that's still a shorter eating window, right?

I know dinner is harder for a lot of people to move around because you kind of beholden to everyone else in your family or, you know, getting home from work and stuff. But if you're able to, that's also another viable option if you wanted to. And that can be helpful as well because eating tons of calories later at night and into the evening is not great for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, it can impact your sleep. Secondly, we are less

I almost said less good. We are less insulin sensitive in the evening. So we're just not as great at handling food as digesting and metabolizing food as we are when the sun's up. Now that doesn't mean no carbs after 7pm. That doesn't mean once it's too late for dinner. Absolutely not. It just means like try and get the large majority of your calories during the day and then just have dinner and or maybe a snack in the evening. But by pulling dinner earlier, it makes that even better.

I'm gonna sneeze. I'm not gonna cut that out, because this is real. Anyway, that's kind of everything I was gonna say. There is a study. It's a small pilot study, which essentially is a study where you can't make huge claims about it because it's small, but it's like a... no, he started. That's right. I'll try and get this done before the sneezes hit too hard. It's a small study. And so because it's small, it's got to...

a small number of participants, we can't make huge claims from it. But pilot studies are run to kind of test an idea like, does this idea kind of make sense? Is there potential here? And then if they find that potential, then it makes it easier to get approval for like, cool, well, let's put more money into this and let's run a really big study. And in this small study, there was pretty awesome results with asking people to, I'll swap my head, think it was delay breakfast by 90 minutes and pull dinner.

Jonathan Steedman (09:26.598)

earlier by 90 minutes. And that was all they told them. They didn't give them any instructions about what to eat or how much to eat or anything. I'm so sorry. But we saw improvements in a few metabolic markers. We saw a little bit of reduction in body weight, which kind of indicates that people's food intake did kind of naturally or subconsciously reduce just by shrinking that eating window. So let's say that you typically would eat at 6 a.m. and then have dinner at 8 p.m.

all of sudden you're breakfast at 7.30 and dinner at 6.30, that's a much shorter.

eating window. And so you might want to give that a try. I'll put the study in the show notes. I clearly need to get out of here. I'm so sorry. I hope that's been helpful. If you have more questions about eating windows, you know where to find me. Otherwise, I'm going to go sneeze lots more and I'll chat to you next week. Bye.