Listen to your body

The next time you enter a waffle house in the early hours of the morning and order the Texas cheese and cheese fondue (1,040 calories), think about this new finding: By this time, the most basic operations of the human body reduce their caloric requirements by about 10% compared to how fast they will burn calories in the late afternoon or early evening.
You may prefer to return to dinner time
. The researchers found that the variations were very different depending on whether you are the waitress working in the cemetery or a stopover from 9 am to 5 pm for breakfast, after eight hours of closing. The "resting energy expenditure" of the human – the use of calories by the body to fuel basic functions such as breathing, brain activity and fluid circulation – follows a predictable cycle that grows as the day progresses and decreases with the night.
The new study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, offers further evidence that circadian rhythms dictate not only the urgent need for sleep, but also the functioning of complex mechanisms such as metabolism over a 24-hour period. . This may help explain why people who maintain irregular sleep schedules, including shift workers, have higher rates of obesity and are more likely to develop metabolic abnormalities such as type-diabetes. 2.
And this demonstrates that one hears or not, the clock of our body is always turning, placing us in our daily cycle with incredible precision.
At "zero hour" – which is approximately 4:00 to 5:00 am – our core body temperature drops to its lowest point and our idle fuel consumption reaches its nadir. From that moment on, first quickly, then a little more slowly, the body's "energy expenditure at rest" increases until the end of the afternoon or early evening. After reaching its peak around 5 pm, the number of calories we burn at rest decreases steadily for about 12 hours.
Then, just as surely as the day after the night, we start again.
Remember, no matter how timeless our schedules became 24/7, our bodies were built for a slower, simpler world in which humans roamed all day in search of food , ate while the sun was up and slept when the sky was dark.
Today, our appetite and the availability of tempting dishes all night long can make us eat well after sundown. And our jobs may require us to sleep the day and wait at the table, treat patients, or drive trucks all night long. But our bodies still adhere to their old, inflexible clocks.
The results of the study are also accompanied by an implicit warning: when we do not take into account the biological rhythms that govern our bodies, we do so at our peril.
Resting energy expenditure accounts for the majority of the minimum calories we burn in a day. Spending a day eating, sleeping and breathing consumes 60% to 70% of our "energy expenditure at rest". Thus, a serious imbalance between calorie consumption and the burning of most of them could prompt the body to make decisions – like storing calories in the form of fat – that are not necessarily healthy.
The new study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a good fasting 12 hours, when it is aligned with the darkness and nocturnal response of our body, can be a way to prevent or reverse obesity. Satchin Panda, a researcher at Salk Institute, has demonstrated the impact of food obedience to our circadian rhythms in laboratory animals and a growing number of people.
Others demonstrated the power of timing by showing how easily it could be disrupted.
In In a study conducted in 2014, 14 healthy and skinny adults agreed to upset their days over a six-day period. Fed with a diet sufficient to maintain their weight, the subjects quickly adapted by lowering their thermostats. Compared to basic readings taken on arrival (when they were awake during the day and asleep at eight o'clock in the evening), the subjects burned 52 fewer calories on day 2 of their rotation program and 59 calories less on day 3 of this program.
Do it for a few days and you may feel a little behind. Do it for months, years or a lifetime, and the result could be that too much fat is stored up and the metabolic processes go insane.
"One of the dishes to remember is that for optimal health, including metabolic health, it is best to have a regular schedule seven days a week – get up and go to bed at the same time and eat our meals. at the same time, "said lead author Jeanne F. Duffy, neuroscientist and sleep specialist at the Brigham & Women's Boston Hospital.
"We have these powerful clocks in us and they are ready to deal with certain events – eating and sleeping – at particular times of everyday life. We want them to be perfectly prepared for this. "
To arrive at these results, the researchers had to convince seven people to spend three weeks sequestered in rooms without windows without a clock, a cellphone or the Internet. In what is called a "forced desynchronization protocol", the researchers extended the four-hour subjects' days. All spent at least eight hours in bed at the end of their extended work day, then woke up and went through an artificial "daylight" period of 18 hours before being allowed to sleep again.
At first they seemed at the beginning. race to follow this strange clock. But after three weeks of such discombobulation, the subjects basically come to rely on their own internal clocks to set the length of their days and separate their days from the nights.
The individual rhythms in which each subject came back did not show as many variations. Without a wake up call or other signal, they finally found a cycle of sleep and waking that hovered around 24 hours, Duffy said.
At the end of the first week, the trend is repeated hour by hour. The idle energy expenditure became evident: between 23 and 24 hours, subjects disconnected from the day and night signals had remarkably similar resting energy consumption patterns, followed by the same increase in daytime and night time. the decrease of the night. These patterns remained unchanged until the end of week 3.
At the same time, similar patterns of macronutrient use were used. The subjects burned the most carbohydrates at the beginning of their waking hours. Carbohydrate consumption then decreased steadily, with a small jump in the middle of the night. Fat burning was the lowest in the morning, peaked in the early evening and then decreased.
"We were impressed by the fact that these patterns were so similar between individuals," said Duffy. "It told us that it was something real."
The number of calories we burn – or store as fat – is probably influenced not just by our size, what we eat, and how much we eat. amount of exercise we get, said Duffy. The timing of eating is also important.
When we sleep late at weekends, whether we are jumping across time zones or working on schedules that keep us up all night and back to the day, "we are disrupting our clocks and our metabolisms are inefficient, and in the long run this will lead to illness, "she said. "The best way to avoid this is to stay on the same schedule." – Los Angeles Times / TNS