Thursday, 17 November 2016

The Skinny on Skipping Dinner to Lose Weight


True or false: eating dinner early, or skipping it, can help you fight body fat.

TRUE!

Although it goes against your mother’s insistence that you eat three square meals a day, science has proven that early-time restricted eating may have benefits for losing weight. In a recent study presented at ObesityWeek 2016, researchers found that having a very early dinner, or even skipping dinner, reduced swings in hunger and altered fat and carbohydrate burning patterns, which can help with weight loss.  

Skipping supper as a means to a slimmer frame may sound a bit drastic, but remember that the purpose of early-time restricted eating is not starvation. You should continue to follow your normal diet filled with nutritious and well-balanced meals; however, instead of your scheduled 5 pm supper, push the meal up to 2 pm, or eliminate it altogether.

This new research appears to suggest that if you want to lose weight, eating during a smaller window of time can be the key to success. “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,” said Courtney Peterson, PhD, who led the study at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. This is because of the impact that the body’s inner clock, the circadian clock, has on aspects of your metabolism. During the morning, many aspects of metabolism are at their optimal functioning; therefore, eating in alignment with the body’s circadian clock, such as earlier in the day, can positively influence health and weight loss.

It may take some time to change lifelong habits, but according to science, we should ditch supper in favour of “lupper.”

What do you think about early-time restricted eating? Do you have a cutoff time for eating?


Photo Credit: By Jay Wennington, courtesy of Unsplash
Story Credit: Science Daily Note: Content has been edited for style and length

1 comment:

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