Time restricted eating can help you consume fewer calories.
Diets and weight loss strategies constantly come and go. It’s estimated that in the US, about 45 million people go on a diet every year. This group spends about $33 billion on weight loss products. While adopting healthy eating and getting enough exercise and rest can go a long way towards helping you lose weight, some people are turning to something else. It’s called time-restricted eating. What is this and does it work? Here’s a look.
What is time-restricted eating?
You might say restricted eating is what anyone on a diet is doing. When hoping to lose weight, you are often eating certain foods while avoiding others. Time-restricted eating refers to eating only during certain hours of the day. You can eat anything you want but only within certain hours. This practice results in a type of daily fasting that has participants eating throughout an 8 to 12 hour window during their waking hours. During the rest of the day (12 to 16 hours), you don’t eat.
Time-restricted eating often involves waking up during a.m. hours, eating breakfast in the morning, consuming a regular lunch, and eating dinner sometime in the late afternoon or early evening hours. During the time before going to bed, the idea is to abstain from eating anything extra.
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What’s it like in practice? You might wake up at 8 a.m.. You may have your breakfast at 8:30 a.m., eat lunch around 12 or 1 p.m., and consume your dinner around 5 or 6 p.m.. You may then have a small snack around 7 p.m., and go to bed between 11 p.m. and midnight. In this way, you can potentially fast from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day.
Many people follow this type of eating pattern without thinking about it. It’s normal to “fast” at night. If late-night snacking has become a ritual for you, however, and you are gaining weight, you might find time-restricted eating helps to control your caloric intake.
Does time-restricted eating really work?
Researchers in one study published in April 2022 found time-restricted eating was just as beneficial in helping people who are obese to lose wieght as a calorie-restricted diet. In this study, participants who either followed a calorie-restricted diet for a year, or only ate between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. lost around 14 to 18 pounds.
So, yes, time-restricted eating can help you lose weight. The key is to not binge eat or stock up on high calorie foods during your eating hours. Resist the temptation to go all out and overeat. Eating a healthy diet and following a healthy lifestyle in connection with not eating late at night could be the trick to long term weight loss. Yo-yo dieting, or going on a diet for a temporary period of time, and then reverting back to your old eating habits is a bad strategy. This will inevitably cause you to gain weight.
If you are interested in losing weight, talk to your doctor to get started.
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