Says he's doing 24/7

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:

A Smartphone App Reveals Erratic Diurnal Eating Patterns in Humans that Can Be Modulated for Health Benefits

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