Losing weight?

Experts warn: watch the clock

Next time you stagger into a Waffle House in the wee hours of the morning and order the Texas sausage egg & cheese melt (1,040 calories), consider this new research finding: At roughly that hour, the most basic operations of the human body throttle back their caloric needs by about 10 percent compared to the rate at which they will burn calories in late afternoon or early evening. Maybe you’d prefer to come back around dinnertime. This pattern of calorie use doesn’t significantly vary based on whether you’re the waitress working the graveyard shift or a 9-to-5’er stopping in for breakfast after eight hours of shut-eye, the researchers found. Humans’ “resting energy expenditure”—the body’s use of calories to power such basic functions as respiration, brain activity and fluid

circulation—follows a predictable cycle that waxes as the day progresses and wanes as night sets in.

The new study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, offers further evidence that circadian rhythms dictate not just when we feel the urge to sleep but how complex mechanisms like metabolism operate across a 24-hour period. It may help explain why people who keep irregular sleep schedules, including swing shift workers, have higher rates of obesity and are more likely to develop metabolic abnormalities such as type 2 diabetes.

And it demonstrates that whether we hear it or not, our body’s clock is always ticking, locating us in our daily cycle with uncanny precision.

At “hour zero”—roughly corresponding to somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m.—our core body temperature dips to its lowest point and our idling fuel use reaches its nadir. From that point, at first quickly and then a bit more slowly, the body’s “resting energy expenditure” rises until the late afternoon/ early evening.