Health News Update: Trying to Lose Weight?
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Health News Update: Trying to Lose Weight? 8.10.26
Hello everybody: There is a strong body of evidence that when we eat and how much we eat at certain times has a powerful metabolic effect on weight management, especially if it is combined with resistance training:
“In this eight-week study, early time-restricted eating (eTRE: 8:00 AM–2:00 PM) produced more pronounced weight loss than that with delayed TRE (dTRE: 12:00 PM–6:00 PM) or a control schedule (8:00 AM–8:00 PM) among young women performing resistance training without compromising their muscle thickness or endurance. These findings suggest that aligning meal timing with earlier hours may enhance weight management while preserving muscular adaptations. Further research with larger, more diverse samples and detailed dietary tracking is needed to confirm these results and clarify the underlying hormonal and circadian mechanisms.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11945196/ early time restricted eating helps lose weight
Bottom Line: The key takeaways are this:
· Time restricted eating is meant to align our food intake with our own circadian rhythms. Historically, our ancestors mostly ate twice a day and had periods of fasting due to the somewhat unpredictability of food availability. The notion of 3 meals per day is a relatively new idea (about 100 years only) which does not appear to be very health promoting.
· For most of us, eTRF means starting with some type of breakfast that is based in a whole-foods, predominantly plant-based pattern and followed by a lunch before 2 pm whereby you consume 80% of your total daily caloric load within that starting time frame. You can make breakfast or lunch your main meal, but not both. Your dinner constitutes 20% or less of your total daily caloric intake and should be consumed within 10 hours after your breakfast. This pattern is the one that most commonly aligns with most of our circadian clocks. Example: breakfast by 8 am, lunch before 2 pm and dinner by 6 pm.
· Some people seem to do equally well with dTRF (delayed or late Time Restricted Feeding) when it comes to weight loss. Typically, breakfast is skipped and all food is consumed between 11 am and 7 pm. Take care to stop all calories at least 3 to 4 hours before bed so as not to interfere with autophagy (when we burn fat and clean out our brain and body overnight…any calories after dinner stop the clean out!)
· Multiple studies assess various parameters: weight loss, insulin management, inflammation markers, immune markers, cognition, aging markers…and there are not adequate long-term trials to show us which is the best method as both early and late TRF have benefits. However, on the whole, the early TRF shows some superiority in most all categories. Right now, you can find out by starting with eTRF and see how it goes, or late or dTRF…find out which one works for you by picking one and sticking with it for several months. I say, start with eTRF.
· Aligning your food intake with your natural circadian rhythms has many papers showing benefit. Consuming all of your daily calories within a 10-hour window and eating an unprocessed, whole foods, predominantly plant-based meal plan is a good place to start. Staying hydrated helps too.
· If you are eating an eTRF within a 10-hour window and not losing weight (assuming you might need to), then reduce your food intake at each meal…track your weight for several weeks…if not losing weight, check the quality of food. If not losing weight, you might want to get an app (such as Cronometer or MyFitnessPal) and a food scale to accurately measure and figure out your actual caloric load. Most of us greatly underestimate how much we eat, so this can be super valuable.
· If not losing weight, examine your food quality…usually eating more and varied plants and avoiding alcohol, sugar, refined carbs, no food at night and no drive-through is a good place to start.
· If you need more guidance, here is a really cool site that will help you figure it out and if you sign up the fees are very low (I am currently not associated with them):
https://www.eatthismuch.com/calculator




