I lived in Maryland for 21 years and commuted more than an hour each way to work. During that time I stayed fit by training for and competing in triathlons and running races and doing lots of indoor climbing. My weight generally stayed in a narrow band around 185 pounds, with small decreases during peak training periods and small increases starting at Thanksgiving each year.
I continued to work remotely when we moved to Bozeman in June 2020, but not having to commute and with improved access to skiing, trail running and mountain biking my weight declined steadily until it stabilized at around 172 pounds. When I started zone training In October 2022, I experienced a second decline in my weight; running slowly, but more frequently pushed my weight down to around 166.
In all this time I hadn’t made any changes to my diet. I eat well: lots of whole grains, mostly vegetarian. But the timing of my eating was out of sync with research that I’d read snippets of that can be easily summarized as “Eat like a king in the morning, a prince at noon and a peasant at dinner,” and eat dinner early in the evenings. As I said in my previous posts, the only times my eating patterns reasonably align with this prescription is when I am on vacation. On a recent trip to Zion National Park my eating more or less followed this prescription and I had my new Garmin 255 Forerunner watch on all day and night. I noticed a dramatic change in my health stats that I atrtributed in large part to this eating pattern: lower resting heartrate, lower stress levels while I slept and a higher body battery when I woke up. Most importantly, I managed to do hard trail runs for three straight days without any noticeable decline in my health stats, something that does not happen at home.
In the past 6 weeks I’ve continued following this eating pattern to the best of my ability; mostly, I eat more in the morning and I eat dinner early with no seconds, and the only after dinner snack I allow myself is fruit. My health stats have improved as a result. They aren’t quite as good as they were when I was on vacation, but I can work out day after day without seeing them steadily deteriorate.
A third decline in my weight has been another side benefit from this shift in my eating patterns. Thus far my weight has declined to about 161 pounds, but my new equilibrium weight may even be a few pounds less than that. With ski season over and my training becoming more systematic, I wouldn’t be surprised to see my weight drop a few more pounds before stabilizing.
Given my success with slight changes to the timing of my diet I did some reading into the research on the effects of meal timing on weight and energy. The research is not definitive because human bodies are affected by a lot of factors that are difficult or impossible to control for in a research setting and thereby add a lot of unexplained variation to the results. But the research does generally support shifting food consumption to earlier in the day for improved heart health and weight control.
Not eating late and then grazing after dinner is a daily challenge, but experiencing the quick impact of these changes on my health stats and weight keeps me from going to back to old behaviors.
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