Could Eating Earlier Help You To Lose More Weight?

There are so many weight loss nuggets of wisdom that it’s hard to know which is true for your wellness, and which have been made up to sell diet pills. One of these adages is that late night heavy meals and snacks make you more likely to opt for unhealthy dishes, and your body’s metabolism is slower then. By this logic, eating late at night means that you store more weight instead of burning it off, but a new study has found that there could be wisdom in this advice after all.

For the study, which was published in the International Journal of Obesity, 420 Spanish dieters spent 20 weeks eating their main meal at different times. One group ate before 3pm, the others after, and it was found that even though their overall caloric intake was the same, the group who ate before 3pm lost more weight than those who ate it later. However, the researchers did not find a link between weight loss and the timing of smaller meals.

According to the researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, America, in collaboration with the University of Murcia and Tufts University, the late lunchers lost, on average, 7.7kg, whereas those who ate before 3pm lost an average of 9.9kg. Over the 20 weeks, this is a body weight loss percentage of 9% and 11.3% respectively. The researchers also found that the later eaters were more likely to consume fewer calories at breakfast, and even more likely to skip it altogether. This group’s estimated insulin sensitivity was also lower, and this can lead to diabetes.

‘This is the first large-scale prospective study to demonstrate that the timing of meals predicts weight-loss effectiveness,’ said author of the study Dr Frank Scheer, director of the Medical Chronobiology Programme and associate neuroscientist at BWH and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. ‘Our results indicate that late eaters displayed a slower weight-loss rate and lost significantly less weight than early eaters, suggesting that the timing of large meals could be an important factor in a weight loss program.’

Prof Marta Garaulet, professor of Physiology at the University of Murcia Spain, and lead author of the study, added, ‘This study emphasises that the timing of food intake itself may play a significant role in weight regulation,’ and diet programmes should take timing of meals, as well as content, into account.