Not so fast with the cakes, clock-watch dieters!

TIME restricted eating (TRE) — also known as ‘intermittent fasting’ — has become very popular, particularly with celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston. The idea is that confining your eating to a set time window will, among other things, help you lose weight. A popular approach is 16:8 — fasting for 16 hours, followed by an eight-hour window for eating.

There have been quite a lot of animal and human studies showing benefits from doing TRE, so a while ago I decided to give it a go. But I found 16:8 impossible to stick to, so have settled on a more moderate version, 12:12, where I try to stop eating by 8pm and not eat again until after 8am.

I find this stops me snacking late at night and helps to keep me trim. But as the Mail reported this week, for 16:8 devotees there has been some disappointing news. A new U.S. study, which involved 116 overweight or obese people randomly allocated to eat normally or follow the 16:8 approach, found that after 12 weeks the fasting group lost just 2lb, only a little more than the control group.

Both groups ended up eating roughly the same amount of calories, though those doing TRE seem to have consumed less protein, which could explain why they also lost more muscle.

The moral of this is that when it comes to fasting, longer is not necessarily better. And it also matters what and how much you eat. I’m afraid that the calories in cakes and biscuits — even if eaten only during an eight-hour eating window — will still add up.