Why you should be eating your breakfast an hour later -- and walking down stairs is better for your body than walking up

JUST One Thing is a series of quick, simple and scientifically-proven ways to improve health and wellbeing devised by Daily Mail columnist Dr Michael Mosley. He’s compiled them in a new book which the Mail began serialising yesterday, with advice such as drink a glass of water with every meal. The tips don’t require a major overhaul of your life – merely actions you can easily build into your daily routine. No one expects you to do them all, or even more than one! Just pick what works for you. And stick at it.

BEGIN THE DAY WITH A BRISK WALK

TAKING an early morning walk is surprisingly life-changing. Getting out and about within an hour or two of getting up can improve your sleep, boost your mood, increase your fitness and cut your risk of heart disease and diabetes.

I love morning walks, even when it is cold and wet. You get the health benefits not only of the exercise, but also of exposure to natural light. Light levels outdoors are at least ten times brighter than inside your house and when this light hits sensors at the back of your eyes, this sends messages to your pituitary gland, ordering it to stop producing melatonin.

Melatonin is known as ‘the hormone of darkness’ because rising levels in the evening help put you to sleep at night.

As well as waking you up, bright outdoor light helps reset your internal body clock, which in turn helps to regulate hunger, mood, body temperature and all sorts of other important bodily processes.

This resetting of the internal clock also means that when you head for bed, you are ready to sleep.

Any walk – short, long, fast or slow – will also strengthen muscles and bones, reduce joint and muscular pain, burn a few calories and increase energy levels.

If you want to supercharge your daily walk, just speed it up. A brisk walk at about 100 paces a minute not only increases your fitness, compared to a more leisurely dawdle, it might even extend your life.

It increases your heart rate, placing a greater demand on your cardiovascular system, thereby maintaining cardio fitness and helping to lower blood pressure.

Which is why brisk walkers have a 21 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease than the more sedentary.

DELAY BREAKFAST AND DON’T EAT LATE AT NIGHT

WHEN you get up in the morning, you may be in a rush to tuck into your breakfast and get out of the door. Or you may be happy to hold off eating for a while (a lot of people find they don’t get hungry until later in the day). One reason why you might want to delay breakfast if you’re not ravenous is that, by doing so, you will be extending your overnight fast (i.e. how long it has been since your last meal). Research shows there are multiple health benefits from extending your overnight fast and adopting Time Restricted Eating (TRE) – usually 16:8 or 14:10.

16:8 is the more challenging version, involving fasting for 16 hours and only eating within an eight hour window. Anyone who manages an overnight fast of more than 12 hours is doing well, particularly as many of us have got into the habit of eating from soon after we wake up until last thing at night, when we have a snack or a milky drink.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Buddha advocated not eating after midday as it put him in ‘good health’. Now modern science suggests he could have been on to something. Professor Satchin Panda, of Salk Institute in California, took two groups of mice and fed them a high-fat diet.

Both groups got the same amount of food but one could eat it whenever they wanted, while the other had to eat all their food in an eight hour period.

After 100 days, the mice who had eaten freely had much higher levels of cholesterol and blood sugars and had put on 28 per cent more weight than the mice who had to fast for 16 hours a day. Many studies in humans show that extending an overnight fast and eating within a shortened daytime window can lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, help lose weight, improve sleep, cut the risk of type 2 diabetes and may even slow the rate at which the brain declines.

Professor Panda follows a 14:10 approach. He has breakfast around 8am (roughly two hours after he wakes) and then an evening meal with his family around 6pm, which gives him 14 hours of overnight fasting. Dr Emily Manoogian, a colleague at the Salk Institute, told me that eating at all hours of the day and night, as many of us do, disrupts the body’s natural circadian rhythm, which wants most systems to be more active during the day and dormant at night.

‘Sleep is when your body should be in a state of rest and repair but

if you go to bed having eaten throughout the evening, your body will have to focus on digestion instead,’ she says.

‘You can end up with elevated blood glucose levels all night, which increases your risk of diabetes, weight gain, blood pressure and inflammation.

‘Restricting the time window in which we eat can go a long way to help our bodies function better.’

Her studies have found that by stopping eating three to four hours before bed, people sleep better and wake up feeling more rested the next day. She recommends an eight to ten-hour eating window that works best for you, one you can happily stick to every day.

‘If possible, aim to eat most of your calories in the first half of your day and for best results, aim to have a consistent eight hours in bed each night,’ she adds.

Outside of the eating window, while you are ‘fasting’, she recommends drinking only hot or cold water.

If you go to bed having just eaten, your body has to focus on digestion instead of sleep