Andrew Huberman· PhD
But also having flexibility. I feel like you would be the perfect person to answer some of this, but I um this is how I first started thinking about intermittent fasting was um it's like well if you every everybody was so wrapped up in when exactly you were eating and I was like if you got the same amount of calories in a 24-hour period and you just spaced it out differently, one person's eating every hour, one person's eating every six hours, one person only eats it all in an 8 hour window, whatever. Is it going to make that big of a difference? like what percentage difference are we attributing to purely meal timing, right? So, I I don't know what the answer is. Maybe you do, but um I feel like it's probably fairly nominal. If your if your body's getting the same amount of calories from the same foods in a 24-hour span, it probably isn't making that dramatic of a difference. You're right. The the one exception is if you start to eat on a nocturnal more nocturnal schedule, it's worse. And I'll battle people to the end of time on this one. I'm not saying everyone has to be up with the sun and down with the sun at the end of the day and only eat on a, you know, when the sun is up and and um and not after the sun is down, but you want to protect an hour or so before sleep, ideally two or three hours where you're both not knowingly hungry. >> Mhm. >> Nor are you consuming a lot of calories before sleep because it will impede your sleep. Yeah. >> And people who work the night shift, and by the way, a lot of people are now shift workers. they qualify as shift workers just by virtue of being on their computers at night or or phones or whatever. There is a ton of data just showing how bad it is for your health, GI health, cancer risk, longevity, etc. to be a shift worker. And we need shift workers of certain kinds, right? Thank you, shift workers. But >> eating the majority of your calories too close to bedtime late in the day, not good. Eating the majority of your calories at lunch and dinner, fine. I have a friend who's a he's actually the neurosurgeon at Neurolink at Elon's company >> and he has a policy uh whereby he skips one sort of traditional meal per day. So, he'll have breakfast and dinner or have lunch and dinner or breakfast and lunch and he varies it and and he insists that it keeps him flexible around this and um he's certainly healthy um one end and of one here but I kind of like that right you're not always eating between 11 and 7 which is generally what I tried to do but sometimes it's a little bit later but I totally agree that it cal calories in calories out and the laws of thermodynamics hold yeah so um you just don't want to eat in the middle of the night >> that answer I think is actually somewhat instructive for this overall discussion about timing and that what the day looks like for habits in general which is yeah if we're being uh perfectly designed and robotic about it then yes we can probably figure out optimal windows for all kinds of things um and it's great if your day can go that way you may not always have enough control over your day to make that happen but on the days when you can that's great but also what we realize is that there is a broad range in the middle where you have flexibility and it counts for a lot to get the thing in you know whether it's eating the meal or doing the workout or doing the writing session or whatever. It counts for a lot to do it even if it's not at the perfect time.