Please talk to him. He listens to you.

Over the course of a 36-year teaching career entailing at least a thousand parent/teacher conferences, I listened to parents lament that a son or a daughter was no longer listening to them a hundred times easily. About two dozen of those times, I was then urged by a parent to do the above for the given reason.

And just about every time I decided doing so was the right thing to do, I found out that the parents were right too.

I share my communicative success not to crow, but to illustrate something you already well know, something first written in “The Fox and the Lion,” a fable created by Aesop long ago.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

For I’m sure all I did in essence is reiterate what the parents had already said. So if Aesop were writing fables today, one might very well be titled “The Teacher and the Student,” with this as the moral:

The same old same old sounds brand new from a brand-new messenger.

With that as the backdrop, I’ll stop playing your mom and pop and introduce you to today’s interceding teacher, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and what he encourages you to do on a Huberman Labs Essentials podcast first dropped on Nov. 24.

To become “a scientist of your own brain and body ... to identify the variables that are most powerful for you and push you in the [health] direction you want to go.” When I first heard these words, they struck me as a more detailed explanation of what I’ve asked you to do dozens of times as health columnist/surrogate parent.

Experiment, experiment, experiment.

With that said, something else needs to be also. That I only profess to be connected to Huberman by this single link, for he may very well be the undisputed heavyweight champ in the fight for better health and fitness while I’m a lightweight and middling one at that.

All the more reason for you to listen to him rather than me.

Without fully pooh-poohing the presumption that it’s morning for aerobic exercise and afternoon for strength training, Huberman explains certain times are best for exercise. That according to both exercise science and circadian rhythm studies, there are three “windows” during the day related to body temperature that lead to optimized performance and a lessened incidence of injury: 30 minutes after waking, three hours after waking, and “later afternoon.”

Now if the thought of breaking a sweat before breaking a fast is abhorrent to you, here’s something you could come to love. Your body has the ability to develop “anticipatory circuits,” so that in as little as three or four days it learns to wake earlier and comes to expect exercise soon afterwards.

Huberman calls the phenomenon a “powerful tool,” one that also affects eating.

To illustrate, he creates a hypothetical situation where you begin eating every day at 8 a.m., 12 p.m., and seven hours later. While he makes it clear there’s nothing magical about these times, Huberman is clear about what now happens as a result: Anticipatory circuits soon produce “some peptide signals” five to 10 minutes ahead of the now-expected eating times.

This makes you feel hungry, “even a bit agitated.” Over time, these nerve impulses involved in eating — and “maybe” the ones involved in smell and taste — create an eating pattern that’s unique to you.

This explains how a longtime dietary grazer can come to enjoy intermittent fasting in only a few days. As well as why a supposedly harmful eating habit, eating too many of my total calories later in the day, may not be harmful to me.

Even though a study performed at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center and published in October 2024 by Nutrition & Diabetes suggests otherwise.

The participants in this study were between the ages of 50 and 75 and labeled as “Late Eaters” if over the course of a two-week period they ate at least 45 percent of their daily calories after 5 p.m. To insure accuracy, food consumption was “validated by time-stamped photos taken in real-time.”

The participants who ate fewer than 45 percent of their calories after 5 p.m. were called “Early Eaters,” and were found to have better glucose tolerance than late eaters — “even after adjusting for body weight, fat mass, energy intake and diet composition.”

This held true even after the participants in both categories who have type 2 diabetes were excluded. But here’s something else that’s true: All remaining participants were either overweight or obese and prediabetic.

Now I’m not a doctor, but mine has assured me I’m none of those, so what my preference for later-in-the-day eating may simply be is an example of what Huberman suggests you do. Become a scientist of your brain and body with the goal of identifying the most “powerful variables” and then using that information to become a healthier you.