Fasting, eating earlier in the day or eating fewer meals – what works best for weight loss?
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Globally, one in eight people are living with obesity. This is an issue because excess fat increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.
Modifying your diet is important for managing obesity and preventing weight gain. This might include reducing your calorie intake, changing your eating patterns and prioritising healthy food.
But is one formula for weight loss more likely to result in success than another? Our new research compared three weight-loss methods, to see if one delivered more weight loss than the others:
- altering calorie distribution – eating more calories earlier rather than later in the day
- eating fewer meals
- intermittent fasting.
We analysed data from 29 clinical trials involving almost 2,500 people.
We found that over 12 weeks or more, the three methods resulted in similar weight loss: 1.4–1.8kg.
So if you do want to lose weight, choose a method that works best for you and your lifestyle.
Eating earlier in the day
When our metabolism isn’t functioning properly, our body can’t respond to the hormone insulin properly. This can lead to weight gain, fatigue and can increase the risk of a number of chronic diseases such as diabetes.
Eating later in the day – with a heavy dinner and late-night snacking – seems to lead to worse metabolic function. This means the body becomes less efficient at converting food into energy, managing blood sugar and regulating fat storage.
In contrast, consuming calories earlier in the day appears to improve metabolic function.
However, this might not be the case for everyone. Some people naturally have an evening “chronotype”, meaning they wake up and stay up later.
People with this chronotype appear to have less success losing weight, no matter the method. This is due to a combination of factors including genes, an increased likelihood to have a poorer diet overall and higher levels of hunger hormones.
Eating fewer meals
Skipping breakfast is common, but does it hinder weight loss? Or is a larger breakfast and smaller dinner ideal?
While frequent meals may reduce disease risk, recent studies suggest that compared to eating one to two meals a day, eating six times a day might increase weight loss success.
However, this doesn’t reflect the broader research, which tends to show consuming fewer meals can lead to greater weight loss. Our research suggests three meals a day is better than six. The easiest way to do this is by cutting out snacks and keeping breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Most studies compare three versus six meals, with limited evidence on whether two meals is better than three.
However, front-loading your calories (consuming most of your calories between breakfast and lunch) appears to be better for weight loss and may also help reduce hunger across the day. But more studies with a longer duration are needed.
Fasting, or time-restricted eating
Many of us eat over a period of more than 14 hours a day.
Eating late at night can throw off your body’s natural rhythm and alter how your organs function. Over time, this can increase your risk of type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases, particularly among shift workers.
Time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, means eating all your calories within a six- to ten-hour window during the day when you’re most active. It’s not about changing what or how much you eat, but when you eat it.
Animal studies suggest time-restricted eating can lead to weight loss and improved metabolism. But the evidence in humans is still limited, especially about the long-term benefits.
It’s also unclear if the benefits of time-restricted eating are due to the timing itself or because people are eating less overall. When we looked at studies where participants ate freely (with no intentional calorie limits) but followed an eight-hour daily eating window, they naturally consumed about 200 fewer calories per day.
What will work for you?
In the past, clinicians have thought about weight loss and avoiding weight gain as a simile equation of calories in and out. But factors such as how we distribute our calories across the day, how often we eat and whether we eat late at night may also impact our metabolism, weight and health.
There are no easy ways to lose weight. So choose a method, or combination of methods, that suits you best. You might consider
- aiming to eat in an eight-hour window
- consuming your calories earlier, by focusing on breakfast and lunch
- opting for three meals a day, instead of six.
The average adult gains 0.4 to 0.7 kg per year. Improving the quality of your diet is important to prevent this weight gain and the strategies above might also help.
Finally, there’s still a lot we don’t know about these eating patterns. Many existing studies are short-term, with small sample sizes and varied methods, making it hard to make direct comparisons.
More research is underway, including well-controlled trials with larger samples, diverse populations and consistent methods. So hopefully future research will help us better understand how altering our eating patterns can result in better health.
Hayley O’Neill, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University and Loai Albarqouni, Assistant Professor | NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, Bond University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Watch Out For Lipedema
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Lipedema occurs mostly in women, mostly in times of hormonal change, with increasing risk as time goes by (so for example, puberty yields a lower risk than pregnancy, which yields a lower risk than menopause).
Its name literally means “fat swelling”, and can easily be mistaken for obesity or, in its earlier stages, just pain old cellulite.
Cellulite, by the way, is completely harmless and is also not, per se, an indicator of bad health. But if you have it and don’t like it, you can reduce it:
Obesity is more of a complex matter, and one that we’ve covered here:
Lipedema is actively harmful
Lipedema can become a big problem, because lifestyle change does not reduce lipedema fat, the fat is painful, can lead to obesity if one was not already obese, causes gait and joint abnormalities, causes fatigue, can lead to lymphedema (beyond the scope of today’s article—perhaps another time!) and very much psychosocial distress.
Like many conditions that mostly affect women, the science is… Well, here’s a recent example review that was conducted and published:
Fun fact: in Romanian there is an expression “one eye is laughing; the other is crying”, and it seems appropriate here.
Spot the signs
Because it’s most readily mistaken for cellulite in first presentation, let’s look at the differences between them:
- Cellulite is characterized by dimpled, bumpy, or even skin; lipedema is the same but with swelling too.
- Cellulite is a connective tissue condition; lipedema is too (at least in part), but also involves the abnormal accumulation and deposition of fat cells, rather than just pulling some down a bit.
- Cellulite has no additional symptoms; lipedema soon also brings swollen limbs, joint pain, and/or skin that’s “spongy” and easily bruised.
What to do about it
First, get it checked out by a doctor.
If the doctor says it is just cellulite or obesity, ask them what difference(s) they are basing that on, and ask that they confirm in writing having dismissed your concerns (having this will be handy later if it turns out to be lipedema after all).
If it is lipedema, you will want to catch it early; there is no known cure, but advanced symptoms are a lot easier to keep at bay than they are to reverse once they’ve shown up.
Weight maintenance, skin care (including good hydration), and compression therapy have all been shown to help slow the progression.
If it is allowed to progress unhindered, that’s when a lot more fat accumulation and joint pain is likely to occur. Liposuction and surgery are options, but even they are only a temporary solution, and are obviously not fun things to have to go through.
Prevention is, as ever, much better than
curetreatment ← because there is no known cureOne last thing
Lipedema’s main risk factor is genetic. The bad news is, there’s not much that can be done about that for now, but the good news is, you can at least get the heads-up about whether you are at increased risk or not, and be especially vigilant if you’re in the increased risk group. See also:
One Test, Many Warnings: The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing
Take care!
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Knitting helps Tom Daley switch off. Its mental health benefits are not just for Olympians
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Olympian Tom Daley is the most decorated diver in Britain’s history. He is also an avid knitter. At the Paris 2024 Olympics Daley added a fifth medal to his collection – and caught the world’s attention knitting a bright blue “Paris 24” jumper while travelling to the games and in the stands.
At the Tokyo Olympics, where Daley was first spotted knitting, he explained its positive impact on his mental health.
It just turned into my mindfulness, my meditation, my calm and my way to escape the stresses of everyday life and, in particular, going to an Olympics.
The mental health benefits of knitting are well established. So why is someone famous like Daley knitting in public still so surprising?
Africa Voice/Shutterstock Knitting is gendered
Knitting is usually associated with women – especially older women – as a hobby done at home. In a large international survey of knitting, 99% of respondents identified as female.
But the history of yarn crafts and gender is more tangled. In Europe in the middle ages, knitting guilds were exclusive and reserved for men. They were part of a respected Europe-wide trade addressing a demand for knitted products that could not be satisfied by domestic workers alone.
The industrial revolution made the production of clothed goods cheaper and faster than hand-knitting. Knitting and other needle crafts became a leisure activity for women, done in the private sphere of the home.
World Wars I and II turned the spotlight back on knitting as a “patriotic duty”, but it was still largely taken up by women.
During COVID lockdowns, knitting saw another resurgence. But knitting still most often makes headlines when men – especially famous men like Daley or actor Ryan Gosling – do it.
Men who knit are often seen as subverting the stereotype it’s an activity for older women.
Knitting the stress away
Knitting can produce a sense of pride and accomplishment. But for an elite sportsperson like Daley – whose accomplishments already include four gold medals and one silver – its benefits lie elsewhere.
Olympics-level sport relies on perfect scores and world records. When it comes to knitting, many of the mental health benefits are associated with the process, rather than the end result.
Daley says knitting is the “one thing” that allows him to switch off completely, describing it as “my therapy”. https://www.youtube.com/embed/6wwXGOki–c?wmode=transparent&start=0
The Olympian says he could
knit for hours on end, honestly. There’s something that’s so satisfying to me about just having that rhythm and that little “click-clack” of the knitting needles. There is not a day that goes by where I don’t knit.
Knitting can create a “flow” state through rhythmic, repetitive movements of the yarn and needle. Flow offers us a balance between challenge, accessibility and a sense of control.
It’s been shown to have benefits relieving stress in high-pressure jobs beyond elite sport. Among surgeons, knitting has been found to improve wellbeing as well as manual dexterity, crucial to their role.
For other health professionals – including oncology nurses and mental health workers – knitting has helped to reduce “compassion fatigue” and burnout. Participants described the soothing noise of their knitting needles. They developed and strengthened team bonds through collective knitting practices. https://www.youtube.com/embed/dTTJjD_q2Ik?wmode=transparent&start=0 A Swiss psychiatrist says for those with trauma, knitting yarn can be like “knitting the two halves” of the brain “back together”.
Another study showed knitting in primary school may boost children’s executive function. That includes the ability to pay attention, remember relevant details and block out distractions.
As a regular creative practice, it has also been used in the treatment of grief, depression and subduing intrusive thoughts, as well countering chronic pain and cognitive decline.
Knitting is a community
The evidence for the benefits of knitting is often based on self-reporting. These studies tend to produce consistent results and involve large population samples.
This may point to another benefit of knitting: its social aspect.
Knitting and other yarn crafts can be done alone, and usually require simple materials. But they also provide a chance to socialise by bringing people together around a common interest, which can help reduce loneliness.
The free needle craft database and social network Ravelry contains more than one million patterns, contributed by users. “Yarn bombing” projects aim to engage the community and beautify public places by covering objects such as benches and stop signs with wool.
The interest in Daley’s knitting online videos have formed a community of their own.
In them he shows the process of making the jumper, not just the finished product. That includes where he “went wrong” and had to unwind his work.
His pride in the finished product – a little bit wonky, but “made with love” – can be a refreshing antidote to the flawless achievements often on display at the Olympics.
Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University and Gabrielle Weidemann, Associate Professor in Psychological Science, Western Sydney University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How To Ease Neck Pain At Home
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Dr. Bang is offering exercises to alleviate neck pain, which pain can be a real… Well, if only there were a good phrase for expressing how troublesome pain in that part of the body can be.
To be clear, he’s a doctor of chiropractic, not a medical doctor, but his advice has clearly been helping people alleviate pain, so without further ado, he advises the following things:
- Taking the head and neck slowly and carefully through the full range of motion available
- Contracting the neck muscles while repeating the above exercise, three times each way
- Backing off a little if it hurts at any point, but noting where the limits lie
- Repeating again the range of motion exercise, this time adding gentle resistance
- Holding each end of this for twenty seconds before releasing and doing the other side, three times each way
- Finally, stabilizing the head centrally and pushing into one’s hands, as an isometric strengthening exercise
He demonstrates each part clearly in this short (5:58) video:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to know more about chiropractic?
You might like our previous main feature:
Is Chiropractic All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
Take care!
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Clean – by Dr. James Hamblin
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Our skin is our largest organ, and it’s easy to forget that, and how much it does for us. All things considered, it’s good to take good care of it! But what if we sometimes take too much “care” of it?
Dr. James Hamblin, a medical doctor-turned-writer, has explored this a lot both personally and in research. Through such, he has come to the conclusion there’s definitely a “sweet spot” of personal hygiene:
- Too little, and the Bubonic plague sweeps through Europe, or other plagues sweep through other places when European invaders came.
- Too much, and we strip our skin of one of its greatest qualities: the ability to protect us.
Dr. Hamblin asks (and answers) such questions as:
- What is good hygiene, and what is neurotically doing ourselves multiple levels of harm because advertising companies shamed us into doing so?
- Is it good or bad to use a series of products, each to undo the problem caused by the previous?
- What the difference between a 5-step skincare routine, and a series of gratuitous iatrogenic damage?
- Which products clean us most helpfully, and which clean us most harmfully?
- How often should we bathe/shower, really?
If the book has a weak point, it’s that it’s written mostly with his body in mind. That makes a difference when it comes to hairwashing, for example. He’s a white guy with short hair. If you’re black and/or have long hair, for example, your haircare needs will be quite different. Similarly, many women engage in shaving/depilation in places that most men don’t, and the consequences of that choice (and implications for any extra washing needs/harms) aren’t covered.
Bottom line: notwithstanding the aforementioned blind-spots, this book will help readers reduce the amount of harm we are doing to our bodies with our washing routines, without sacrificing actual hygiene.
Click here to check out Clean and help your skin to help you!
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Get Better Sleep: Beyond “Sleep Hygiene”
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Better Sleep, Better Life!
This is Arianna Huffington. Yes, that Huffington, of the Huffington Post. But! She’s also the CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live—in particular, by challenging the idea that burnout is the required price of success.
The power of better sleep
Sleep is a very important, but most often neglected, part of good health. Here are some of Huffington’s top insights from her tech company Thrive, and as per her “Sleep Revolution” initiative.
Follow your circadian rhythm
Are you a night owl or a morning lark? Whichever it is, roll with it, and plan around that if your lifestyle allows for such. While it is possible to change from one to the other, we do have a predisposition towards one or the other, and will generally function best when not fighting it.
This came about, by the way, because we evolved to have half of us awake in the mornings and half in the evenings, to keep us all safe. Socially we’ve marched onwards from that point in evolutionary history, but our bodies are about a hundred generations behind the times, and that’s just what we have to work with!
Don’t be afraid (or ashamed!) to take naps
Naps, done right, can be very good for the health—especially if we had a bad night’s sleep the previous night.
Thrive found that workers are more productive when they have nap rooms, and (following on a little from the previous point) are allowed to sleep in or work from home.
See also: How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
Make sure you have personal space available in bed
The correlation between relationship satisfaction and sleeping close to one’s partner has been found to be so high that it’s even proportional: the further away a couple sleeps from each other, the less happy they are. But…
Partners who got good sleep the previous night, will be more likely to want intimacy on any given night—at a rate of an extra 14% per extra hour of sleep the previous night. So, there’s a trade-off, as having more room in bed tends to result in better sleep. Time to get a bigger bed?
What gets measured, gets done
This goes for sleep, too! Not only does dream-journaling in the morning cue your subconscious to prepare to dream well the following night, but also, sleep trackers and sleep monitoring apps go a very long way to improving sleep quality, even if no extra steps are consciously taken to “score better”.
We’ve previously reviewed some of the most popular sleep apps; you can check out for yourself how they measured up:
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Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
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From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose C’s
We asked you for your (health-related) policy on sugar. The trends were as follows:
- About half of all respondents voted for “I try to limit sugar intake, but struggle because it’s in everything”
- About a quarter of all respondents voted for “Refined sugar is terrible; natural sugars (e.g. honey, agave) are fine”
- About a quarter of all respondents voted for “Sugar is sugar and sugar is bad; I avoid it entirely”
- One (1) respondent voted for “Sugar is an important source of energy, so I consume plenty”
Writer’s note: I always forget to vote in these, but I’d have voted for “I try to limit sugar intake, but struggle because it’s in everything”.
Sometimes I would like to make my own [whatever] to not have the sugar, but it takes so much more time, and often money too.
So while I make most things from scratch (and typically spend about an hour cooking each day), sometimes store-bought is the regretfully practical timesaver/moneysaver (especially when it comes to condiments).
So, where does the science stand?
There has, of course, been a lot of research into the health impact of sugar.
Unfortunately, a lot of it has been funded by sugar companies, which has not helped. Conversely, there are also studies funded by other institutions with other agendas to push, and some of them will seek to make sugar out to be worse than it is.
So for today’s mythbusting overview, we’ve done our best to quality-control studies for not having financial conflicts of interest. And of course, the usual considerations of favoring high quality studies where possible Large sample sizes, good method, human subjects, that sort of thing.
Sugar is sugar and sugar is bad: True or False?
False and True, respectively.
- Sucrose is sucrose, and is generally bad.
- Fructose is fructose, and is worse.
Both ultimately get converted into glycogen (if not used immediately for energy), but for fructose, this happens mostly* in the liver, which a) taxes it b) goes very unregulated by the pancreas, causing potentially dangerous blood sugar spikes.
This has several interesting effects:
- Because fructose doesn’t directly affect insulin levels, it doesn’t cause insulin insensitivity (yay)
- Because fructose doesn’t directly affect insulin levels, this leaves hyperglycemia untreated (oh dear)
- Because fructose is metabolized by the liver and converted to glycogen which is stored there, it’s one of the main contributors to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (at this point, we’re retracting our “yay”)
Read more: Fructose and sugar: a major mediator of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
*”Mostly” in the liver being about 80% in the liver. The remaining 20%ish is processed by the kidneys, where it contributes to kidney stones instead. So, still not fabulous.
Fructose is very bad, so we shouldn’t eat too much fruit: True or False?
False! Fruit is really not the bad guy here. Fruit is good for you!
Fruit does contain fructose yes, but not actually that much in the grand scheme of things, and moreover, fruit contains (unless you have done something unnatural to it) plenty of fiber, which mitigates the impact of the fructose.
- A medium-sized apple (one of the most sugary fruits there is) might contain around 11g of fructose
- A tablespoon of high-fructose corn syrup can have about 27g of fructose (plus about 3g glucose)
Read more about it: Effects of high-fructose (90%) corn syrup on plasma glucose, insulin, and C-peptide in non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and normal subjects
However! The fiber content (in fruit) mitigates the impact of the fructose almost entirely anyway.
And if you take fruits that are high in sugar and/but high in polyphenols, like berries, they now have a considerable net positive impact on glycemic health:
- Polyphenols and Glycemic Control
- Polyphenols and their effects on diabetes management: A review
- Dietary polyphenols as antidiabetic agents: Advances and opportunities
You may be wondering: what was that about “unless you have done something unnatural to it”?
That’s mostly about juicing. Juicing removes much (or all) of the fiber, and if you do that, you’re basically back to shooting fructose into your veins:
- Effect of Fruit Juice on Glucose Control and Insulin Sensitivity in Adults: A Meta-Analysis of 12 Randomized Controlled Trials
- Intake of Fruit, Vegetables, and Fruit Juices and Risk of Diabetes in Women
Natural sugars like honey, agave, and maple syrup, are healthier than refined sugars: True or False?
True… Sometimes, and sometimes marginally.
This is partly because of the glycemic index and glycemic load. The glycemic index scores tail off thus:
- table sugar = 65
- maple syrup = 54
- honey = 46
- agave syrup = 15
So, that’s a big difference there between agave syrup and maple syrup, for example… But it might not matter if you’re using a very small amount, which means it may have a high glycemic index but a low glycemic load.
Note, incidentally, that table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide, and is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
The other more marginal health benefits come from that fact that natural sugars are usually found in foods high in other nutrients. Maple syrup is very high in manganese, for example, and also a fair source of other minerals.
But… Because of its GI, you really don’t want to be relying on it for your nutrients.
Wait, why is sugar bad again?
We’ve been covering mostly the more “mythbusting” aspects of different forms of sugar, rather than the less controversial harms it does, but let’s give at least a cursory nod to the health risks of sugar overall:
- Obesity and associated metabolic risk
- Main contributor to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
- Increased risk of heart disease
- Insulin resistance and diabetes risk
- Cellular aging (shortened telomeres)
- 95% increased cancer risk
That last one, by the way, was a huge systematic review of 37 large longitudinal cohort studies. Results varied depending on what, specifically, was being examined (e.g. total sugar, fructose content, sugary beverages, etc), and gave up to 200% increased cancer risk in some studies on sugary beverages, but 95% increased risk is a respectable example figure to cite here, pertaining to added sugars in foods.
And finally…
The 56 Most Common Names for Sugar (Some Are Tricky)
How many did you know?
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