Is it More Effective to Eat Less or Fast?
Eating smaller meals and cutting calories is a more effective way to manage weight than intermittent fasting, when consumption is restricted to a narrow window of time. That’s the conclusion of researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who studied the eating, sleeping and waking patterns of 547 adults over a six-month period. Their findings appeared last week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Participants were asked to track their activities and meals on a bespoke mobile app, giving researchers insight about the amount of time they spent between waking up and eating, the span between their first and last meals of the day and the period between their last meal and sleeping. The scientists concluded meal times weren’t associated with weight change.
“Our findings did not support the use of time-restricted eating as a strategy for long-term weight loss in a general medical population,” they concluded. That may throw a wrench in popular diets, including intermittent fasting, which can involve skipping meals for as long as a day. The study found fewer, small meals were associated with dropping weight.
Excerpted from The Star
