A new study confirms that when the biggest meal of the day is eaten doesn’t affect calories burned or weight loss, but it does affect how you feel about your appetite.
As the old saying goes, “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper”. Many nutritionists believe that consuming most of your daily calories in the morning optimizes weight loss, burning calories more efficiently and quickly.
But according to a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism, whether a person eats their biggest meal first or last day does not affect how their body metabolizes calories. However, people who ate their biggest meal in the morning reported feeling less hungry later in the day, which could promote easier weight loss in the real world.
Eating in the morning makes people feel less hungry, which makes weight loss easier
The myth that breakfast calories are metabolized better was largely fueled by the idea of ​​the circadian rhythm. Since humans are diurnal animals, it would be logical to expect most food to be consumed earlier in the day. That’s why the researchers decided to take a closer look at how the time of day interacts with metabolism.
For the study, researchers recruited healthy overweight or obese individuals to monitor their diets and measure their metabolisms over a period of time; 16 men and 14 women completed the study. Each participant was randomly assigned to either a morning loaded diet or an evening loaded diet for four weeks. The diets were isocaloric, with a balance of 30% protein, 35% carbohydrate and 35% fat.
After a one-week washout period in which calories were balanced throughout the day, each participant switched to the opposite diet for four weeks. In this way, each participant acted as their own study control.
Throughout the study, subjects’ total daily energy expenditure was measured using the doubly labeled water method, an isotope-based technique that analyzes the difference between the rates of hydrogen and oxygen replacement in body water as a function of carbon dioxide production. carbon. The primary outcome of the study was energy balance as measured by body weight. Overall, the researchers found that energy expenditure and total weight loss were the same for the morning and evening load diets. Subjects lost an average of just over 3 kg during each of the four-week periods.
However, although the energy consumed was the same, the results were different in subjective appetite control, glycemic control and body composition. Participants reported that their appetite was better controlled on days when they ate more breakfast and felt full for the rest of the day. This can be quite useful in the real world scenario where people are not having their food tracked by a researcher and making decisions about what to eat based on hunger.
This type of experiment can be applied to the study of intermittent fasting (also called time-restricted eating) to help determine the best time of day for people on this type of diet to consume their calories.
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