Fasting for six hours and eating your last meal at 2pm may help you lose weight as scientists find the radical routine suppresses the appetite

Author: Vanessa Chalmers

Eating your last meal for the day at 2pm may sound like torture - but it may help you lose weight.

Scientists found fasting with a six hour eating window starting at 8am can suppress the appetite and lower levels of hunger hormones. ​

Fasting diets have previously been thought to help people shed the pounds by way helping them burn more calories.

However, the study suggests restricting meal times helps people to simply eat less, and it may be due to eating in line with the natural body clock.

Although experts have long argued it's not what you eat, but when, researchers said this is the first time a study has shown how meal times affect metabolism.

The study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham tested Early Time-Restricted Feeding (eTRF), which is a type of fasting where dinner is eaten in the afternoon.

Researchers enrolled 11 men and women who needed to lose weight, aged between 20 to 45 with a BMI between 25 and 35.

Participants tried two different meal timing strategies, one where they ate three meals over 12 hours, between 8am and 8pm.

The other strategy saw them have only six hours to eat three meals, between 8am and 2pm.
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The same amounts and types of foods were consumed on both schedules which the participants carried out for four days in a row.

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