Whether you’re hungry or not, my friend, chew on this. It’s the sort of food for thought that feeds your ego so much that you’ll need to loosen your belt buckle a notch.

There are people in this world who would do anything to be you.

It’s as easy to forget as it’s sometimes hard to swallow, yet it’s true.

For many people, you are as worthy of emulation as Michael Jordan in his prime, back when you didn’t have to be a basketball lover or a Gatorade drinker, just a television watcher, to be singing and wishing that beverage’s catchy and iconic commercial refrain. “Like Mike / If I could be like Mike.”

So who are these individuals desiring to be you?

Those desperate to move to the United States. Those who just moved here but are starting from scratch.

Now regardless of your views on immigration, the reason why they envy you is easy to digest. All things considered — and let’s be clear here, I do mean all things considered — we got a pretty sweet thing going in the US of A, arguably the sweetest thing in the world.

But dietarily speaking, it’s too sweet, too fatty, and too much of a thing. What makes this clear is what happens to immigrants after they’ve been here for a while.

They get fat.

And a study just released this week in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine shows just that. Researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data from more than 22,000 foreign-born adults in the 2019 and 2021–2024 National Health Interview Survey and found those who had lived in the United States for 15 years or more had roughly twice the risk of obesity compared with those who had been in the country for less than five years.

Now regardless of your views on immigration, you have to be able to see the irony and sadness in that. For in a matter of 15 years, the meaning of “land of plenty” for these one-time American wannabes goes from being a statement about their new country’s economic prosperity to their new health malady.

Adding to the irony and the sadness is whether you were born here or not, the Land of Plenty has plenty of ways of making you fat.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways of undoing that, one being eating properly. It’s a bit unfortunate, though, that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet, which means you need to do what I so often say is essential for you to get and stay healthy.

Experiment, experiment, experiment.

And with that in mind, keep in mind a study published online on June 2 by Clinical Nutrition. It suggests that if you need or want to lose weight and keep it off — yet not necessarily keep to the diet long term — it just may be worth your while to experiment with time-restricted eating.

Researchers from three universities in Granada, Spain recruited 99 overweight or obese individuals. The group was a nearly equal mix of males and females whose average age was 49.

First, the researchers educated the 99 on the ins and outs of the Mediterranean Diet and the benefits of regularly engaging in exercise. Next, they instructed them to follow one of four eating patterns for 12 weeks.

One quarter only ate within an 8-hour window that started before 10 a.m., another quarter only ate within an 8-hour window that started after 1 p.m., the third chose when they wanted their 8-hour eating window to begin, and the fourth served as the control group by continuing to eat at their usual times.

At the study’s conclusion, the average weight loss for those who did some form of time-restricted eating was 5 percent. That’s noteworthy for prior studies have shown that decrease is just enough weight loss in the overweight and obese to bring about better health.

Blood pressure and triglycerides decrease. Insulin sensitivity and high-density lipoproteins (the “good” cholesterol) increase.

Joint pain and the risk of many cancers lessen.

What’s also noteworthy is that the researchers asked the participants to meet with them one year after the study’s conclusion, yet didn’t ask them to eat in any specific way until then. At that meeting, though, the researchers did ask if they had continued to eat as they had in the study.

From that, the researchers discovered those who had and had been assigned a specific time-eating window had maintained “significantly greater body weight loss” when compared with the control group. Even so, that still meant these participants had regained half of the weight they lost during the 12-week study.

But if you think that makes the study a failure, its authors will ask you to think again.

They see the maintenance of 50 percent of weight lost 12 months after a diet as “clinically meaningful and promising” since “even modest weight reductions have been associated with benefits in cardiovascular risk factors.”