After being introduced to a really fit-looking middle-aged female (thank you, my brother) and small talking with her for a while, the Fitness Master in me made me ask her what she does to look that way. My guess (and I love guessing about such matters) was that she had been a serious soccer player in high school and college and now sates her competitive desire (and gets really intense exercise) by doing CrossFit workouts four to five times a week.

Instead of saying anything about physical activity, though, she said, “The 16/8 has been really good for me.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. For I had tried, albeit briefly, that diet where you fast for 16 hours every day, eat all your meals in an eight-hour window, and it just didn’t work for me.

More importantly, the 16/8 diet may not work for you. Not if, instead of having a fit-looking body in the present moment, you want to have more future moments and healthier ones at that.

As well as eat supper at what most of us consider the normal time, between 6-7 p.m.

I issue these warnings based on the key takeaway from a study published this September in Communications Medicine — and the following bit of simple math.

If you’re following the 16/8 diet and finish supper at about 7 p.m., that means you can’t eat again until 11 a.m. the next morning. Which may present no problem if you’re working from home, not working at all, or have a boss who allows you to take an early lunch.

But what is sacrificed in all of these scenarios is breakfast.

Now you may say that just isn’t so. That the first meal of the day — whenever it occurs and whatever it comprises — breaks the fast created by sleep and therefore serves as breakfast, regardless of the time it is eaten.

I agree, and the researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital probably do, too, even the ones who analyzed data from the University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age. Doing so gave them access to a survey about meal timing and health behaviors taken five different times across a span of 22 years by nearly 3,000 British adults who were between 42 and 92 years of age at baseline.

When the researchers assessed all the data, they found something concerning about delaying eating after rising, a delay that almost certainly occurs when following the 16/8 diet. Such a delay was linked to a higher risk of death.

They discovered each additional hour’s delay between waking and eating increased the risk between eight and 11 percent.

Furthermore, the published paper notes that a later breakfast time “was consistently associated with having physical and mental health conditions such as depression, fatigue and oral health problems.”

Ask me what to make of all this, and I’ll shrug my shoulders. But my silence stems not from uncertainty or lack of knowledge, but from a conviction I hold, one that was expressed in last week’s article.

That any time you hear or read about health-related studies, you can’t assume those results will hold true for you, and that’s because the odds are high that the people in the study are much different from you.

While you very well may be close to 64 years old (the average age of the participants in the aforementioned study) and female (as 71.5 percent of them were), what are the odds you also eat breakfast around 8:20 a.m., lunch around 12:40 p.m., and supper around 6:00 p.m.?

Moreover, what are the odds you eat supper about five and a half hours before bedtime?

Now if you’re thinking that all of this is interesting, but not helpful, I have two words for you: Jeff Cavaliere. He’s a middle-aged guy who just happens to be a physical fitness expert and the creator of the 90-day workout program ATHLEAN-X™ — and whose body is so impressively sculpted that it makes even that really fit female mentioned in the intro a bit jealous.

He’s 49 years old and when his body fat is measured with skin calipers it comes in under 6 percent — despite the fact he usually finishes his dinner far later than recommended, often around midnight.

And despite the fact that the paper published this September in Communications Medicine warns “emerging evidence largely suggests that later meal times, particularly eating during the biological evening, is detrimental to health.”

Do you really think doing so is detrimental in Jeff Cavaliere’s case? The guy looks like Adonis and routinely does gym workouts most guys half his age would never dare attempt.

And can you now better understand the case I so often make?

That while ongoing research in health and fitness is crucial, it’s not gospel. That you need to recognize the ways in which the research participants are different from you, and then — based on your abilities, goals, and what’s been uncovered in the study — intelligently experiment.