Researchers found that intermittent fasting, which can include limiting eating to a certain number of hours per day, may not be as effective in losing weight.
The quantity of food that is consumed probably has a greater impact on weight loss than the timing of your meals, a recent study found.
Restricting eating times, as seen in diet trends such as intermittent fasting, has become a popular way to try to lose weight in recent years.
But the study, which was published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found no association between restricting eating times and weight loss.
This also included how long people ate after waking up, how long their window of eating was throughout the day and how close to going to bed they ate, said principal investigator of the study Dr. Wendy Bennett, an associate professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Instead, smaller meals were associated with weight loss, she told CNN.
“Based on other studies that have come out, including ours, we are starting to think that timing of meals through the day most likely doesn’t immediately result in weight loss,” Bennett said, adding the caveat that for some people, timing meals may be a useful tool in tracking nutrition.
The study tracked the portion sizes and eating times of 547 people, in addition to data on their health and weight, over the course of six years.
Time-restricted eating is a popular intermittent fasting schedule. Some proponents of this method argue that by limiting eating to a certain number of hours per day, people can use their bodies’ natural rhythms to shed pounds.
But the researchers found that what mattered was the size of the participants’ meals: people who ate more large- or medium-sized meals were more likely to gain weight, while people who ate small meals were more likely to lose weight.
However, experts advised that the findings of this study should be interpreted cautiously.
The study had few racial and ethnic minorities among the participants, noted Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Also, other social determinants of health, such as stress and people’s environment, could be added to the data, Stanford added.
These variables may be important in gaining a better understanding of the effects of meal timing, according to Alice Lichtenstein, professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University.
“I suspect that if they looked more closely at the data, that there would be subgroups (where timing of meals) may have had a significant effect,” Lichtenstein told CNN.
Bennett noted that this study was observational, which means that they looked at existing patterns for the study rather than making changes to a randomised group.
More research is needed on the subject, she added.
The main takeaways are that there is no one nutrition strategy that works for everyone and that the quality of food matters.
“If you make some effort to consume a healthy diet, you make some effort to be physically active, you’re less likely to have diabetes, chronic kidney disease, obstructive pulmonary disease and hypertension,” Lichtenstein said.
Intermittent fasting or restricting eating intervals can be a helpful way for some people to take note of personal tendencies, but many people can’t sustain it for long enough to see long-term change — or keep any weight they lose off, Lichtenstein added.
