Restricting your eating between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. can help you lose weight and lower your blood pressure, international researchers have found.
The randomized clinical trial of 90 obese adults in the United States found that people who only ate during the restriction period lost about 5 pounds more weight, compared to those who ate for 12 hours or more.
They also lowered their blood pressure over a 14-week period.
“ETRE (early time-restricted feeding) intervention may therefore be an effective treatment for both obesity and hypertension,” the authors said.
“It also improves mood by decreasing fatigue and feelings of depression-weakness and increasing vigor, and those who can stick to eTRE lose more body fat and trunk fat.
“However, eTRE did not affect most fasting cardiometabolic risk factors in the primary intention-to-treat analysis.”
The trial took place between August 2018 and April 2020.
Participants were adults between the ages of 25 and 75 with obesity who received weight loss treatment through the University of Alabama Weight Loss Medicine Clinic at Birmingham Hospital. .
“Our data suggest that eTRE is feasible, as participants joined six days per week on average, and most participants joined at least five days per week,” the authors said.
“Despite the challenges of navigating evening social activities and work schedules, adherence to eTRE was similar to other TRE interventions…and satisfaction was similar between groups.
“Additionally, we found that eTRE was acceptable for many patients. Approximately 41% of completers in the eTRE+ER group planned to continue practicing eTRE after the study ended.”
However, the authors said larger trials are needed to confirm whether losing fat specifically is better.
“Future clinical trials will need to enroll much larger sample sizes – up to approximately 300 participants – to determine whether FI (intermittent fasting) affects body composition and cardiometabolic health,” the authors said.
“Future studies should determine whether the timing and length of the feeding window affects these outcomes, as well as who can adhere to eTRE versus who cannot, and who would rather benefit from other interventions on the diet. ‘Meal time.
“The eTRE intervention should be further tested as a low-cost, easy-to-implement approach to improving health and treating disease.”
The authors also noted that there were some limitations to their study.
“Our study has some limitations, including its modest duration, recruiting primarily females, and not reaching the planned sample size, in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” they said.
“Furthermore, we measured physical activity by self-report, not accelerometry, which may have limited our ability to detect differences in physical activity between groups.
“Finally, we measured cardiometabolic parameters only in the fasting state. Future research should investigate glycemic parameters in the postprandial state or over a 24-hour period.