Can earlier lunch help shed weight?
Source: Agencies |
January 31, 2013, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WANT to lose weight? Eating lunch earlier rather than later may help you out.
Dieters who ate early lunches tended to lose more weight than those who had their midday meal on the later side, according to a Spanish study.
The finding doesn't prove that bumping up your lunch hour will help you shed that extra weight, but it is possible that eating times play a role in how the body regulates its weight, researchers said.
"We should now seriously start to consider the timing of food, not just what we eat, but also when we eat," said study co-author Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The research included 420 people attending nutrition clinics in southeast Spain. Along with going to regular group therapy sessions with nutrition and exercise counseling, dieters measured, weighed and recorded their food and reported on their daily physical activity.
Study participants were on a so-called Mediterranean diet, in which about 40 percent of each day's calories are consumed at lunch. About half of the people said they ate lunch before 3:00pm and half after.
Over 20 weeks of counseling, early and late lunchers ate a similar amount of food and burned a similar amount of calories through daily activities.
However, early eaters lost an average of 10 kilograms, just over 11 percent of their starting weight, while late eaters dropped 7.7 kg, or nine percent of their initial weight.
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