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Recently I have been reading a lot more about meal timings, how that by using intermittent fasting or eating earlier in the day seems to be helping people lose weight because it is lowering their appetite rather than burning more calories throughout the day. There was a study that I found that showed how meal timing affects 24-hour energy metabolism when food intake and meal frequency are matched.
"Coordinating meals with circadian rhythms, or your body's internal clock, may be a powerful strategy for reducing appetite and improving metabolic health," said Eric Ravussin, PhD, one of the study's authors and associate executive director for clinical science at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. "We suspect that a majority of people may find meal timing strategies helpful for losing weight or to maintain their weight since these strategies naturally appear to curb appetite, which may help people eat less," said Courtney M. Peterson, PhD, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
It was found that meal timings strategies may have helped people burn more fat in general during a 24-hour period. The sort of study that they did was called Early Time-Restricted Feeding (eTRF) which is a form of fasting that means later meals are eaten at earlier points in the day, it is meant to help improve the ability to switch between burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat for energy. The more common way that we know it is metabolic flexibility.
They constructed most of their studies between 2014-2016 where they had 11 men and women who had a little more weight to try this method. The basically changed their diet from possibly eating between 8am – 8pm to 8am – 2pm so that they were fasting between 2pm and 8am the next morning. The same food was consumed by each member in the research and the results were as followed.
So, though there wasn’t a change in the calories that they were consuming throughout the day, it was just in a shorter period of time and then during the time they were fasting, they would be subject too small walking exercise before going to bed. Most of the people that were involved did show over the course of two years of testing this theory that their food cravings were lower. In the beginning as with anything the cravings still lingered but once their bodies got used to having food at a certain time of the day, and then nothing for a long while the results started to show.
They did lose more weight easier though the calorie intake did not change, but the fasting and also doing small exercise in that fasting period helped them burn more calories over the course of the day.
I hope that helped you out like it did me, it showed that I feel like we all need to listen to how our bodies work. This would not work for everyone and for some people it didn’t.