“Avoid eating in the afternoon and evenings” has been a tenant of major diet plans and a key piece of advice from experts in the weight loss field for decades. But new research has confirmed that controlling when you eat can also slow the signs of aging.

Eat According to Your Natural Circadian Rhythm

As humans, we respond to the natural cycles of the sun. It wasn’t until we learned to harness fire (and later electricity) that we extended our active hours into the evening.

While we tend to eat three meals a day (with snacks in between) and often extend our evening meals well past sunset, it wasn’t uncommon for our ancestors to eat only once or twice a day and almost never in the darkness. This gap created a natural fasting period that helped the human body repair on a cellular level. It’s during this time between meals that much of our cellular regeneration takes place—when our body cleanses itself of broken, aging, or ineffective cellular castoffs and generates new material.

Indeed, fasting has been clinically proven to help your body reset its natural processes corrupted by overeating (like insulin resistance). This benefit of fasting alone can help people lose weight—even those who have struggled for years—because it forces the body to use the calories stored as fat. Indeed, clinical research has shown that people who eat the majority of their daily calories before 3 PM were able to lose 25% more weight than others. It can also potentially decrease the risk of long-term chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.

In addition to helping with weight loss, intermittent fasting can also help slow our biological clocks and actually decrease the cellular signs of aging.

Calorie Restriction Combats Aging

Autophagy—or the degradation and reabsorption or expulsion of old cellular material—may be the key to combatting the cellular signs of aging. But how do you jumpstart this natural process? Through calorie restrictive diets like intermittent fasting.

As Ettore Bergamini, M.D., Ph.D. notes in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences “this process (referring to autophagy) has an essential role in adaptation to fasting and changing environmental conditions, cellular remodeling during development, and accumulation of altered ROS‐hypergenerating organelles in older cells.”

As Bergamini and his team studied autophagy, they found that caloric restriction was the key toward reinvigorating this essential anti-aging process. “Several pieces of evidence show that autophagy is involved in aging and is an essential part of the anti‐aging mechanism of caloric restriction.”

How Can You Tap Into Your Body’s Anti-Aging Processes?

The key to taking control of this natural process is controlling when you eat.

Indeed, multiple studies on intermittent fasting diets (such as the 5:2 Diet or the 14:10 Protocol) have found that even when people continued to eat the same foods they love, they can lose weight, feel better and be objectively healthier if they observe periods of fasting.

The Anti-Aging Eating Plan

So now you know the benefits of a calorie restrictive diet but how do you put one into practice for yourself? You have many options available to you (several of which we’ll go through in a minute), but the best way is to combine these options in a way that works for you.

The 5:2 Diet

The trick is to find the best solution for you. Do you like to go out on weekends with friends? Trying to fast on those days might not be easy. Does work distract you from food? If so, you may find it easier to fast on days you have that distraction.

Regardless, you can use tools like The Hollywood 48-Hour Miracle Diet® to create your own anti-aging eating plan to help you lose weight and enjoy the anti-aging benefits of a calorie restrictive diet without feeling as if you’re depriving yourself.

The Miracle Diet® products can be used to help “jumpstart” your fasting by giving you the nutrition you need during the fast days without the calories you don’t. Plus, the liquids are essential for staying hydrated and feeling fuller longer. 

The 14:10 Protocol

This is another calorie restrictive fasting protocol that creates a natural 14-hour fasting period in your daily routine. You simply restrict eating to 10 hours, then “fast” for the remaining 14. This can be as simple as not eating anything after 8:00 PM and then breaking your fast at 10 AM.

By restricting eating to a 10-hour window during the day, the 14:10 Protocol creates that necessary calorie reduction your body needs to ramp up its natural autophagy. 

Finding the Right Balance for You

You can use either of these plans to realign your body’s natural chemistry and enjoy the anti-aging benefits of autophagy or you can combine them. For example, begin a 5:2 Diet by finding two days a week during which you can fast. Then use the 14:10 Protocol to reduce your caloric intake and create a natural fasting period even on the days in which you eat a normal diet.

Additionally, you can use any of The Hollywood Diet® products to create your own specific calorie restrictive routine without relying on the popular methods detailed above. As long as there’s a significant reduction in calories over a set period of time your body will engage in anti-aging autophagy.

If you try The Hollywood 48-Hour Miracle Diet® as a fasting aid, make notes of your triumphs and struggles. If you find the days you’ve chosen don’t work for you, switch them up. 

The key to long term success with any anti-aging eating plan is to stick with it. To do that you have to remain flexible. The rigidity in any “diet” plan leads to boredom, frustration, and backsliding. So don’t think of your intermittent fasting as just a diet. Think of it as an anti-aging eating plan you’ve designed to create a healthier you!