14:10 intermittent fasting: how to run a 10-hour eating window day to day

1. See what 14:10 intermittent fasting changes in your day

Sleep covers about eight of the 14 hours, so the fast you actually notice is six waking hours split between evening and morning. On a 9 am to 7 pm window, that means nothing after dinner and no food or milky coffee until 9.

For a lot of people that is a bigger change than it sounds. When researchers at the Salk Institute had 156 healthy adults log every bite and sip in an app, half of them spread their eating over more than 14 hours and 45 minutes a day. As a group, they ate less than a quarter of their calories before noon and more than a third after 6 pm. If your day starts with coffee and cream at 6:30 am and ends with chips on the couch at 10 pm, 14:10 trims about five hours off it.

Our guide to intermittent fasting hours compares 14:10 with the other daily schedules.

2. Check whether 14:10 suits you

Ten hours leave room for three meals, which is why this window works for people who give up on longer fasts.

Your situation	14:10?	Why
New to fasting and used to breakfast	Yes, after a week or two at 12 hours	You keep breakfast, a little later, and only give up eating after dinner
You lift or run before or after work	Yes	There is room to eat on both sides of a session and to spread protein over three meals
16:8 left you starving by 11 am or raiding the fridge at night	Yes, step back to it	Two extra hours often calm the morning, and the habit of a fixed window stays
You work 24-hour or rotating shifts	Worth a try	Firefighters on 24-hour shifts held a window of about 11 hours in a trial
Diabetes treated with insulin or a sulfonylurea	Only with your doctor	Fewer eating hours can push blood sugar too low, and doses may need to change

If you already eat within about 10 hours, say breakfast at 8 and dinner done by 6, you are on 14:10 today, and the real question is whether to tighten it at all.

3. Pick a 10-hour window that matches your real meals

Start from the meal you share with other people, usually dinner, and count 10 hours back. Then keep roughly the same hours on weekends. The Salk team found that many people's eating times shifted on weekends as much as a flight across time zones would, which they called metabolic jetlag.

Your day	Eating window	Meals	Fasting hours
Early riser, home by 4 pm	7 am to 5 pm	Breakfast at 7, lunch at 11:30, dinner at 4:30	5 pm to 7 am
Gym at 6 am before work	7:30 am to 5:30 pm	Breakfast after the workout, lunch at noon, dinner at 5	5:30 pm to 7:30 am
Office job, dinner at 6:30	9 am to 7 pm	Breakfast at your desk, lunch at 12:30, dinner at 6:30	7 pm to 9 am
Kids' practice, family dinner at 7:30	10 am to 8 pm	Late breakfast at 10, lunch at 2, dinner at 7:30	8 pm to 10 am
Night owl, in bed around 1 am	Noon to 10 pm	Lunch at noon, snack at 4, dinner at 8	10 pm to noon

4. Walk through a 14:10 workday

Here is the office row from the table, on a regular Tuesday:

• 6:45 am: a big glass of water, then black coffee for the commute. A splash of milk adds calories, as our page on whether milk breaks a fast explains, so save the latte for 9.
• 9 am, breakfast: a cup of plain Greek yogurt with blueberries and a spoonful of granola, about 22 g of protein, or two eggs on an English muffin.
• 12:30 pm, lunch: a turkey and Swiss sandwich on whole wheat with an apple, or a chicken burrito bowl from the place near the office.
• 3:30 pm: string cheese and a small handful of almonds if dinner feels far away.
• 6:30 pm, dinner: chicken thighs with rice and roasted broccoli, or a bowl of chili from the weekend batch, finished by 7.
• Evening: sparkling water or peppermint tea in front of the TV.

If happy hour or an 8:30 pm reservation pushes dinner back, start the next day an hour later or accept a 12-hour fast and return to your hours the day after. FastTrack can start and stop your fast automatically at your window's hours, so you do not have to remember to press start.

5. Make the window work around shift work

A randomized trial of a 10-hour window in shift workers followed 137 San Diego firefighters on 24-hour shifts for 12 weeks. One group got Mediterranean diet advice, and the other got the same advice plus a 10-hour window of their choice. Most picked roughly 9 am to 7 pm and kept it even on shift days, eating outside it about one or two days a week when a late call came in, which the study allowed.

Their eating day shrank from about 14 hours to 11 on average, with no adverse effects and better quality of life. Weight changed little, and the gap between groups could have been chance. Among firefighters who started with elevated blood sugar or blood pressure, HbA1c and diastolic pressure fell more with the window than with diet advice alone.

If you work fixed nights, say 7 pm to 7 am, a window from 3 pm to 1 am covers a meal when you wake and a last one on your midnight break, with only water or tea until you sleep at 8 am. The trial did not test fixed nights, so treat that as a starting point.

6. Know what studies of 10-hour eating windows found

The research on 10-hour windows is small, and much of it compares people with their own starting point.

In the Salk pilot, eight adults with overweight cut their eating day from over 14 hours to 10 or 11 for 16 weeks. They lost about 3.3 kg on average and reported more energy and better sleep, and a year after starting they had kept those changes. Nobody told them to change what they ate, yet their estimated calorie intake went down. There was no control group.

In San Diego, 19 adults with metabolic syndrome, most of them already on a statin or blood pressure medication, ate within a self-chosen 10-hour window for 12 weeks. Weight fell about 3%, and blood pressure and LDL cholesterol dropped too. This was also a single group with no comparison arm.

A randomized trial in Thailand compared the two windows directly. Ninety-nine adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes, none on insulin, fasted 14:10 or 16:8 three days a week for three months, or kept eating three regular meals. Weight dropped 3.2% with 14:10, 4.0% with 16:8 and 0.6% with regular meals, and blood sugar and lipids improved in both fasting groups. Both fasting groups felt moderately hungrier in the morning.

Taken together, a 10-hour window seems to help most when your eating day used to sprawl, partly because people end up eating a little less. Results vary a lot between people.

7. Move to 16:8 once 14:10 runs on autopilot

Going shorter is optional. In the Thai trial, 16:8 came out ahead by less than one percentage point of body weight over three months. A longer fast on its own changes little: in the TREAT trial, 116 US adults who ate only between noon and 8 pm for 12 weeks lost about the same small amount as those eating three set meals a day.

Try it once 14:10 has felt easy for at least four weeks and you rarely think about food before your window opens. Push breakfast back by 30 minutes every three or four days, from 9 to 11 over about two weeks. Our glossary entry on 16:8 fasting covers how that schedule runs.

Stay put if you train hard or if breakfast is the one meal you share with your kids. A window you can hold for a year beats a tighter one you drop after a month.

8. Know when to stop and see a doctor

Mild hunger around your old breakfast time is normal in the first week or two. Stop the fast, eat, and call your doctor if you notice any of these:

• Dizziness or fainting, especially when you stand up.
• Shakiness, sweating or confusion while you take insulin or a sulfonylurea such as glipizide.
• A pounding heart, or headaches that do not settle once you eat and drink.
• Bingeing in the window, or guilt and anxiety around food.

Talk to your doctor before you start if you have diabetes on medication, are pregnant or breastfeeding, have a history of an eating disorder or are under 18. For those groups even a 14-hour fast is a medical decision.

Where 14:10 leaves you

14:10 is a daily rhythm most people can keep for years, with breakfast a little later and nothing after dinner. The studies suggest it helps most when your eating day used to run past 14 hours, and its effect on its own is modest. Hold it for a month before you decide whether 16:8 is worth the extra two hours.