Health magazines are full of ways to change your eating habits to help you lose weight. One of the big suggestions is to not eat at night. The rationale seems to be that if you eat later in the evening or before you go to bed, you won’t have time to burn off those calories before you go to sleep. Or, perhaps, your metabolism slows down in the evening.
A Swedish study compared eighty-three obese women to ninety-four non-obese women, and found that the obese women ate more meals, and more of their meals were eaten in the afternoon, evening or night. But just because obesity and an increased number of meals at night may be tied together somehow, one does not necessarily cause the other. What it all comes down to is this: people gain weight when they ingest more calories than they burn. The key problem in this study was that these obese women were eating more meals (and more calories) – the issue wasn’t the time of day that they ate.
In another study, Swedish men didn’t show any evidence of weight gain when they ate at night. In a study of eighty-six obese men and sixty-one average weight men, there were no differences in the timing of when they ate. Another study of sixteen obese subjects investigated whether the timing of when they ate would alter the circadian pattern of energy expenditure (the body’s normal pattern of when it burns more calories or less calories). The timing of meals did not change the circadian rhythm of when their energy was used up. In a large study of over 2,500 patients of all weights, the time of day that they ate their meals had nothing to do with whether or not they gained weight.
When all is said and done, eating more than three meals per day has been shown to play a role in obesity. Additionally, some studies have connected skipping breakfast with weight gain. Not only is eating breakfast every day associated with maintaining a healthy body weight, but records of calorie intake also suggest that those who eat breakfast each day do a better job of evenly distributing how much they eat throughout the rest of the day. When you eat three regular meals, you are less likely to overeat at any one particular meal.
The key to weight loss or to maintaining a healthy weight is very simple, and yet so hard for most of us to execute: eat fewer calories than your body burns. Trust us. As long as you do that, it doesn’t matter what time of day you eat – you’ll lose weight.