Sleep 22 - Action - 16 hour fasting - do not eat for 16 hours before desiring to wake up. A trick for jet-lag?

The idea ~ are you needing to reset your sleep’s circadian rhythm? Do you want to wake up at 8am the following morning? Make sure your last meal, of the previous day, is at 4pm. Allow for a fasting space of 16 hours.

[The following text is taken from, ‘How to Naturally Reset Your Sleep Cycle in One Night’, By Will Chen, wisebread.com looking at the work of Clifford B. Saper ~ https://www.wisebread.com/how-to-naturally-reset-your-sleep-cycle-overnight]

How Do You Use This Trick?

Simply stop eating during the 12-16 hour period before you want to be awake. Once you start eating again, your internal clock will be reset as though it is the start of a new day. Your body will consider the time you break your fast as your new "morning."

For example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am, you should start fasting between 10:00 am or 2:00 pm the previous day, and don't break your fast until you wake up at 2:00 am. Make sure you eat a nice healthy meal to jumpstart your system.

Another example: If you are traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo, figure out when breakfast is served in Tokyo, and don't eat for the 12-16 hours before Tokyo's breakfast time.

…

Here's a quick summary of Clifford B. Saper’s research findings:

"For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death," the study said.

"Hence, it is adaptive for animals to have a secondary "master clock" that can allow the animal to switch its behavioral patterns rapidly after a period of starvation to maximize the opportunity of finding food sources at the same time on following days."

The shift is a survival mechanism in small mammals that forces them to change their sleeping patterns, Fuller suggests. One starvation cycle is enough to override the traditional light-based circadian clock, the study suggests.

"This new timepiece enables animals to switch their sleep and wake schedules in order to maximize their opportunity of finding food."

"A period of fasting with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock," says Saper.

An anecdote from Reddit.
It's old news, but I have actually done it. It kinda happened by accident (the fasting part), but then I set an alarm, slept, and headed over to McD's for a couple of breakfast sandwiches when I woke up. That was at 7am. The next day I awoke abruptly at 7am on the dot.”

via https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/977fi/comment/c0bo2ma/

References

• ‘Differential Rescue of Light- and Food-Entrainable Circadian Rhythms’,
By Patrick M. Fuller, Jun Lu, and Clifford B. Saper
Main article Science Magazine via https://www.science.org/, 23 May 2008
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1153277

• ‘Resetting your circadian clock to minimize jet lag’, Harvard Health Blog
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/resetting-your-circadian-clock-to-minimize-jet-lag-2016090810279

• ‘Study identifies food-related clock in the brain’, Harvard Gazette
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/05/study-identifies-food-related-clock-in-the-brain/

• ‘Skip the pretzels: starving may fend off jet lag’, Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brain-clock/skip-the-pretzels-starving-may-fend-off-jet-lag-idUSN2252042720080522/

• ‘Scientists Find Internal Clock Sets at Mealtime’, NPR podcast,
Talk Of The Nation Science Friday, from NPR News, May 23, 2008
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/90769113