The circadian rhythm diet involves setting your eating hours according to your body’s circadian rhythm, or biological clock. In addition to being able to lose weight, the circadian diet also has other benefits, such as avoiding obesity or diabetes and maintaining liver function and cholesterol levels.
Various types of diets are commonly done by many people to lose weight. starting from setting eating patterns, abstaining from eating certain foods, setting eating patterns, and setting eating schedules.
Many researchers and the general public are becoming interested in intermittent fasting, where you are only given a window of time to eat for a few hours a day. However, this can be too difficult for some people because most of the time you will feel hungry.
What is?
Your circadian rhythm is a 24-hour internal clock that runs in your brain and regulates your body’s biological clock. This biological clock is influenced by external factors such as light and food. Sleep schedules, body temperature, hormone levels, and digestion are affected by circadian rhythms.
Disrupted circadian rhythms can cause health risks such as increased production of the hormone insulin. Increased insulin levels in the long term can increase the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. In addition, it increases the risk of obesity and depression.
How it works depends heavily on the light. You wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night due to the sunlight. When the sun goes down, your eyes signal your brain to release the hormone melatonin, which makes you feel sleepy. When the sun rises, this light signals the brain to lower melatonin levels.
Sleep affects two hormones in the body that regulate hunger, namely ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin stimulates your appetite, while leptin signals satiety.
When your body is sleep deprived, your circadian rhythm is disrupted, increasing ghrelin levels and decreasing leptin in the body. This causes an increase in hunger and cravings for food, especially sweets.
Diets that follow circadian rhythms are easier to implement because they follow the body’s awake schedule. The circadian rhythm diet allows you to eat during certain time windows, especially when there is still sunlight, and fast for the rest of the time.
Although circadian rhythm fasting is almost the same as intermittent fasting, the circadian rhythm diet has the more specific goal of aligning your eating schedule with your natural circadian rhythm.
The circadian rhythm diet falls under the category of an intermittent diet because there is a time window for eating. However, the two terms are not interchangeable. You can eat from 8 to 18, and there are no restrictions or limits on the calories you eat.
Potential Benefits
There are studies involving rats whose calorie intake is not restricted but whose eating schedule is limited to 9 to 10 hours. The results indicate that they are not obese or diabetic and have normal liver function and cholesterol levels.
According to Professor Heilbronn’s research, eating a limited amount in one day can give all the cells in the body time to rest. If done in the long term, insulin levels drop because the body has anticipated and knows that the body only gets glucose at certain times each day, and insulin can make the most appropriate response. In addition, a circadian rhythm diet can provide many benefits:
- Weight loss
- Reduced body fat
- Lowers blood pressure
- Lowering LDL or “bad” cholesterol
- Increase HDL or “good” cholesterol
- Lower fasting insulin levels
- Lowering fasting glucose levels
- Reducing insulin resistance
So it can be concluded that the circadian rhythm diet can be a strategy to help prevent diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), and high cholesterol. You can also get the benefits of losing weight if you have difficulty losing weight with lifestyle changes.
Several studies also suggest that a circadian rhythm diet can strengthen your body’s circadian rhythm. When your circadian rhythm is not disturbed, you can lower your risk of disease and increase your life span.
Can Help You Lose Weight by:
1. Reducing Calorie Intake
Although people fasting on a circadian rhythm are allowed to eat as much food as they want, they often consume fewer caloriesOnene study found that people on a time-restricted eating pattern accidentally ate 20% fewer calories than they normally would.
2. Reduce Appetite
Research has found that people who are overweight or obese experience a decrease in appetite when eating earlier in the day. This decrease in appetite could be due to the synchronization of eating with the release of certain hormones in the body.
3. Increase Metabolism
By aligning meal times with one’s circadian rhythm, one can optimize one’s metabolism. Food is consumed at a time when eating-related hormones, such as ghrelin and adiponectin, are at their peak. This strategic timing of meals means that food tends to be digested and metabolized more efficiently and is less likely to be stored as fat tissue.
Helps Better Quality Sleep
Eating food close to dinner time can cause you to experience circadian rhythm disturbances. You should not only eat healthy foods, but you should also eat according to your circadian rhythms. The body’s metabolism is closely related to circadian rhythms.
Sleep disturbances that are experienced due to disturbances in circadian rhythms can be overcome by following a circadian diet. The circadian diet is carried out by reducing food consumption at night so that the body does not experience circadian rhythm disturbances and rests optimally.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to follow a circadian diet so that the circadian rhythm in the body continues to work well and you can avoid various health problems that you can experience. How to start a circadian diet?
Launching from the Today page, eat normal portions at breakfast and lunch. Increase the consumption of vegetables, protein, and carbohydrates. You can also eat fruit as a snack in the afternoon. However, reduce the portion at dinner.
You can eat dinner in the form of vegetables or salad combined with nuts. In addition to improving sleep quality, following a circadian diet reduces the risk of diabetes, lowers high blood pressure, increases energy, and maintains an ideal body weight.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, someone with a disturbed circadian rhythm can experience fatigue throughout the day, be sleepy during the day, wake up too early, and have trouble sleeping.
How to do
Broadly speaking, this diet involves having breakfast as early as possible and dinner before sunset. Generally, you can split up a 12-hour eating window and a 12-hour fasting period. Here is an example of a meal schedule.
1. Breakfast within 1 hour after you wake up
Good breakfast hours are around 06:00–09:45. Don’t wait until you are hungry to start breakfast. When you wake up to eat, your body is ready to digest your breakfast.
2. Morning snack 2 to 4 hours after breakfast
If you feel hungry after breakfast and before lunch, you can have a morning snack for 2 to 4 hours after breakfast. This is because your digestive system needs time to process your breakfast.
3. Have lunch 4 to 5 hours after breakfast
In general, you should have lunch between 11 and 12. If you have activities that prevent you from having breakfast, prepare a snack for you to consume at lunchtime. After that, have lunch as soon as possible.
4. Afternoon snack 2 to 4 hours after lunch
If you have eaten on time but are still hungry in the afternoon or late in the evening, you can eat a midday snack to prop up your stomach.
5. Dinner from 17.00-18.00
It is best if you have dinner before sunset. For those of you who don’t feel used to eating early, you can advance your dinner hours 15 minutes earlier for one week, and continue to advance 15 minutes each week until you get used to eating at 5-6 p.m.
6. Evening snack if necessary
It’s best not to eat any more after dinner. However, that very early dinner makes your stomach feel hungry, even though it’s not time for you to sleep. The recommended evening snack is milk because, besides being easier to digest, it also contains the amino acid tryptophan, which has a calming effect.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to do excessive calorie restriction, so this diet doesn’t make you feel so hungry. If possible, consume more water, protein, and fiber to help keep you full longer.
