HealthPassport – Doctor Delabos, can you tell us how you developed your method based on chrononutrition?

I developed it after failures with traditional diets to lose the 20kg accumulated after I stopped smoking. My work as a geriatrician-nutritionist for 7 years led me to conclude that the undernutrition of elderly people was often linked to the fixity of meals in their schedules and in their composition. After studying the biological and metabolic rhythms of the human body as well as the instinctive eating habits of our distant ancestors, I came to the conclusion that it was not the choice of foods and the quantities that were lacking, but the time to eat them during the day. Subsequently, my work was validated by the very famous Professor Jean-Robert Rapin, pharmacologist after clinical research work on patients subject to overweight or to problems of thinness. Professor Rapin then said to me “Alain, you have no idea what you have discovered”. I replied that I thought I had learned how to lose weight properly without getting damaged and without going on deficiency diets. But he went further: “you found how we could rebalance the human body”. And today, I realize more than ever that he was right.

HealthPassport – Most diets are hypocaloric: they are based on the well-known and well-documented postulate that to reduce weight, we induce an energy balance which is negative, but for chrononutrition, this is not the case. How does weight loss take place?

The intakes in this diet are neither low nor high: it is a normal-calorie diet. We do not remove calories to lose weight, we allow the body to manage its caloric potential itself. In a way, we give back to the body the possibility of eating normally. In fact, we are not trying to make people lose weight, we are trying to ensure that the body no longer needs to store. Why do people store? Because they do not have a food balance that suits their body and therefore, it needs to look elsewhere. If you don’t have the right amount of protein and saturated fat at the right time of day to allow the body to rebuild itself every night, it will be looking for what you didn’t give it all day. And there it will get bigger.

HealthPassport – Can you quickly go over the important points of chrononutrition?

The body secretes a very important hormone for the regulation of the metabolism of fats, proteins and carbohydrates: cortisol. However, the secretion of this hormone takes place according to a 24-hour cycle controlled by biological clocks. In chrononutrition, meals correspond perfectly to the evolution of this cycle. The maximum peak of cortisol secretion, coupled with a peak of insulin, occurs at the very end of the night, which will trigger hypoglycemia leading to the awakening and arrival of appetite. The strongest appetite of the day is therefore that of the morning. However, you have almost 40% of people who do not eat in the morning. It is a regrettable fact of society… At noon, that is to say 4 to 6 hours later, there is a new cortisol peak, smaller, and another, even smaller at the end of the day, which generally corresponds to the snack. But there are none for dinner! But, then why are we having dinner? It’s very simple: to provide the body with energy that was not provided to it in good time. Thus, people who do not eat in the morning will make up for it in the evening, a time which is the least suitable for the body … Unfortunately, it will be difficult for them to resume eating in the morning.

HealthPassport – A study has shown that eating fat at restricted times of the day, especially in the morning as you recommend, would be less associated with weight gain compared to the same consumption spread over the day. Despite everything, chrononutrition remains relatively little proven by the scientific literature, and in particular by clinical studies …

I am often criticized for the lack of clinical studies, but if we look at all the scientific literature on nutrition, we see that there are about thirty that are moving in the direction of chrononutrition. So what are researchers waiting for to conduct a clinical study? I do not understand. For me, it is “normal” food.

HealthPassport – Assuming that this is indeed the “normal” diet, don’t you think that it is now too out of step with the environment in which we live today? Clearly, the French have a habit of eating in the evening, for example. There is also this recommendation to eat 2 portions of meat per day, whereas given the environmental challenges, we should rather reduce our consumption …

With this imbecility of telling us that we should not eat too much meat, we forget a small detail. What is the most important muscle in the human body? The heart ! When you put people on a low calorie diet, you simply screw up their hearts, because they lose muscle mass… To come back to your question, and in particular on the point of meat, I do not agree with say that we must reduce our consumption. I understand what you are suggesting about environmental challenges, but you are forgetting something important. If I take the example of beef: before being consumed, it must have eaten a lot of vegetables. But if you don’t eat that beef anymore and eat these vegetables instead, you’ll have to eat almost as much as it does to have the same nutritional quality, since each finished serving of meat is a part of the work that your body does. was not required to provide certain nutrients, such as protein. Hence a double perverse effect: forcing your body to consume a very large amount of plants to obtain the correct amount of proteins and lipids contained in much greater quantities in meat, and forcing your body to spend much more time on digestion and assimilation to transform the plants that you have absorbed into proteins useful to the body.

HealthPassport – What place does physical activity take in your method?

Sport is important, but when a person is really overweight, 95% of the time they are damaged, both physically and intellectually. It no longer has the necessary and sufficient potential for this. This means that you must first re-educate her from a nutritional point of view and bring her back the quota of muscle potential that she has lost.

HealthPassport – One study has shown that there are multiple types of obesity depending on body composition and distribution. How can you imagine that a single method could be the solution to quite different problems?

In fact, there is a specific chrononutrition for each type of obesity. Depending on the type of obesity, depending on the place in the body where we put fat, this means that we have made such dietary errors corresponding to specific foods. We will therefore work in this direction. Any human being has exactly the same physiology. Whenever someone has variant obesity, it means that they have recklessly eaten this or that nutrient, that or that food. For example, a diet based largely on starchy foods results in abdominal obesity, which is what I call monastic obesity. There was a time, for example, monks never ate meat. In my method, I describe twelve morphotypes corresponding to the nutritional errors to be corrected.

HealthPassport – Do the people who come to consult you tell you of their incomprehension in the face of all the diet methods that abound and that say a bit of everything and its opposite?

Most of the time, people come to me to consult after having tried dozens of diets. And in 95% of cases, chrono nutrition allows them to never be fat and / or in poor health again. To my knowledge, only about 5 to 6% of people regain more weight than they lost with chrononutrition. And in these cases, there is always a social, family reason such as divorce, retirement when you are not intellectually prepared for it, the loss of a child or a loved one … that it is absolutely necessary to stop wanting to choose your foods to lose weight! Chrononutrition insists on the fact that you have to indulge yourself, while returning to a diet that corresponds to the physiology of the human being. It is for this reason that we can continue this “normal diet” for life.

Return to the first page of the Great Inquiry

They don’t believe in diets

Jean-Michel Lecerf

Head of the nutrition department at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, author of the book “To each his own true weight”.

“Not every weight problem is a food problem”

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Helene Baribeau

Dietitian-nutritionist, author of the book “Eat better to be on top” published in 2014.

“You have to be in tune with your real needs”

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They have faith in their method

Jean-Michel Cohen

Nutritionist, author of the book “I decided to lose weight” published in 2015.

“Doing regular diet sequences can be interesting”

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Alain Delabos

Doctor, father of the concept of chrononutrition and author of numerous books.

“A diet that allows the body to manage its caloric potential on its own”

Read the interview