On a typical school day, I work out before I eat breakfast, with the second event occurring around 7 a.m. as I finalize the day's lesson plans at school. I drink a protein shake at 9:20, eat lunch at 11:45, have an afternoon snack around 2:30, and then begin supper by 5:45.

You'd think my eating would end with a before-bed snack, but no. I usually wake up twice before midnight and eat two more times.I've followed this eating pattern for more than 20 years, so for five days out of the week during the school year, the longest gap between feedings is seven to eight hours. On weekends, it can be as little as five.According to the Salk Institute study published in December in Cell Metabolism and discussed at length in last week's column, eating as often as I do is all wrong. Last week, in fact, I wrote that it may only be the 14 hours or so of exercise a week that keeps the Fitness Master from morphing into the Fatness Disaster.I was only joking, but that doesn't mean I find the Salk Institute research a joke.Far from it.For years, I've written that we are only in the infancy of nutritional science and that as we move into adolescence one element above all others will stand out: that different people change food into energy and get affected by that process differently.So my way of eating is probably an effective way but possibly not the most effective way for me to be eating, and probably a perfect recipe for making someone else fat. Another illustration of this, and one you probably don't recall, happened to Dr. Rachel F. Heller and gave her the impetus to write the bestselling diet book, The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet.Embarrassingly overweight her entire life, Heller became super motivated to lose weight as an adult. She did so time and time again by following all sorts of diets only to regain the weight and then some each time.Then one day when she was not dieting, a delayed medical test caused her to fast for nearly a full day. She was surprised that she didn't feel as hungry as normal throughout that work day, ate to her heart's content at supper that night, and somehow lost two pounds in the process by morning.So she did so again the next day: no food until supper and then eat whatever. Again, she lost weight.Eventually, Heller lost 150 pounds following this formula and gained a theory: that many people, like herself, were addicted to carbohydrates, which led to overeating. By limiting their carbohydrate consumption to one hour window late in the day, that addiction could be controlled and the body would also burn stored fat throughout the day.In short, Heller and her husband who lost even more total weight by eating the same way provided a diet antithetical to the graze-all-day-on-carbohydrates diets that were in vogue at the time and successful for thousands of people allowing thousands of others to lose more weight than they ever imagined possible.Yet I also know a handful of people who had lost no weight on this diet, further solidifying my aforementioned theory.So what should you ultimately take from the Salk Institute study that found a correlation between limiting the daily feeding window as a way to monitor weight gain: that because of my diets-are-unique-as-snowflakes theory and the narrow scope of the study, a variation of it may or may not work for you.For instance, the best results were achieved when the mice ate as much unhealthy stuff as they liked and then the eating window was applied.If we apply that to humans, it's the equivalent to studying a group of five-year-olds given free rein to eat bad stuff whenever they want, yet only allowing half of them to eat for eight hours a day. With this stipulation, the kids not allowed to eat around the clock would be expected to gain less total weight.Furthermore, exercise was not factored into the Salk Institute study. One of the reasons I eat nearly around the clock during the weekends is that I'm usually riding the bike between eight and 10 hours inside a 30-hour window.To be able to do that, my body needs to recover as quickly as possible from the first ride to handle the second. That's not happening without consuming carbs every two hours or so to restock the glycogen stores in the muscle cells.So while limiting calorie consumption to eight or 10 hours a day may work really well for people who can't control the amount of junk food they eat or don't workout too intensely, my guess is that it's just not as effective though it may still permit some success for those who eat healthy foods yet still can't seem to lose weight or engage in ambitious exercise regularly.For those people, a different strategy needs to be employed, further proof that there's no single solution just a plethora of possibilities when it comes to weight loss.