Maintaining a 12-hour eating window can be the key to losing weight without restricting calories and following the simplest diet. Dieters hoping to shed the pounds should pay as much attention to the clock as they do to the calories. That's what researchers say in a new study after finding that limiting the hours we eat stops weight gain.
Simplest diet for effective results
So you can limit meals to a time slot, such as8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with intermittent fastingmake. This appears to make a big difference in whether the body stores fat or burns it, according to scientists. Researchers at the Salk Institute in the US claim it adds more evidence to studies that eating late at night leads to weight gain.
For this reason, they suspect that restricting meal times could help combat high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity. “These days, most of the advice is: ‘You have to change your diet, you have to eat healthy,’” said Associate Professor Satchidananda Panda. “But many people have access to a healthy diet. So the question is, without access to a healthy diet, can they still eat on a time-limited basis and get some benefit from it?”
Research results
The researchers studied 400 laboratory mice ranging from normal to obese, which were placed on different types of diets and time restrictions. They showed that animals that were fed a high-fat diet but had access to food for only 12 hours a day were healthier and leaner than mice that had access to the same food all day, even though both groups consumed the same number of calories.
The results were the same even when the diets were high in fat or high in sugar. The study also suggests that the strange bug probably doesn't make a difference. For example, late-night weekend takeout is unlikely to affect the body's metabolism. However, eating regularly at night would have a big impact.
“The fact that it worked regardless of diet and on weekends and weekdays was a very nice surprise,” says the study’s first author, Amandine Chaix, a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Panda’s lab.
Mice that became overweight after eating ad libitum during the day lost five percent of their body weight. This happened when they were put on restricted within a few days. At the end of the 38-week study, they were 25 percent lighter than the group that continued to eat freely. Experimental animals that ate a healthy diet no longer lost weight, but did gain muscle mass. That showed in theJournal Cell Metabolismpublished study.
