Weekly Newsletter - Health Momentum, Food's effect on decisions and Satisfaction (Patreon)

Compounding vicious cycles---
Recently I've had a nice injection of stress in the form of tons of extra paperwork. I'm used to Japanese culture and do my best to respect all forms of it, especially the cultural practices surrounding paperwork. The Japanese philosophy on paperwork has evolved over the millenium, but the key tenet is that there should be a lot of it.  Anyhow this was stressing me out and had me thinking of a basic concept:

Good momentum and Bad momentum

■Good momentum is when you wake up at 7, get a workout done which reduces your appetite, makes it easier to not eat until 1PM and makes you more resilient to stress. You finish finish eating by 6 so you get a full 4 hours to digest your last meal before bed, put away work and stop looking at blue light stuff by 9PM so you get  a full hour to wind down. and you shoot to fall asleep by 10:15 but it becomes more like 10:45 - not bad. The next day, you repeat all of this and because each of these activities are "zeitgeibers" (cues that entrain the circadian rhythm), everything is a little easier - Come when it's time for your workout, you're already a little bit more geared up to get moving. Your hunger shows up closer to 1PM and 5:30PM since you ate at those times yesterday, and now you're sleepier by 10PM so you fall asleep at 10:30. Nice.  

■Bad momentum (for me anyways) is when I've got appointments and no time to workout in the morning, drink an extra coffee at 2PM to make up for the lost alertness from the lack of exercise, eat a little bit later than usual thanks to the coffee, which (seems to) shift my circadian rhythm forward, I fall asleep later, the next day I wake up at the same time but I'm groggier and put in a half assed, shorter workout so I'm less resilient to stress and deadlines are coming up so stress from that affects me more than usual which raises my appetite and now I'm eating more than I usually do and am gaining a little weight.  
OK, I'm embellishing a little bit here. Two or three not so perfect days are not a big deal, but I think you get the picture. Though these good and bad spirals paint a decent picture why it's easier to sleep by a certain time if you've been sleeping at that time the past couple days, why day 5 of exercising is easier than day 1 and so on.    

The takeaway from this is - do things at the same time and do new things gradually. Making a plan to run 10km every day for April will be easier if you let yourself start with 2km one day, 3km the next, 5km the next and you do it at the same time every day. I think this part of the reason people do so well on intermittent fasting. Having an established time frame for eating eventually has you knowing when you can expect to be hungry, and when you can expect your hunger to subside. I've been eating 2 meals a day over a 6 hour window for a while now, but if I were to do a fast, it makes it easier to slowly shorten the window until I'm at one meal a day. Then, when I do the fast, I'll know I can expect to be hungry around the time I would eat that one meal, but I'll also know around when I can expect the hunger to subside.   

Question from a Patron - shifting the intermittent fasting window
One of y'all asked:  
"Just yesterday I finished a 5 day full fast and am really happy with the results. I'm returning to intermittent fasting, but wanting to experiment with having a 2hr eating window instead.  However, I'm curious if you know anything about moving the window around (lunch today, dinner tomorrow) depending on social obligations (etc) for the day.   I presume that the only adverse affects of this would be my ghrelin getting used to this inconsistent pattern and causing me to feel hungry at two points during any given day, even though I only eat once.   Is that correct? Are there other learnings you've come across, with regards to IF and shifting the eating window depending on the day, that you could share with me?"  

This is related to the bullet above, but the strategy of doing everything at the same time and doing it gradually wouldn't be effective. You could move all the zeitgebers you can forward (exercise, coffee, time you wake up etc) so you could transition from dinner to lunch easier, but this would mess with your circadian rhythm and affect your sleep. Sleep is fragile in that its quality depends on when you're able to fall asleep, so, while hunger is also tied into the circadian rhythm, I think it would be best to shoot for a set up that best preserves sleep quality. After all, you were able to pull off a 5 day fast so some extra hunger every now and then shouldn't be too bad. (That article above says the quality sleep window is between 8PM and midnight, others say 10PM to 2AM is the sweet spot. Unfortunately neither of these are great schedules for socializing. Though, I imagine it depends on what your body is adapted to - consistency with zeitgebers may be more important than the absolute time. That said... I always feel more rested falling asleep early and waking up early.)  

Three strategies come to mind:

1) Set up as many consistent zeitgebers as you can. Wake up at the same time, expose yourself to blue light at the same time (look at smartphone), exercise, shower, have your coffee, take a shower, take a bath, go to the sauna, stop looking at blue light, make your room cold, et cetera all at the same time.  (More on heat acting as a Zeitgeber 1 2 3) Food is a big Zeitgeber (which is why fasting on flights and then eating at your typical time at the destination is a good jet lag prevention strategy), but setting up several other Zeitgebers to keep your sleepiness time consistent would be helpful.   

2) Figure out the typical lunch and dinner times, and eat a small meal during the time you're not eating with friends. i.e. Have a dinner plan, eat a small lunch. I think the aim is to keep a "one meal a day" schedule, but as long as the window between meal 1 and meal 2 is relatively short, I don't think you'll lose too many benefits. One big benefit for me when I did one meal a day was that having a big dinner was a really strong circadian anchor and I could fall asleep consistently. The problem was that the huge meal made me very sleepy right afterward and I slept better if I gave myself more time to digest.  With consistent timing of two meals, I think the benefits from sleep will outweigh the potential benefits from a super short eating window (omad).  

3) If you really want to stick to having one meal, you could do something to keep you from feeling hungry. Replace the lunch with a brief workout, or replace the dinner with a sauna session.   

Does diet influence thoughts or decisions?
Dr. So Young Park in Germany ran an experiment where people had to play a simple game. There is an amount of money on the table. The person sitting across from you makes an offer on how to split up the money. If you accept the offer, you get to walk away with the money no questions asked and so do they. If you don't like the amount offered, you both walk away with nothing. So, if the person offers you some unfair amount like 1 euro out of a total of 10 euros, you can either choose to get 1 euro and watch them walk away with 9, or you can have both of you get nothing and at least not feel cheated. Before all this, they had the people coming into the laboratory have one of two breakfasts. It was set up to where the breakfasts looked similar, but actually had different protein and carbohydrate contents. They found that subjects who consumed a high protein breakfast in the morning were tolerant of unfair offers and got to keep some money. Those who had the high carbohydrate breakfast rejected unfair offers twice as often. Blood tests revealed that lower levels of the amino tyrosine correlated with the likely hood of sacrificing some free money in order to preserve subjects' fragile sense of pride.  (Video) (Original study)  

How are memories stored and recovered in the brain? Why would a neuronal gene form something that looks like a virus? (Video) Do viruses have a place in evolution?  

Question: What do y'all find satisfying? Recently I've been interested in what generates that (not food) "satisfying" feeling.
If you had to pick, which is most satisfying for you?
Organization -Neatly organized desk, room, server room cables, tool racks...
Perfect timing/sync - music beat, dance moves, synchronized swimming, daigo full parry, rhythm games
Accuracy - Bullseyes, Headshots, Catching a baseball
Craftsmanship(?) - Calligraphy, machine milling, lathing, cake frosting, lathing, lumber milling
(See poll)