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Experts reveal that stopping eating by 3 PM could help you lose weight.
Experts reveal that stopping eating by 3 PM could help you lose weight
Ever have a hard time losing weight? Yeah, us too. As soon as you finish dinner, you promise yourself: no more food for the night. But your partner/spouse comes home with chocolate bars from your local grocery store and tells you to help yourself. You open the fridge, see the treats sitting pretty on one of the shelves and you extend your hand to grab one…
HANDS OFF! Those chocolate bars aren’t going to help you get what you want! If you really want to lose weight, then science is starting to show that you should start considering the TIME that you eat. Yes, you read that right, the time that you eat MATTERS! Don’t take it for granted.
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In fact, experts say that finishing all meals before 3 PM and not snacking in the evening helps you lose that unwanted weight! Experts who reviewed 250 prior studies recommended fasting for at least 14 hours a day and restricting food intake to between the hours of 6 AM and 3 PM.
They claim it works best with the body clock and is more akin to how our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate because they didn't have virtually unlimited access to food like we do.
Researchers stated that people who ate this way had better blood sugar control, melted off a significant amount of weight, lost hazardous fat around their midsection, and reduced inflammation.
According to a study presented at the European Congress on Obesity, eating earlier is connected to healthier gut bacteria, which helps the immune system and overall health.
'Data suggests that eating earlier in the day promotes weight reduction, glycemic management, appetite, insulin resistance, and fertility,' said Dr Courtney Peterson of the University of Alabama in Birmingham in the United States.
'Western-style diets, which contain fat-rich food and snacks that are consumed around the clock, have a causal role in the development of various chronic diseases,' according to a study published in Nature Communications.
Dr. Peterson warned that feeding throughout the day increases the risk of obesity by 57% and recommended sticking to early and consistent meal times to prevent triggering a sort of ‘metabolic jetlag.'
‘Most people eat within a 12-hour window but that time window shifts from day to day,’ she explained. ‘So for some people that eating window can be 14 or 15 hours because one day they'll eat breakfast and another day they'll eat really late. 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.’
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‘This clock makes you better at doing different things at different times of the day. So for instance, your best muscular strength, greatest reaction time, and greatest coordination are in the afternoon. Your highest alertness, testosterone production, and in most people best blood sugar control is in the morning.
So your metabolism is kind of optimised. Your body is optimised to do different things at different times of the day. One of the things that's really important about having these optimal circadian rhythms is doing the same thing at a consistent time of day.’
‘A great example of this is say, you normally go to bed at 10 PM and the next night you're out partying and go to bed at 2 AM.’ she added, ‘Even if you're in bed for those same eight hours of sleep, you feel way less good. That's because your body thinks it has shifted several time zones. You get this sort of feeling of jetlag. There's actually a similar thing going on when you shift your meals from day to day and we now call that metabolic jetlag.’
What do you think? Do you reckon you’d have the willpower to abstain from food between 3 PM to 6 AM? Tell us all about it in the comments!
And if this doesn’t work for you, worry not! Check out this video below for more weight-losing tips for older Aussies.
