This is the best time to eat dinner if you want to lose weight
Although what we eat is very important, the timing of our meals is vital, as MNN reports.
Studies have shown that when consuming calories at night, the body will most likely store them as fat instead of burning them as energy. “For years, we said a calorie is a calorie no matter when you consume it,” dietitian Joy Dubost, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told the Washington Post. “I don’t know if we can say that anymore, based on the emerging research. The timing of a meal may potentially have an impact.”
According to registered dietitian Angel Planells there’s no such thing as the “best” time to eat dinner. “Breakfast sets you up for success. If you don’t eat breakfast, by lunchtime you’re starving, and by dinner any healthy eating plans are out the window,” he explains.
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If certain circumstances make it nearly impossible for you to have dinner early, you should make smart food choices. “Avoid having something too rich or heavy,” Planells says. “Your body is going to be trying to process it and you won’t be able to go to sleep.”
“If we eat early and don’t get enough protein or fibre, the potential downside is we’re more likely to get a late-night snack, and choose more decadent foods like cookies, cake or other snacks,” Planells explained.
If you’re planning on losing weight, you have two options: either eat dinner very early or make a late lunch the last meal of your day. A recent study found that overweight people who ate their last meal by mid-afternoon managed to reduce daily hunger swings and increased fat burning at night.
“Eating only during a much smaller window of time than people are typically used to may help with weight loss, specifically by increasing our body’s ability to burn fat and protein,” said Courtney Peterson, Ph.D., who led the study at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “We found that eating between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. followed by an 18-hour daily fast burned more fat and kept appetite levels more even throughout the day, in comparison to eating between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. which is average for Americans.”
Eating early assures an optimal blood sugar control.”Starting around 3 p.m., blood sugar control is substantially worse than it is in the morning, meaning that if you ate the same meal at 3 p.m. as you did for breakfast, your blood sugar levels would rise higher, despite the fact that you act the same amount of food,” Peterson explained.
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