The 8-Hour Diet (8 page)

The 8-Hour Diet Success Story

“THE 8-HOUR DIET ALLOWS YOU TO INDULGE—AND LOSE WEIGHT!”

Jill dropped 10 pounds in just 4 weeks!

Jill Martin, 36,
NEW YORK, NEW YORK

OCCUPATION:
FASHION/LIFESTYLE EXPERT AND TV PERSONALITY

HEIGHT:
5'7"
     STARTING WEIGHT:
145
     WEIGHT AFTER 4 WEEKS:
135

Jill Martin had only a few pounds to drop, but as a busy author, fashion consultant, and television correspondent—not to mention a major foodie—she wanted a program that would give her boundaries without forcing her to overhaul her whole schedule and lifestyle. Just a month in, she’s 10 pounds lighter and more energetic than ever—all thanks to the 8-Hour Diet.

A 3-DAY-A-WEEK DIET? YES!

Like a lot of people who’ve tried dieting before, Jill was a weight-loss skeptic. “You hear ‘8-Hour Diet’ and the idea that you can eat whatever you want and lose weight, and you’re sort of like—wow! That sounds good, sign me up! But I was skeptical at first because I thought, how could you eat whatever you want and lose weight?” Still, her interest in looking and feeling better—and her love of rich, indulgent food—inspired her to give it a shot. The catch? Because of her busy schedule, Jill realized she’d only be able to follow the plan 3 days a week.

GREAT FOOD, INSTANT ENERGY

Jill didn’t eat anything special on the diet, nor did she count calories. She just limited her eating time frame for 3 out of the 7 days of the week—and within a month, her life had changed. Jill’s lost 10 pounds, gained a spring in her step, found a new balance—and she’s feeling healthier than ever. “I wake up with more energy, and I find myself less hungry when I first wake up,” Jill says. Her favorite part? Success without sacrifice. “If you’re a food person and food is important to you, which it is to me, [the 8-Hour Diet] allows you to indulge, which a lot of diets don’t,” says Jill. “I could never be the girl at the table not eating!”

HEALTHIER—AND HAPPIER!

Jill couldn’t be happier with her success, and she says the 8-Hour Diet gave her exactly what she was looking for. “I found that for my situation, and my personality, and my schedule, this works for me.” The 8-Hour Diet let Jill set boundaries where she needed them, while still allowing her to live her life—and the result is its own reward. “For me, there’s nothing better than feeling healthy and being at a weight where you’re comfortable and happy.” And with the new strategies she’s learned from the 8-Hour Diet, she has the tools she needs to be comfortable and happy for life.

The 8-Hour Diet Success Story

“I LOOK BETTER! I FEEL BETTER!”

Marisa lost 13 pounds in 6 weeks—and regained her body confidence

Marisa DeLorenzo, 45,
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

OCCUPATION:
PROJECT MANAGER
     HEIGHT:
5'4"

STARTING WEIGHT:
225
     WEIGHT AFTER 6 WEEKS:
212

Starting a new diet is easy. Sticking to it is the hard part, as Marisa DeLorenzo can tell you. Since becoming a mom, Marisa noticed her weight sneaking up, but traditional diet plans just didn’t fit into her life. “I was always looking for something that I could stick to that would keep me motivated,” she says. But most of the plans she encountered were either too complicated or too time-consuming. Then Marisa discovered the 8-Hour Diet.

A DIET THAT ADJUSTS TO HER DAY

Armed with the sample meal times and 8-Hour Powerfoods, Marisa quickly established a routine that worked perfectly for her—one that was so manageable she found she could consistently stick to it 7 days a week. She broke her 8 hours—from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.—into 4 small meals per day, eating at approximately 2- to 3-hour increments. “It’s easy to incorporate into your life: You just need to get into the routine of adjusting when to start eating based on your day’s activities,” she says. “It seemed so natural, I wondered, ‘Why didn’t I think of doing this before?’”

RAPID, SUSTAINED WEIGHT LOSS

Since she started the 8-Hour Diet, Marisa experienced a rapid change not just in her weight, but in her entire body. “I was consistently losing 2 pounds every week,” she says. She finds it easier to wake up in the morning, and she has more energy throughout the day. “I am more productive both at home and at work. Plus, I have the motivation to exercise,” she says. “I can see progress in losing weight—my waist is smaller, my pants fit better, and even my face looks slimmer,” she says. “And doing something good for myself has made me happier in general.”

A NEW BODY, A NEW LIFE!

Now, although Marisa may have lost weight with the 8-Hour Diet, she’s gained something else: confidence. That confidence has encouraged her to participate in activities she never would have thought of trying before. Her daughter, a cross-country runner, even convinced her to pick up the sport. “Once you start to feel better, you’re inspired to do other things,” she says. “And you’ll see more results when you want them.”

The 8-Hour Diet Success Story

“THE BEST PART IS THAT IT’S SO EASY!”

Norm Schulman lost 13 pounds in 6 weeks—without exercise or cutting calories

Norm Schulman, 57,
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

HEIGHT:
5’8”
     OCCUPATION:
ACCOUNTANT

STARTING WEIGHT:
191
     WEIGHT AFTER 6 WEEKS:
178

Norm Schulman had tried everything, but he was fed up with sticking to impractical restrictions—so the 8-Hour Diet was a dream come true. “This is a stroke of genius! It seems so simple, yet the concept is clearly very achievable.” He opted not to do the 8-Minute Workout or stick to the eight Powerfoods—and he still lost 13 pounds in just 6 weeks, simply by switching up the timing of his usual meals.

GO AHEAD, HAVE THE MILK SHAKE!

Name a diet, and Norm had tried it before. His main problem? Norm’s business life is pretty hectic—he was named New York Enterprise Report’s 2012 Accountant of the Year—so restricted eating just wasn’t realistic. “You go on a diet, you have to eat certain kinds of food, and you have to be cognizant of that all day,” Schulman explains. “If you go out to lunch with somebody, you get water, a salad, and you’ve got to make sure there’s no croutons, no dressing.” With the 8-Hour Diet, Norm finally found a plan that fit into his life. “Instead of telling me I can’t have a milk shake, I can have a milk shake, it’s just a matter of when I have it,” he says. “The best part is that it was so easy. It was more like a game than a diet, and once I got into the routine of it, there was no turning back.”

“THIS IS NOT LIKE ANYTHING ELSE!”

After 6 weeks, Norm has already lost 13 pounds on the diet—and in his first week, he was already noticing changes. “My pants were looser, my shirts fit a little better.” For Schulman, the feeling of all-around good health was its own reward. “I have more energy. When you lose even 12 or 13 pounds, you feel better. You feel less bloated. You feel less tired in the afternoon.” Norm’s success took him by surprise, and he’s unhesitating in his recommendation of the plan. “Unlike other diets that put you on a regimented food program, this is strictly timing. If you’ve tried everything else, this is not like anything else. It’s a completely different concept. If you’ve tried everything else, try this.”

I
t’s Thanksgiving night. Football flickers on the flatscreen. Piles of dishes soak in a bisque-like liquid in the sink. The denuded carcass of a once-proud fowl rests in imploded squalor on the dining room table. And sprawled across assorted sofas and chairs is your family, strewn about the living room like plane crash survivors in a stuffing-induced stupor. As
you survey the damage and contemplate the task of wrapping the leftovers, you feel about as energetic as a tortoise on Benadryl.

What’s happening here? Why are we so lethargic after a big meal? And more important, why won’t anyone help you clean up?

Contrast that scene of Turkey Day torpor with a scenario that Professor Ron Evans from the Salk Institute conjures out on the primordial plains of Africa, where all the animals are on high alert and looking for dinner. Like Cassius in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, they have “that lean and hungry look.” Here’s how Dr. Evans characterizes those animals that have been searching for dinner for a while: “They’re aroused, always moving and alert, looking for where the food is. When they see potential prey, they’re even more attentive.”

Indeed, research shows that when you extend the period of time between meals—eating whatever you want in your allotted 8-hour time frame, but allowing your body the benefits of resting longer between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next—the benefits go beyond the mere physical. (And those physical benefits—rapid weight loss, slashed diabetes risk, dramatically lowered chance of heart attack—are nothing to sneeze at.) In fact, the 8-Hour Diet may make you sharper, smarter, and calmer in the short term and make your brain healthier as you get older.

“A lot of people like to fast because they’re alert and motivated,” says Dr. Evans, himself an alert, motivated, intermittent faster. “That’s because we’re predators. When you fast, you’re more attentive. Your senses of smell and sight are enhanced. Everything is heightened; your breathing, your vision, your coordination. In attack mode, animals need to be physically running so they can do the job. We do that, too. We’re good at that.”

So now let’s become alert and attentive to one of the most profound ways that this plan can improve your life: sharpening, and extending the warranty on, your mind.

It’s not easy to find the fountain of youth, even if you have GPS.

If there’s a secret key to unlocking eternal vigor, it’s located in the laboratories of the National Institute on Aging, a short drive from downtown Baltimore. But the main drag to the research campus is under heavy renovation, so drivers lurch and bump down the strip, avoiding a pothole here and a leviathan earth-moving machine there, following detours nobody bothered to tell the folks at Garmin about, and watching flag wavers on every corner, flailing in contradictory directions.

It is, in other words, a terrific metaphor for the path that all of us are on. The road to a ripe and healthy old age is indeed populated by giant, machine-like entities, confused flag wavers, and detours that are as likely to lead to a ditch as they are to golden years that are truly gold.

But if you can read the signposts, you can find your way. In fact, there is a small one bearing the institute’s initials—NIA—and it leads around the corner and down the hill to a tower so tall and so new that it is in itself a metaphor of the most promising kind. It’s an emblem of the way that the best researchers, when given the best tools (thanks to the National Institutes of Health), can make progress with mysteries that have been bedeviling us since the dawn of human consciousness: Why are we destined to die, and how can we postpone that destiny for as long as possible?

If you’re looking for answers—or simply looking for a way to shed weight and add energy, mental acuity, and years—there’s no one better to turn to than Mark Mattson, PhD. He’s been working his entire career to find ways to extend your lease—and his own—on this planet. And his solution is shockingly simple, inexpensive, and effective.

When he’s not logging hours as a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Mattson is a professor in the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. At a particularly brainy institution, he’s in the brain department. Lately, he’s been investigating
the fascinating effects of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting on animals of all kinds. So, while rats and worms and rhesus monkeys command a lot of his attention, he’s studying those animals for what their experiences can tell him about you and me.

“My interest in fasting began when I got interested in aging, back in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” says Dr. Mattson, seated in his office on a high floor of the skyscraper. “It was known that in animals, if you reduce their energy intake, they live longer.”

Thus began a career quest to investigate the science behind this equation: Less energy intake equals more life output. Dr. Mattson is striving to find comfortable ways to subtract food with the goal of adding productive years to human lives, including his own.

He’s now in his early fifties, but he cuts the figure of a skinny teenager who just might have some difficulty keeping those blue jeans hitched above his waist. A profile in
US News and World Report
pegged Dr. Mattson’s weight at “less than 130 pounds”—the result of a diet in which he skips breakfast every day, lunch most days, and relies on his evening meal for most of his sustenance.

Don’t panic: Nobody’s telling you to arrange your life around a single meal. But it’s at least instructive that Dr. Mattson, given all he knows about this subject, has embraced this approach to eating with such fervor. Much like the researchers at the Salk Institute, the more scientists learn about the effects of an 8-hour diet, the more they begin to change their lives to gather up all its benefits.

OK, perhaps Dr. Mattson takes it to an extreme you’d rather not share. For instance, even on days he’s fasting, he’s known to run 6 to 9 miles with a high school cross-country team he coaches. (He says he likes to swap out snacking in favor of exercise, which isn’t a bad strategy, actually.) The fact is, we could all stand to be a lot leaner and have the stamina to keep up with the teenagers in our lives. And as Dr. Mattson quickly points out, there are mental benefits as well. This distinguished doc makes his living by finding longevity secrets at a time of life when most of us would be satisfied just to locate the car keys.