If you make a list of the beautiful things in your life, I hope your list is long. I’m sure Dr. Layne Norton holds that hope for you, too.

As well as this specific one. That one of the things that makes your list is occasionally being wrong.

Before you hear his reason why, here are mine for why Norton’s the quintessential Renaissance man. Worthy of consideration if Dos Equis ever creates another The Most Interesting Man in the World commercial campaign.

He holds BS in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences and has founded BioLayne, a company according to its website designed “to provide ethical, science-based coaching [by combining] real world experience with evidence based protocols.” He has written two best-selling books, The Complete Contest Prep Guide and Fat Loss.

He’s considered one of the top experts in nutrition, muscle gain, and fat loss; has won seven bodybuilding, six powerlifting titles, and done a world-record squat; and though he’ll soon be 43 still competes in powerlifting competitions. Not to mention he provides “enormous amounts of free content via social media, podcasts, articles, and various other outlets.”

Which I see as an altruistic attempt to share what he’s come to know with average Joes so they need not be average if they don’t want to be average any more.

When Dr. Peter Attia hosted Norton on his podcast (#235) two Decembers ago, they discussed many things, including what qualities you should look for in people who offer health and fitness advice. Norton believes it’s the “exact opposite of what you think you should look for.”

Instead of searching for someone who comes off as supremely confident, he suggests you seek out people “who sound kind of doubtful and say things like probably, maybe, possibly.” When Attia asks Norton to elaborate, he learns what Norton so often tells others.

That being wrong is “a beautiful thing.”

If you’re already right, he explains, you can’t get any better. But if you’re wrong, you now have something you can improve upon and that’s “awesome.”

Likewise, it would probably be awesome for more than seven out of 10 American adults to lose weight, for it would probably improve their health. (Please note the repeated use of a certain word, my friend.)

Yet many people who claim to be in the know tell you that there are no “maybes” or “possibilities” about how to go about this. That the job gets done best by intermittent fasting, the most hyped version of which is technically a form of time-restricted eating called the 16:8 diet.

To follow it, you do all your eating during an eight-hour window of your choosing. So if supper ends at 7 p.m. and you don’t snack after that, you don’t eat again until 11 a.m.

If you do have a snack, though, you may not be eating the next day until 2 p.m.

For many people, either scenario may be impractical — and an example of Norton’s beautiful thing. For a study published in the May 2024 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine and funded by the American Heart Association suggests the 16:8 diet may not be worthy of the hype.

In part, that’s because the prior successful time-restricted dieting studies where weight loss occurred independent of calorie intake have used rodents. So this time, researchers used 41 adults with obesity and diabetes or diet-controlled diabetes, mostly Black females who averaged 59 years of age and 210 pounds at the time of the study.

For the next 12 weeks, the 41 followed one of the two specific diets, with the first being a bit less time-restrictive than the 16:8. This group ate within a 10-hour window, but — and this is a big but because it’s difficult for most to do — consumed 80 percent of their total calories by 1 p.m.

The second group ate in a manner the researchers call the usual eating pattern, a less than 16-hour eating window where more than 50 percent of calories consumed came after 5 p.m.

Both diets, however, were isocaloric, meaning the number of calories as well as their macronutrient composition remained the same for both groups. What also remained the same for both was the improvement in fasting glucose levels and insulin resistance detected in the bloodwork done at the study’s conclusion.

Weight loss, however, was a different matter.

The average amount lost by those following the time-restrictive diet was 4.9 lb. The average for those eating in what was deemed the usual manner was 5.7 lb.

The difference only projects to 3.5 lb. in a year, which statisticians don’t see as significant. But the fact that the usual timing of meals while dieting lead to more weight loss than a time scheme specifically designed to achieve it certainly is.

So much so that in the study’s conclusion, the authors suggest that since time-restricted eating in this case did not decrease weight or improve glucose homeostasis when compared to a usual eating pattern “any effects of [time-restrictive eating] on weight in prior studies may be due to reductions in caloric intake.”