Tweaking Your Meal Schedule May Help You Lose Weight, Here's How

Have you been looking to lose some weight for quite some time now? Tried different diets and different workouts yet no significant results? Changing your meal timings may help suggests a new study. Yes you heard us, weight loss is apparently a lot more than just your diet and workout schedule. Your meal timings may have a significant role in your weight management that you are yet to tap.  According to a latest study, tweaking your eating schedule like having an early dinner or even skipping it - can help reduce hunger pangs and promote fat burning.

"Eating only during a much smaller window of time than people are typically used to may help with weight loss," said Courtney Peterson, an associate professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US.

"We found that eating between 8 am and 2 pm followed by an 18-hour daily fast kept appetite levels more even throughout the day, in comparison to eating between 8 am and 8 pm, which is what the average American does," said Peterson.

A new diet called the Time Restricted Eating or Time Restricted Feeding allows you to lose weight, without starving. What's more? You can eat anything you like and want to. But does it really help? Or is it just one of the many fad diets that are doing the rounds. The study is the first human test of early time- restricted feeding (eTRF). 

The findings revealed that this meal-timing strategy reduced swings in hunger and altered fat and carbohydrate burning patterns, which may help with losing weight.With eTRF, people eat their last meal by the mid- afternoon and do not eat again until breakfast the next morning.

Eating a very early dinner, or even skipping dinner, could help you shed a pound or two said the researchers. However, further studies need to take place to confirm that theory.

Previous animal studies have indicated that eTRF helped rodents burn more fat. The buman body has an internal clock of its own. The metabolic rate of the body is said to be deeply linked with this biological clock. Researchers say that many aspects of metabolism are at their optimal functioning in the morning.

Eating in alignment with the body's circadian clock by eating earlier in the day may positively influence health and also help lose weight.

For the study, researchers followed 11 men and women with excess weight over four days of eating between 8 am and 2 pm, and four days of eating between 8 am and 8 pm.They were then tested for the impact of eTRF on calories burned, fat burned and appetite.

Participants tried both eating schedules, ate the same number of calories both times and completed all testing under supervision.

Researchers found that, although eTRF did not affect how many total calories participants burned, it reduced daily hunger swings and increased fat burning during several hours at night.The diet was also enhance their metabolic flexibility, which is the body's ability to switch between burning carbs and burning fats.

The findings could be a major intervention in the field of diet and nutrition, however it is still in the nascent stage. A larger, more comprehensive study will need to take place to find if the diet is sustainable in the long run, the researchers noted.

(With inputs PTI)