Conquering the urge to eat after 3pm is the fast way to lose weight
‘People eat within an eightto-10-hour window and so they’re effectively fasting for 14 to 16 hours a day’
IT HAS long been said that the secret of good health is to breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper. Now scientists have gone one further by concluding that the best way to get into shape is to eschew all meals after 3pm.
Intermittent fasting has grown in popularity in recent years.
Advocates suggest that skipping meals emulates the habits of our hunter-gather ancestors, who did not have access to food round the clock. Researchers who reviewed 250 studies on diets and lifestyles, have concluded that fasting for around 15 hours a day is optimal for health and weight loss.
They found that dieters who ate early were most likely to achieve weight loss.
One study of women on caloriecontrolled diets for 12 weeks found that those who ate most of their meals early in the day lost 11lbs more than those eating the same calories over the day.
In the latest review of the evidence, scientists found that fasting had other health benefits including reducing blood pressure, inflammation and risk factors for diabetes.
When dieters were allocated the same calories, eating earlier in the day was linked with greater weight loss.
And in other studies, where slimmers were given more free rein over their diet, eating earlier in the day appeared to regulate appetite – lessening overall calorie intake.
The findings, presented at the European Congress on Obesity in the Netherlands, suggests that the best results came from eating all meals before 2pm or 3pm.
Scientists said sticking to this pattern worked best with the body’s circadian rhythms, harnessing its natural body clock, making it better at processing blood sugar and boosting healthy gut bacteria. Fasting for part of the day mimics the hunter-gather ways of our ancestors, researchers said.
Dr Courtney Peterson, associate professor and co-director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Core at the University of Alabama, said: “Time-restricted eating is becoming wildly popular.
“People typically eat within something like an eight-to-10-hour window and so they’re effectively fasting for 14 to 16 hours a day.”
Dr Peterson said consistent meal times helped to boost health, avoiding a kind of “metabolic jet lag”, which could be fuelled by changing habits. “We think benefits come when it is the same eating-time window each day.
“The reason for this is you have an internal biological clock, called the circadian system,” Dr Peterson said.
Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum, said: “The mantra ‘breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper’ couldn’t be better to describe this research”, adding that such changes offered a “painless” way to lose weight.