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Timing
Few case stories I know illustrate timing as powerfully as Mr. Pizza Pop’s, who you
might remember ate an entire (actual, not metaphorical) pizza every day. Without making
significant changes to the other three pillars—quantity, quality, balance—he achieved
dramatic positive results mainly by shifting his nutrient intake from backloaded—all at
the end of his day—to a sequence of pit stops starting about an hour after he got up and
then every three hours up to a few hours before he went to bed. In twenty-plus years I
have not met up with another client with exactly the same dietary profile, but his story
shows us two good templates for timing: pit stops and a caloric window.
To identify and optimize your better caloric window, here are the rules:
Calories—not caffeine or supplements—are your body’s source of energy. Your
body will call you out if you try to cheat it with replacements too often.
Not taking in anything gives your digestion and your mind the rest they need. But if
there is too much time without fuel, they start to freak out. There’s better timing for
these time-outs; discover yours.
At different life stages and on different days within a life stage, your body may do
better with a different nutrient window. So, define a window, but don’t plan to
stay with it forever.
Your body sends clear signals regarding how it feels about your window; it’s up to
you to decode them.
Your window impacts your hormones, including your Switch. Make sure to check
in on them.
A window of ten to twelve hours is better for most people most of the time, for
two reasons. It gives the body sufficient time off. Taking in calories over ten to
twelve hours gives the body twelve to fourteen hours to do its recovery work.
Longer time-outs, such as sixteen to twenty hours of not eating, make it more
challenging to get in all the nutrients your body needs in keeping better nutrition
(balance, quantity, timing, quality). The window of ten to twelve hours also breaks
up the day into pit stops at intervals of about three hours.
Caloric window + pit stops = better timing
Whether you wake up earlier than 6 a.m. or at varying times, use the caloric window
calculator:
Waking time + up to two hours, ideally (not longer than three hours) = first pit stop
TEN-HOUR WINDOW TWELVE-HOUR WINDOW
Pit stops: 8 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 3 p.m., 6 p.m. Pit stops: 8 a.m., 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m., 8 p.m.
Then about every three hours = a pit stop
Bedtime minus about three hours = last pit stop
If you answered yes to any of the eight statements in the timing part of the
assessment, here’s how you adjust the components to secure better timing most days.
Make your first pit stop—better quantities of nutrients, in balance—within two hours of
waking. Example: Instead of black coffee with nothing to eat, have your coffee with
Greek yogurt, berries, and hemp seeds or an open-faced egg and turkey bacon sandwich.
If your coffee is a latte, then wait three hours for the egg and turkey bacon sandwich,
and . . . make that sandwich your next pit stop. And yes, you can do coffee with a
protein powder as a pre-workout option. Just remember the “Better Be Delicious to Me
Right Now” tool. If this combo makes your coffee not delicious to you, there may be
consequences with your post-workout choice.
If, like Sarah, you don’t have “time for lunch” three hours later, have a nutrient-
balanced pit stop—it can be a grab-n-go option such as a bar. Be sure to get in your next
pit stop about three hours later. For that last pit stop, reverse engineer from your set
bedtime. Make it everything you and your body need it to be to go the final three hours
with no more than a noncaloric beverage such as water or herbal tea leading up to bed.
Practice better-timed choices to see what is doable and delivers better for your
Switch and ecosystem. Evaluate the timing experiments with assessments of your
daytime energy, sleep quality, cravings, body composition, and other data.
“But what if I have tried adjusting my timing and it didn’t work?”
Do any of these sound familiar?
I am not hungry every three hours.
If I have breakfast, I am hungry all day.
If I eat this often, I will eat too much and gain weight.
I am really busy. My life doesn’t allow for a meal every three hours.
My ____ gets home late, and we like to eat together.
If the timing I’m suggesting hasn’t historically worked for you, or feels like it won’t,
two things could be going on separately or simultaneously. Perfectionism may be at
play. Remember, we’re all about better, not perfect. Life doesn’t happen in three-hour
increments, so your pit stops may not always happen in this window. When they don’t,
how your body responds can give you insights about your body’s needs and its
responses to not getting resources in a consistent, timely manner. The idea is to
experiment with eating every three-ish hours and see how your body responds. When a
ten-to-twelve-hour nutrient window isn’t doable, or when you’re too hungry to wait
three hours (or you feel too full to have anything), this gives us insights that other pillars
or your digestion, for example, need attention.
The tenets of the timing pillar—trialing a ten-to-twelve-hour window and pit-
stopping about every three hours—work because they are based on the human body’s
design. They don’t work when the body’s design is being challenged or is dysfunctional.
That’s why we worked on digestion and hydration first, and why timing is a pillar that
works in cahoots with the others, not as a standalone.
Quality
A cast-iron pan is round, and so is a paper plate, but that doesn’t mean they’re equally
useful for frying an egg. A car runs better on certain liquids—gasoline, ethanol—than it
does on banana juice. You get an email in a script that does not even look like a
language; just because this email reached your inbox doesn’t mean you can read or
answer it. When our bodies recognize the things they get, they can use those things—and
use them more efficiently and effectively. What they don’t recognize easily or fully they
may be unable to use at all. And our bodies send us signals. Some signals register with
us fast—give a kid candy and watch what happens. Other signals reach us on a delay—
artificial sweeteners disturb our oral and gut microbiome, but we can be slow in
becoming aware of the trouble this causes. Signals reacting to quality tend to be of the
slow-impact kind. So where you are today with regard to quality is an important
baseline. The signals you’re getting right now are a cumulative story. Let’s consider
how the quality of your regular choices may be frustrating your body and giving it
unproductive or wasteful work.
Consider the review you did to familiarize yourself with better and not-better
quality ingredient sources. For the choices you consume most often and know the quality
of: Were ingredients, preparation, or storage mostly on the “Not Better” side of the list?
If that’s a yes, you have a great place to start on quality adjustments:
Check out the quality of what you consume regularly.
Upgrade where doable, as indicated.
Here’s how we do that:
Use both sides of the list. Look at the “better” column. How can these choices
figure into your pit stops more often?
Look at the not-better items for ones to substitute or reduce now or within thirty
days.
As you experiment with upgrading choices, which can feel cost-challenging or
prohibitive, consider setting a weekly budget for “experiments.” Use this budget to
buy a new choice and see if it is delicious to you and works as a quality upgrade.
Beyond the list, the online resources guide you to tools that help you identify and
upgrade choices. These include third-party certifications, websites, and lists
designed to navigate through the quality of choices. You’ll get to know your own
go-tos. Check them out via the QR code here.
For most of us, the quality of a lot of what we consume may be unknown because
someone else is preparing it:
To get insights on the quality of ingredients, preparation, and storage of these
regular choices, you can always go more directly to the source, reviewing
restaurant, product, and ingredient websites or asking business owners and
manufacturers directly.
If for any reason you are not going to, consider reducing the frequency of having
items for which you don’t know the quality.
Before we move on, some words of caution and consideration. Plus, another story
about fly-fishing.
Before my Alaskan fishing adventure, I got a primary lesson in quality from a guide
in Montana. The guy had taken me out to teach me some basics of fly casting. What he
knew about his customer: plant-based, gluten-free, and a dietitian. The morning went
well. The fishing was catch and release, so I was curious about the menu for lunch.
There was a picnicky-looking bag. Vegan in the boonies, I expected PB&J. I was
wrong. Out of the bag came a ceramic bowl, a glass container with salad, and a cloth
napkin. I watched wide-eyed like Jane and Michael Banks. What would my Mary
Poppins produce next? He uncovered the ceramic bowl. Bison. He held up the bowl and
a vegan energy bar. “What do you prefer? I know you don’t eat meat, but I wanted to
offer it since I hunted and cooked it myself. Or the bar. It’s made with soy protein
isolate,” he deadpanned. “I don’t eat that, so it’s all yours if you want it.” The bison
was local, wild, almost for sure grass-fed and free-range. Never saw a feedlot or GMO
corn in its life. It had lived on what was better for its body. Whereas the energy bar . . .
My guide and host mentioned that he couldn’t explain to his kids what it was made of,
and he’d gotten a good grade in chemistry. The bison wasn’t just the more appealing
choice. It was the better-quality choice. The guy who’d prepared it and offered it to me
had just shown me what I really was where food was concerned: a qualitarian. Been
one ever since. Maybe you’re one and haven’t made that discovery yet.
That bison was delicious.
The quality calculus is sometimes, say, two kinds of chicken: battery-fed and raised
with growth hormones and antibiotics over here; organic, natural-feed, no meds over
there. More often, everyday life presents us choices between foods that are unalike.
Maybe not between bison and an energy bar but two protein options on a menu, two
choices at a breakfast meeting, two packaged snacks on a plane. Qualitarian living
means you get to say yes to one choice way more than no to all choices, and that’s great
when it comes to adventures, culinary and otherwise.
Better quality does not necessarily mean eating only organic fruits and vegetables.
Resources like the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen”
rightly get a lot of attention. They tell us about the fruits and vegetables that come to us
with the heaviest pesticide residues. It’s quality intel for the fruits and veggies we
hopefully consume often, although not nearly as often as things like coffee, tea,
chocolate, flour-based products, protein bars, and the like. Additionally, if the choice is
between eating conventional fruits and vegetables or none at all, I come down in favor
of nonorganic almost every time. But when it comes to these others? Better to pass. Try
to hold your coffee (and the water it’s brewed, dripped, or expressed with), chocolate,
and protein bar to a better quality standard or find an alternative. The Environmental
Working Group has some great resources to help you navigate these choices, too.
If something you love is not so lovable by quality measures, and you’re not into
giving it up or substituting something that’s better, look at loving that thing less often.
Maybe it’s a treat or even a rare treat. When it comes to things that aren’t helpful to our
weight-health ecosystems and our weight health, it is very often the fact that less equals
more.
It isn’t better quality just because they tell you so. We’re seeing an ongoing decline
in trust toward food sources. The decline is mostly led by marketing. But even when
swaying your purchase behavior isn’t the desired outcome, in spite of good intentions,
what passes some “better-quality” test often doesn’t stand up. For example, that extra-
virgin olive oil may have been adulterated with oils on the not-better side, especially in
restaurant and food service. For a retail purchase, find a third-party certification that
verifies it as both genuine (made from olives) and pure (from olives only). In a
restaurant, ask to see the container the olive oil came in; this will give you a degree of
quality assurance. Unfortunately, there are times when even that effort doesn’t pan out—
like my client who observed a restaurant worker refilling olive oil from a container
with a different label. If that seems too dicey, based on your health and goals, you’ll
likely want to pursue your quest for better quality differently. Maybe bring your own or
eat at home.
There’s reasonable concern as to whether better quality is affordable. Better quality
can cost more. But it doesn’t have to. Typically the more people involved in the foods
we consume, the more we pay for them. And of course, the more high-quality
ingredients in a food’s makeup, the more it’s likely to cost (100 percent pure vanilla
extract costs more than other kinds). However, we can invest our efforts and choose
differently to make better quality affordable more of the time. Making a mostly organic
salad at home can be half the cost of a conventional salad at a take-out place, and a third
the price of a comparable organic salad in a restaurant. More economical yet: frozen
organic vegetables sautéed instead of the same or similar in a ready-to-eat organic
(often misleadingly labeled “fresh”) package. Using coupons or buying bulk can help
extend resources, as can expanding your repertoire of pit stops made from reimagined
leftovers.
Better quality is pointless if it’s not doable, and doable when you want or need to
do it—which is to say, now. Whether what holds us back is cost, access, or straight-out
non-deliciousness, quality upgrades don’t amount to better if we’re not able to make
them more of the time or most of the time. Still, lower quality, due to these impediments,
sure doesn’t add up to better either. The aim is not perfect, just better.
The degree and time frame in which you make quality improvements—and notice
outcomes—is a lot like counting steps. Yes, there is a mass recommendation for 10,000
steps daily. If you are at 9,500 today, that’s a great goal. But if you are at 1,000, then
maybe your better next steps will be to get to 1,200 daily for a while, then 1,500.
To summarize, when it comes to quality:
Nobody knows quality like your weight-health ecosystem.
A primary quality control officer is your Switch.
Better quality helps your body work better more often.
The choices you consume regularly need to give your body what it recognizes and
can use most efficiently and effectively. That doesn’t necessarily mean organic. It does
mean those choices are full of nutrients with minimal challengers for your body to
manage.
Do I need to detox?
Yes, every day that ends in Y, your whole life. Your weight-health ecosystem comes
with a built-in detoxification function. It requires optimally resourced amounts of better-
quality choices. It runs better when it can manage its workload (i.e., the challengers). So
your goal with quality is to make choices more often that minimize toxins and help
deliver nutrients to support detoxification efforts.
So my body runs better when I invest in the choices that give it fuel it can use while
limiting the challenges I throw at it, too. And my wallet runs better when I invest in
the choices I can afford. So I run better with both?
Exactly. You got it.
Better quality matters. But “perfect” or “best” quality is a myth.
Balance, quantity, timing, quality: Mix them together and, baby, you’ve got a sauce.
It better be delicious, for your body and for you right now.
But we don’t eat pizza sauce by itself.
We put the sauce on the crust, add the cheese and the toppings, and then we fire the
whole beautiful thing.
The components all work together.
All this talking about food and beverages . . . we better get moving, right?
Sprinkle or cover it with cheese.
ADD THE CHEESE: DUMPING “DON’T STRESS,” “BE MINDFUL,” AND
OTHER UNHELPFUL LIFESTYLE ADVICE
Heading the list of things that aren’t helpful and frankly piss me off are
recommendations to just do this one specific thing; yet, if we could already do that
thing, we wouldn’t be seeking professional help. Like a cardiologist who advises
“reduce stress” to improve heart health or a dietitian who tells you to “eat more
mindfully.” We are not going to do that here.
Here you choose your pizza’s cheese. Cheese that will be delicious, doable, and
personalized. Doesn’t help if a pizza has a gooey cheesy layer but it sends you to the
bathroom or makes your skin erupt. Same if you choose the plant-based cheese but it’s
not made from better-quality ingredients or it doesn’t melt.
For our pizza, the cheese is the lifestyle choices your body needs for optimal Switch
function. They happen for all of us—dairy or plant-based—but how much, how often,
what kind, and in what balance is where we differ. Around my family table, there are
some of us that add a dusting, more of us that enjoy a good amount of cheese, and a few
who add so much they have no idea what is actually underneath. That’s the same with
lifestyle choices. Your cheese works with your sauce, and vice versa. Like a pizza, the
whole is so much more than the sum of its parts.
THE FOUR PILLARS OF BETTER LIFESTYLE CHOICES
Turns out, to function optimally, the weight-health ecosystem also relies on lifestyle
choices that align with the four pillars. It isn’t just what you choose to do—or don’t—
but the balance, quantity, timing, and quality of those choices that result in your body
getting what it needs when it needs it, more often. Now we will investigate the
fundamental lifestyle choices—movement, sleep, stress, breathing, and joy—that impact
Switch and ecosystem operations.
Let’s kick off this section with the Big Three: movement, sleep, and stress. It’s
probably no surprise to hear that all three are hugely important to the functions of your
ecosystem and your Switch. And as you probably can attest to firsthand, the fabric of
modern-day life is built to screw with all three of these.
Diagnosis of and remedies for all three tend to add up to “This is a problem” with
no solution offered. If I could address the problem, I wouldn’t have the problem. So
what is newsworthy here: approaches to optimize movement, sleep, and your stress
response that are actually doable.
Movement
It’s all calories in, calories out . . . that’s why movement matters, right?
No, we unlearned that mantra.
Sitting is the new smoking . . . okay, we’re getting closer.
But still no cigar.
Switch function impacts movement, and optimizing movement using the four pillars
improves Switch and ecosystem function.
One form of movement we have already explored is digestive activity. Your
digestive-tract muscles run throughout your body using movement to facilitate transport
and elimination. Nurturing these muscles is a key part of Switch Optimization. The
quality of your movement—where, when, how much, how intensely—will impact your
digestion. The quality of your muscles—slow- and fast-twitch—will, too.
In order to move effectively and efficiently, your body also needs recovery. To not
move or to move at a slower pace, in a less taxing manner, invites different ecosystem
activity to occur—or not—with desirable outcomes. The quality, timing, and quantity of
your recovery efforts impact your vagus nerve and thus the transport pace for your
Switch hormones.
Then there is the movement that your Switch hormones directly impact. Organs—for
example, the stomach—receive messaging for how they are to move—or not. Case in
point, the prolonged intentional delay of gastric emptying accomplished by the Shot and
more modestly with your Switch hormones.
In view of all this, we now turn our attention to decode the signals that your Switch
hormones are revealing about your current movement choices.
Your movement assessment: Answer the following according to last week—or if it
was an abnormal week, use a prior week for evaluation. Answer yes or no and note the
date with your answers.
Do you lift items or weights that feel heavy to you three or more days a week?
Do you walk or jog twenty minutes or more most days?
Do you complete more than thirty minutes of intense cardiovascular exercise two or more times a week?
Do you avoid being seated for longer than three hours (180 minutes) at a time during the day when not sleeping?
Do you spend more than twenty minutes outside in nature most days?
Do you stretch or do an activity that moves your abdomen more than once daily?
Are you able to do ten pushups? (On your knees counts.)
Do you go through your day with minimal—or earned—soreness from your activities the day before?
Do you fall asleep and stay asleep easily following your day’s activity?
Do you spend more than fifteen minutes most days stretching or being stretched to get into your muscles and
fascia for recovery? (Fascia? It’s connective tissue that covers organs, muscles, bones—even nerves—and
supports their movement within the ecosystem.)
Are your hunger and thirst after exercising satisfied with the choices you make in the hours following?
For any no answers, these represent areas of opportunity to experiment with
improving the balance, quantity, timing, and quality of your movement.
While I am passionate about movement, exercise, form, and recovery, I am not a
trained expert in any of them. What I have put together here is what I have learned
through collaboration with experts to support my patients. This is how they’ve taught me
to assess potential imbalances, and how to evaluate improvements or ongoing
challenges. For building and refining plans, I suggest collaborating with an expert.
Balance
To move effectively, the muscles of your ecosystem work in opposition—push and pull,
contract and relax. You have fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles that require equal
attention. More globally, the body needs movement to occur both intensely and
moderately. And of course it needs you to both move and be still.
Nutrients play a key role in the push-pull, contract-relax efforts. We saw this in
hydration with electrolyte minerals, where imbalances were as critical to identify as
insufficiency of one or more nutrients. Activity choices should do the same.
Muscles should be used in both directions—contracting and relaxing, with pushing
and pulling. Recall the fly-fishing guides hauling the boat anchors and all the gear as
well as their new guest’s kettlebell-containing duffel. What counts as your movement
isn’t just about what you do at a gym for minutes or an hour a few days a week or even
daily. Muscle-working movements occur in cleaning and gardening, lifting children or
groceries—even in pushing away from the table. For your Switch, you need to make
sure this includes abdominal movement to support digestion along with strength-training
efforts to build and retain the amount and integrity of muscle mass throughout your body.
Intensity of activity—in exercise, this is now commonly referred to as zone training;
in old-school terms, “degree of difficulty”—should be balanced, too. Your personal
training goals and lifestyle will impact this dramatically, so the term balance can apply
quite differently to your life versus others’ and throughout your own life phases or
seasons. But balance is still key. What does this mean? The harder you train, the harder
you need to recover. From professional athletes to entertainers to parents, caregivers,
and professionals such as doctors, teachers, builders, and farmers, when I audit their
“training” time, I can often find a severe imbalance with their recovery time and efforts.
Often on their to-do lists is “I need to make time for the gym,” when what their body is
saying is “You need to make time to stretch and relax muscles, open up fascia, and
recover.”
We can use several markers beyond the movement assessment above to evaluate the
balance of your movement. Continuous glucose monitoring tells me how your body is
responding to training and where recovery is suboptimal. Your body’s oxygen level,
pulse, and respiratory rate give me insights; and if you have the ability to monitor heart
rate variability, we get even more usable data. Scales and scans that measure body
composition provide data, too. As does how you feel—physically overall, on waking,
and throughout the day—in terms of energy.
Quantity
We’ve already broken up with the word more, so let’s see what better quantity of
movement looks like for you.
Activity is like macronutrients in that we need an optimal amount of them all and,
as we just covered, in balance. Think about movement types in this analogy: your
cardiovascular exercise = movement carbs; strength training = movement protein;
stretching, fascia, and recovery work = movement fats. Using the movement
assessment, you can see where you may benefit from increasing the quantity of a
certain type of movement or recovery. The specific amount will be dictated by
what is doable in your schedule and how your body responds.
Just like with nutrition, if there is a reason you need to limit or not do one form of
movement, you will want to use the others and some supplemental sources to make
up for what your body isn’t getting. What does that look like? It is hard to move a
lot when you are on a plane, but you can move your abdomen and other parts of
your body in your seat, and you may be able to get up and walk around. Before you
board or between flights you can walk around the airport. You may also benefit
from wearing compression socks or using other tools to help your body when
movement is impaired.
Overenthusiasm or an active memory of glory days often leads to overexertion in
the name of meeting a prescribed movement goal. If climbing the stadium stairs
today means you are unable to move for three days afterward, your in-the-moment
movement choice wasn’t better. Temper enthusiasm with a small dose of reality by
asking yourself—as we do in the assessment—how a movement undertaken today
is likely to feel tomorrow. Doability like this is compatible with setting big
movement goals. Do set them, train for them, learn from how your body responds,
optimize recovery, and smash your big goals!
Timing
Just as with our consumption of nutrients and calories, the amount of movement we do
can leave our ecosystem under-resourced or overwhelmed. Doing a lot of activity at
just one point in the day and spending the rest sedentary isn’t better. We need to break