A
generation or two ago most middle-aged men ate at a cadence best described as “three
square meals a day” and breakfast, lunch and dinner were the venues where
fueling their bodies took place. I’m
sure some snacked between meals but it wasn’t common like nowadays.
Restaurants
weren’t opened for as many hours and 24-hour fast food
establishments were a rarity. Both make
it so easy for hungry middle-aged men to acquire and consume food-on-demand to
satisfy their starving guts crying to be fed.
In
those olden days, grazing was something the cows did and this notion of eating
mini-meals throughout the day was something most middle-aged men didn’t have time for or could imagine doing.
When
meal time finally came, middle-aged men were hungry and ready to eat whatever
was on their plate. The rest of their day was devoted to things besides
food.
There wasn’t a preoccupation about
it like now. The time people
devoted to fueling their bodies with food was commensurate with the benefits
provided. People didn’t eat because they
were bored; they ate because they were hungry.
It
seems different today and some recent research indicates this is true.
A
report appearing on the internet website of Cell Metabolism, a research journal
dedicated to publishing novel, impactful papers spanning basic to clinical
metabolic research, shared study results from monitoring the daily eating
patterns of 150 healthy, non-shift worker adult males and females for three
weeks.
Aided
by modern technology of a smart phone app, researchers discovered how more than
half of the adults in their study ate for 15 hours or longer from day to day.
In
fact, most ate frequently and erratically throughout wakeful hours with their fasting
duration only taking place during their time in bed.
There
was a bias toward eating late with an estimated less than 25 percent of daily
calorie consumption being consumed before noon and greater than 35 percent
after 6:00 p.m.
The
daily food consumption intake duration exceeded 14.75 hours for half the study
subjects.
A
follow-up study was also done of overweight individuals included in the
original study. These overweight folks
lost weight during a 16-week period when they reduced their eating duration
from more than 14 hours a day to 10-11 hours a day. They also reported being more energetic and
sleeping better.
Click
this link to read more:
This
study is further support and a “two-thumbs up” for intermittent fasting as a
viable method for middle-aged men wanting to shed a few pounds.
But
in the fast-paced world in which we live, many of us thrive on being
multi-tasked and working around the clock in a chasing-your-tail approach to
living life to the fullest.
Now,
thanks to this research, "porking out" all day long may be what’s really going on
when a fatso middle-aged man says he’s doing 24/7.
Pax
Domini sit semper vobiscum
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