If You Want To Lose Weight, Change The Time You Eat Your Evening Meal, Doctors Advise

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Eating earlier in the evening could be the key to losing weight, experts have suggested.

Even changing meal times by as little as an hour can have a huge impact on levels of body fat, cholesterol and blood sugar, University of Surrey tests showed. The research - carried out for the BBC show Trust Me I’m A Doctor - used 16 volunteers - half of whom ate their evening meal 90 minutes earlier and their breakfast 90 minutes later.

Dr Jonathan Johnston of the University of Surrey believes that the impact on the body is to do with the time spent ‘fasting’ - i.e not consuming food. Dr Johnston also found that if his volunteers ate a heavy meal late in the evening, it takes far longer for the body’s blood sugar levels to return to normal.

Dr Johnston said: ‘Your body isn’t expecting you to be eating at that time of the day.

‘It is expecting you to be fasting and so what you find is that during that time when people eat a meal the spike of things like sugar and fat… is higher if you eat at night and that spike takes a bit longer to get back down to background level.

‘So if you eat most of your calories certainly during the early part of the day, and fewer calories in the late afternoon and the evening that will actually help your metabolism and potentially help you to lose weight and maintain weight loss as well.’