Review: The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight

The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight by Satchin Panda
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started reading this book after a recommendation from The Huberman Lab podcast. The core of the book, the central message, is that our body follows a circadian rhythm that should be the foundation for our habits and lives. The book uses this to generate to time-restricted eating, exercise and sleeping schedules, and blue-light blocking in the evenings. It discusses the science behind it to some limited degree and explains some mechanisms.

I went into this expecting a more scientific look at these ideas. Instead, the book comes very close to being just another self-help book that could have been a twenty-page pamphlet instead of a long read that reiterates the same points over and over. The explanation of the mechanisms is too brief and not detailed, the discussion of the experiments is not critical and is very surface-level.

For some people, this will be an exciting book. I will admit that a lot of the advice here is relatively interesting and worth trying out. It's just that it feels like a lot of this book could have been cut, or at least could have done with some reorganising. Read a summary instead and look up the actual papers in the bibliography.

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