What time should you have dinner to lose weight faster

• Is intermittent fasting the best way to lose weight after the holidays?

If you want to lose that pair (or more) of kilos that you have brought as a souvenir from the beach and you do not know how, you should still look more at the hours in which you distribute your meals throughout the day. That is, at least, the theory that supports a group of researchers from different American institutions, led by Courtney M. Peterson, a professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences at the University of Alabama.

In an investigation published last July in the journal 'Obesity', Peterson and his colleagues revealed how the use of hourly strategies in meal planning (such as intermittent fasting or early dinners) could help you lose weight by reducing appetite

His study is the first to show how the moment we eat affects energy metabolism for 24 hours, depending on how food intake and meal frequency are combined .

"Coordinating meals with circadian rhythms (internal body clock that regulates physical, mental and behavioral changes that occur during a day in our body) can be a powerful strategy to reduce appetite and improve metabolism functioning," have assured the authors of the report.

Peterson and his colleagues also concluded that the way in which food intake is distributed throughout the day can boost the average fat burning over a 24-hour period. To be more exact, they observed that early restricted time feeding (eTRF) , a daily intermittent fasting modality that proposes to advance dinner as much as possible, helps improve metabolic flexibility , that is, the ability to change the source of obtaining of energy through the burning of glycogen or fat, depending on the moment and the possibilities available.

However, they clarified that the results obtained on the burning of adipose tissue are preliminary. "It is necessary to evaluate and confirm whether these strategies help people lose body fat in a much longer study," they said.

EARLY DINNER

To reach these conclusions, Peterson and his team recruited, between November 2014 and August 2016, 11 adult men and women, between 20 and 45 years of age, who were in good general health. All of them were overweight: they had a body mass index between 25 and 35 kg / m2 (inclusive) and weighed between 68 and 100 kg. In addition, everyone went to sleep every night between 9:30 p.m. and 12 a.m.

How did they do the study? They designed two different meal schedule strategies in random order: one in which participants ate three meals during a 12-hour period (with breakfast at 8:00 am and dinner at 8:00 pm) and an eTRF schedule , in which the participants took three meals over a period of six hours (with breakfast at 8:00 am and dinner at 2:00 pm ).

In both approaches, the individuals under study consumed the same amounts and types of food. The fasting periods for the control schedule were 12 hours per day; while the eTRF involved a fast of 18 hours per day.

After following the programmed guidelines for four days, the researchers measured in a respiratory chamber how many calories, carbohydrates, fats and proteins each of the study participants had burned.

They also assessed appetite levels every three hours while they were awake, as well as the hunger hormones during the morning and at night.

In this way, they detected that, although the eTRF had not significantly affected the amount of calories burned by the participants, it had managed to reduce the levels of the known as hunger hormone (ghrelin) and improved some aspects related to appetite regulation Similarly, he had increased fat burning for 24 hours.

The doubt is; Who is able to be without eating food from 2 pm to 8 am the next day? Complicated.

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