Ready For The 8-Hour Diet?

Here’s another diet on the block with the assurance of weight loss. The 8-Hour Diet is fairly simple and doesn’t come with a list of foods you can’t eat. Also, it assures dieters weight loss while eating whatever they want and there’s no gruelling exercise program involved. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, there’s a catch — you can eat only between an eight-hour time slot ie. you fast for  the remaining 16 hours. Read on to know more..

The 8-Hour Diet

- The 8-Hour Diet is a well-known weight loss plan by American author and publisher, David Zinczenko, who authored Eat This Not That, a best-selling book. Following his own diet, which works on the principle of intermittent fasting to lose weight, Zinczenko lost seven pounds. 

- This 8-Hour Diet involves eating over an eight-hour period and then fasting for a 16-hour period in a day. The thought process behind this is that the body should be focused towards repairing and resting, rather than continuously digesting food.

- One can choose the time slot for this eight-hour period during which they eat. So you can choose either 9 am to 5 pm or 10 am to 6 pm or 11 am to 7 pm. Also, you should delay eating breakfast until your food window begins. So if you can’t start eating until 10 am, Zinczenko suggest having  a cup of tea, water, or coffee and doing some light exercise before any calories are consumed.

- Now for the best part, there’s no food that is forbidden. You can eat what you want but don’t use this as a cheat code to overeat, so therefore, portion sizes should be kept in mind. 

- Snacking is allowed during the eight-hour period. However, dieters are requested to include eight power foods mentioned in the book.

- No heavy exercising here — as per the diet, just eight minutes of exercise is required to turbocharge the fat burning process. Exercises are mentioned in the book. 

- You can begin by following the diet thrice a week and then gradually increase the number of days.

Expert speak

Shalini Bhargava, Director, JG’s Fitness Centre, says that weight loss is a matter of negative calorie balance, so any healthy diet has to ensure this in order to achieve results. This diet will work, if there is a negative calorie balance. She says, “All healthy balanced and doable diets recommend having the last meal of the day as early as possible, before going to bed. However, timings may differ for each person. So I would recommend a diet which suits the person’s needs in terms of goals, timings and preferences.”

It’s a quick fix to weight loss

The good part of this diet is that there’s definitely flexibility here, which offers one to choose their 8-Hour Diet window. However, it’s a quick-fix to weight loss, opines consultant nutritionist Pooja Makhija. “How will you maintain the weight loss, after losing weight?  If you follow this diet say, for a month, you will lose weight. But are you going to continue this diet for the rest of your life to maintain the weight loss? On an average, most individuals are awake for about 14 hours a day and sleep for eight hours. Instead of only eating for eight hours of the 14 hours that you’re wake, why not eat right and sensibly for 16 hours instead? Even if you choose the eight-hour window to coincide with your office timings, what about when you’re done from work? Wouldn’t you prefer spending  harmonious time with your family later than be cranky because you’re not going to be eating for the next 16 hours?,” she questions.

Another fad diet   

This diet seems to be another fad diet and this trend of fasting for eight hours/ 16 hours to lose weight has been there for a long time now, informs Pallavi Srivastava, fitness nutritionist,Proprietor, Q-Slim Fitness Studio. “This diet might work for few people stuck on a plateau to begin their weight loss with. But if care is not taken — vitamins, minerals, proteins, complex carbohydrates, fats, fibre, are not in the right proportion — there are chances of deficiency and side-effects like hair fall, de-toned skin, wrinkles, joint pains, unstable blood sugar levels, hormonal imbalance, brittle nails, tiredness, etc.,” she warns. She further adds though this diet does talk about eating what you want so as to take care of the whole deprivation process during dieting, in portion control, but one can easily go overboard with the idea.

Would they recommend it?

Srivastava says, “I wouldn’t recommend the 8-Hour Diet to my clients. If this kind of eating is followed, one must ensure that it is under supervision. Make sure you keep yourself well-hydrated, if you are suffering from any health conditions, talk to the expert before starting with the diet.”

“I wouldn’t recommend this diet to others because it’s sounds like a quick fix to weight loss. Mathematically, it sounds right and will help shed the pounds but it won’t maintain the weight lost once you stop following the diet. Also, besides weight loss, any diet which will result in muscle loss is bad for the health,” Makhija gives her verdict.