Whether you just enjoy eating lunch later on in the day, or you simply don’t have the ability to stop before then, a study has suggested that this may give you more trouble when you want to lose weight. According to the research, which was published in the International Journal of Obesity, eating before 3pm means you could lose 25% more weight than those who eat after this time.
However, senior researcher Frank Scheer, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, noted that the study participants were from Spain, where lunch is the biggest meal of the day, and so it may not be a late lunch that thwarts your weight loss, but rather having your main meal later in the day. He pointed to popular wellness advice that you should eat breakfast like a king and dinner like a pauper, saying that ‘this is the first large-scale, long-term study to show that it is an important factor in weight-loss success for overweight and obese individuals.’
Overweight and obese Spanish adults took part in the five-month weight-loss programme, in which they were given no advice on what time to eat, but were encouraged to follow a traditional Mediterranean diet, which includes plenty of fish, olive oil, vegetables and whole grains, but goes light on red meat and butter. Both groups managed to lose weight with this diet, but in the end the group that usually ate lunch after 3 pm lost an average of 17 pound, compared with 22 pounds in the early-lunch group.
So why is lunching later in the day worse for your wellbeing? It’s possible that people who eat lunch late have gone too long without eating since breakfast, which negatively affects their metabolism. Connie Diekman, director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, reported that some studies show eating smaller meals every three to four hours can be beneficial when trying to control your weight.
Of the 420 people in a weight-loss programme, the people in the group who ate later were more likely to eat a light breakfast or skip breakfast altogether. Compared to just 3% of early lunchers who did this, almost 7% of those who ate later skipped or had a light breakfast. Diekman explained that the findings show a ‘potential connection between going too long between meals and weight gain, but given the study design, more studies are needed to determine if there is a cause-and-effect connection.’
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