There are three guaranteed things in life: death, taxes and Jennifer Aniston looking forever young regardless of how old she is. Okay, a major part of it is her having luxury of being able to maintain her health due to all that Friends money, but a lot of it is also down to her diet and intermittent fasting routine.
Jen spilled her youth-retaining secrets to Radio Times (via The Guardian) and said the secret isn’t drinking the blood of virgins or water from the fountain of youth.
No, her schtick is to go on the 16:8 intermittent fasting diet, which involves fasting for 16 hours (bedtime is included in this part) and then eating healthily for the other eight hours.
Okay, that sounds pretty tough tough but is actually far less restrictive and underwhelming than you think.
Jen says she wakes up around 8:30am every day (must be nice being a Hollywood star who can do that), has breakfast at around 10am, does things like drink celery juice, exercise, and plays with her dogs, and then has dinner at around 5:30pm.
So in other words, the secret to Jennifer Aniston’s health is, uh, eating healthy, exercise and early dinner. How… anticlimatic. Where’s the part involving sacrificing animals to the eternal youth god?
That all sounds like a normal person’s routine with a dash of having early dinner every day. That’s not fasting and if it is then it just makes no sense calling it “fasting” when you’re just doing what people do every day.
Hell, if that’s intermittent fasting then I’ve been (unintentionally) doing it every day, though it clearly has had less on an impact on my health than it has on Jen. Just a hunch but perhaps the eating healthy and exercise part may be more important than when you can and can’t stuff your face with calories.
Jen says she noticed a “big difference going without food for 16 hours,” which makes me wonder what kind of difference is she talking about because it’s literally what most people do every day. Is there something in breakfast food that I’ve been missing out on this whole time?
This whole saga has yielded two conclusions: either Jen has a different definition of intermittent fasting compared to the rest of us or the Hollywood PR machine has been incredibly effective at turning something as simple as an everyday routine into a hot diet fad.
But hey, let’s look at it this way, Jennifer Aniston’s intermittent fasting routine is perfectly doable and doesn’t require much change your in routine until most big diets that “guarantee” you’ll be shedding weight in no time.