There is more than one way to skin a cat!
An interesting little study published last week examined what happens if a healthy person restricts their eating window each day.
Participants were divided into 4 groups and told to restrict their eating window each day to either of 12 hrs, 10 hrs, 8 hrs or do nothing and eat as usual.
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-024-05849-6/figures/2
They did so for 8 weeks and their weight, body fat, visceral fat, cholesterol, blood glucose and other markers of cardiometabolic risk were measured.
In the whole study only one thing happened.
The group of people who restricted their eating window the most, i.e those that ate during an 8hr window (between 10am and 6pm), lost some weight in the form of fat while keeping their muscle.
Turns out that without intending to, or being told to do so, by eating only during an 8hr window each day they had somewhat reduced their total calories. Over an 8 week period that resulted in some weight loss in the form of fat, but interestingly not loss of muscle.
None of the other participants lost weight and nobody saw any impact on their cholesterol, fasting blood glucose or other markers that were measured.
So what does this mean for you and me?
If you are in the business of losing a few (or not putting some on during the holidays, for that matter!) there is more than one way of doing so.
While caloric restriction has proven effective, to be done properly it can be somewhat cumbersome. You have to be quite deliberate about it, follow a diet plan prepared by a dietician and/or use an app for logging your food and counting your caloric intake. If you are the kind of person who likes that kind of stuff, great!
If, however, you are like me and logging meals and counting calories winds you up, then you could try just restricting your eating window each day.
If you are going to do so, make your eating window as early in the day as is feasible for you, i.e.:
=> if you are going to skip a meal, skip dinner and not breakfast.
The data on chronobiology is clear on this by now. I cover this in my blogs posts on dinner timing and breakfast skipping.
Whatever you do,
if you want to lose weight, you need to find a way of doing things that you can keep doing FOREVER.
There is no diet or exercise plan that will make you lose weight and then stay at that weight when you stop the diet plan. The body just does not work that way.
That is why I am not a huge fun on calorie counting. While effective, it is rarely sustainable long term. It can also backfire as you lose muscle when restricting calories but when the weight comes back on it will be all fat, so you are worse off than when you started. (Unless you have been religious about weight training the whole time!)
Time restricted eating, on the other hand, can indeed become a way of life and has multiple benefits for your health and metabolism beyond just inadvertent calorie reduction.
If anything, if your eating window is in the first part of the day, your blood glucose will be lower and more stable during the night, which in itself is a big bonus. Unstable blood sugar during the night is not good news for sleep. At the same time, going to bed hungry is not a good plan either so,
If you are going to try it, do so gradually, giving your body time to adjust.
If you are someone who currently eats dinner at 8pm and has a bedtime snack at 9h30 and then breakfast at 7, do not just go cold turkey into an 8 hour eating window. Aim for 12 hrs at first and then increase gradually.
Find what works for your and what can fit into your life. Even if you do not restrict your eating window down to 8 hrs and even if you do not lose weight, you will still be getting all the other benefits of giving your body time to rest and rebuild you without having to be digesting half the night, and that is not insignificant.