What tool of measurement you should always have on hand when you want to lose weight? If the first thing that came to mind is the scale, you’re wrong. We talk about the watch. Because you decide what time you eat is more important than ride weighing out ingredients and adding calories. Is more, just change the time of breakfast and dinner for wreak havoc in your body fat stores.

To demonstrate this, Jonathan Johnston and his colleagues of the University of Surrey (Uk) designed a pilot study with nine older adults with a stable body weight and without substantial medical problems. The only guideline dietary that I was given was to delay breakfast an hour and a half, and advance the hour of dinner, another 90 minutes for more than two months. A measure which in the jargon is known as a restriction feeding schedule (TRF) (for its acronym in English). Otherwise, they could eat whatever they wanted.

DINE EARLY

“most of The studies about the effects of the TRF are limited to short periods, or to spontaneous changes in the intake, such as those carried out during the Ramadan -the fasting month of the muslims -” explain the researchers in the Journal of Nutrictional Science. “Our study is extended for 10 weeks, to find out if reduce the window of food intake causes changes in physiological weight loss in the long term,” he added.

And the answer is a resounding yes. In comparison with control subjects who ate the same thing without time constraints, the individuals subjected to TRF lost weight, reduced fat and reduced caloric intake. With a significant side-effect: it stopped the feet to obesity, diabetes and other metabolic problems arising from excess body fat. The news is not a big surprise. Long before the introduction of the discipline known as crononutrición, the Spanish proverb warned: it is better to a No-dinner, that a hundred Avi-dinners, and also early Dinner, and live healthy. Only that until now had not quantified how much exactly it was desirable to bring forward the last meal of the day in human.

On the effects of restricting food intake to certain hours of the day there are also some interesting studies in mice. Without going any further, another recent experiment carried out at Institute of Biological Studies Salk reveals that, consuming a diet rich in fat, but only in a window of 10 hours per day (and fasting the remaining 14), the rodents not only avoid obesity and take good care of the line. In addition, your liver is kept healthy, sorteaban diabetes, kept in check the cholesterol and inflammation levels in your body fell dramatically.

To make matters worse, in other previous trials, the same researchers had already found that by reducing to nine hours to the time of food intake, the muscle mass turned out to be more lean, and increased their resistance to aerobic exercise, doubling their ability to run. On the contrary, the same diet without time restrictions deteriorated the health of the animals and filled their furry bodies lorzas.

The researchers at the Salk Institute driving window of 14:10 (14 hours fasting, 10 hours of intake) and 15:9. But the scientists shuffled other combinations. For example, a diet of 16:8 (16 hours fasting and 8 to eat freely, similar to that of the month of Ramadan) reduces cardiovascular problems and blood pressure in both sexes, as well as the incidence of breast cancer in females. With less cancer and less heart disease, life expectancy is lengthened.

TISSUE REPAIR

From the scientific point of view has a lot of sense. Eat interferes in the regulation of the circadian clock and the expression of many genes. Without moments of strict fasting, we do not allow the metabolism to be regulated properly. Among other things, because eating at all hours does not activate the enzyme complex is AMPK, regulates energy balance and caloric intake, as well as to set in motion the repair of tissues. What is more, the AMPK maintains the heart health and puts you tripped the cancer, hindering the progress of the tumors. More reasons to leave it working.

Faced with such evidence, can we say that the diet TRF has come to stay? It is not so clear. When Jonathan Johnston and his colleagues asked the participants if they would be able to maintain the diet at 10 weeks of life, the majority replied that for her part there was no problem, but that it was absolutely “incompatible with family and social life”.

“we Should try to design another plan more flexible that everyone could adopt,” says Johnston. That, or change the dietary guidelines of a society as a whole.

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