Tag: eating

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One of the first things my Oura ring helped me figure out when I got it 4 years ago, was that if I eat a meal in the 4 hours before bedtime it interferes with my sleep. The effect was dramatic enough that Jackie and I switched to eating just two meals a day: breakfast an hour or two after we get up, and then our main meal of the day around 2:00 PM. Since that change, I’ve slept much better.

Sometimes though… life intervenes. Yesterday was one of those days. My local Esperanto group had its annual Zamenfest, and I brought pizza and cookies to the meeting, and ate a lot of both. (In fact, I not only ate several of the ginger sparkles I bought, I also ate some green star-shaped sugar cookies and some peanut butter cookies brought by other members of the group. It was a real cookie fest, as well as a Zamenfest.)

Unsurprisingly, I saw a repeat of the various issues that showed up 4 years ago, as can be seeing from looking at my Readiness metrics from my Oura ring:

Screen capture from the Oura Ring software showing a resting heart rate of 53, an elevated body temperature, and a poor recovery index.

The “Recovery index” basically means that my heart rate remained elevated until shortly before I woke up. That’s on top of the fact that it only got down to 53, which is rather high for me. My body temperature was 1.1℉ above baseline, which is probably just that my body was very active digesting food, rather than being a fever due to an infection or something.

A single day of this is no problem. Today I’ll eat on my usual schedule, and I expect I’ll sleep very well tonight. But I thought it was an interesting example of the sort of thing that the Oura ring is good at alerting the user to.

I didn’t get a picture of yesterday’s cookies, but here’s some from a prior year’s batch:

Ginger sparkle cookies

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For a couple of years now I’ve been experimenting with time-restricted eating.

I guess I really started about a year and a half ago, after I got my Oura ring. One of the first things I noticed was that the early hours of my sleep were disrupted unless I had finished dinner at least 4 hours before bedtime. (This in contrast to the “common wisdom” that you want at least three hours between the last thing you eat and bedtime.)

Once I notice that I started pushing Jackie to arrange things so that we could finish supper at least 4 hours before we went to bed. The issue here was that while working at the bakery Jackie had gotten into the habit of getting up at 4:00 AM—because that’s when she needed to get up if she was going to be able to have coffee, breakfast, dress for work, and then spend most of an hour walking to work. As she has been so far unable to break herself of that habit, she finds herself very sleepy starting at about 8:00 PM. If you work out the math, you can see that we need to finish supper no later than 4:00 PM.

Jackie found herself somewhat daunted by the prospect of having to prepare lunch at mid-day, clean up the kitchen, and then prepare supper to serve at 3:00 PM so we could be done by 4:00 PM.

We experimented with various lunch/supper timings with limited success. But back in December, when Steven brought Lucy and his boys to visit, we fell into the habit of just having two meals a day. I went to his hotel for the breakfast that the hotel served to guests (Jackie made her usual breakfast at home), and then one of us (often, but not always, Jackie) prepared our main meal of the day sometime in the afternoon.

This turned out to work great, and Jackie and I have continued the practice since Steven and family departed. Jackie gets up at 4:00 AM as usual. (I tend to sleep until closer to 6:00 AM.) We linger over coffee, then have breakfast at 7:00 AM or so. Whatever we hope to get done in the day happens between 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM, at which point we have “dinner” consisting of our main meal of the day. We finish it by 3:00 PM or so.

(In these pandemic days we follow that up with a virtual happy hour with Steven and Lucy via Zoom, so we’re still consuming cocktails until 4:30 PM or so, but I try to make sure to limit both the carbs and the calories that late in the day. I’m hoping that eventually we’ll be able to arrange things such that happy hour doesn’t extended until so close to bedtime.)

Jackie and I usually enjoy some video entertainment in the evening, and then retire to read for a bit before 8:00 PM and time to go to sleep.

I’m sure that’s way more detail than a stranger could be interested in, but the gist is that our eating window is compressed to just 9 hours a day or so (from 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM), putting us within striking distance of a 16:8 time-restricted eating window.

And I have to say, it’s working pretty well. Jackie especially appreciates not having to prepare both lunch and dinner every day. Keeping my weight stable has been especially easy—if I’m hungry in the morning I fix a bigger omelette, if I’m hungry at mid-day I take a bigger serving of whatever Jackie is fixing, or just have something more (peanut butter, cottage cheese, jerky, protein powder, whatever). And if I’m not extra hungry, I just eat a regular breakfast and a regular mid-day meal.

The result has been that I easily get enough food, don’t overeat, get done eating four hours before bedtime, and spend nearly 16 hours per day in a fasted state, with all the attendant benefits described in the post linked just above. And as a bonus, Jackie doesn’t have to prepare two meals after breakfast.

Time-restricted eating: Highly recommended.

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News today about a proposal to change food labeling rules reminds me of a long-ago peeve of mine.

More than 20 years ago, I got word from my doctor that my cholesterol was elevated. I responded by changing my diet to reduce my fat consumption. That led to reading a lot of food labels, which led to observing that a lot of manufacturers were gaming the system by manipulating portion sizes.

The specific example that served as patient-zero for my peeve was a brand of sliced cold cuts that advertised itself as “fat-free.” Their justification for that was slicing their smoked chicken and turkey into slices so small they had less than half a gram of fat, which they could then round to zero—and then calling one paper-thin slice a serving. With “zero” grams of fat per “serving,” they were “fat-free.”

Now, I was a bit torn. I mean, portion control is a legitimate part of eating a good diet, and I was willing to accept the idea that one thin slice—perhaps torn up on top of a chef’s salad—might be a serving. I was totally down with supporting, even encouraging, people to make that choice.

On the other hand, when I used that lunch meat to make a sandwich, I used 8 or 10 slices—and had no idea how much fat I was eating. I could assume it was pretty close to 5 grams, but I would have really liked to have a more accurate figure.

My own preferred solution would have been to put the total fat content of the whole package on the label. Then if I used half or a third of the package to make a sandwich, I’d just have to divide by two or three to get a reasonably accurate figure.

That idea never seemed to get much consideration. Finally now the new rules move us some ways toward that, at least in categories where everybody knows that people consume a whole package. For example, soda companies will no longer be able to pretend that a 20-ounce bottle of soda contains two and a half 8-ounce servings.

What surprised me about the whole thing is that, although I remember caring deeply about this 20 years ago, I’m over it. I scarcely even look at food labels any more.

Part of the reason is that I’ve outsourced the label-checking to Jackie, but probably the bigger part is that a whole lot less of what I eat even has a label any more, because I eat a lot less in the way of manufactured edible products. (Strangely, food often doesn’t come with a food label. It’s the food-like products that get the food labels.)

Still, it’s good that people are paying attention to this. My label-based efforts to reduce fat consumption were effective: I brought my cholesterol down, and have kept it down for 20 years. It would have been a lot harder without the labels. Better labels would have helped more.

Even now I make use of the labels, although not so much the content of the label. Now that I’ve observed that food tends not to have labels, the presence of a label is a good, quick way to spot that I’m dealing with a manufactured food-like substance. (And I do eat them, I just try to make them a small part of my diet.)