This new research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is one of the most intense and rigorous studies that examined time-restricted eating. Time-restricted eating has people not eating for 16 hours in a day and only consuming food during an 8-hour time window. Normally this is from 12 noon till 8 at night. This diet approach has been followed by celebrities and people seeing weight loss diets.
This new JAMA study revealed that those overweight adults who fast for 16 hours daily, eating all their meals between noon and 8 p.m., shockingly got almost no benefit from it. The participants were studied over a three-month time period. The results after 12 weeks were a meager weight loss of only 2 to 3 pounds. The study revealed that the weight loss was not fat but instead muscle mass. That is the last thing you want to have to happen on a diet.
Those in the fasting group lost more muscle mass than the other participants in the study who were just on a calorie-lowering diet. The problem with losing lean muscle is that results in slowing down metabolism and this means when you come off the diet you gain all the weight back you lost.
The lead researcher and author of the study was Dr. Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Weiss had been practicing time-restricted eating since 2014. He only ate for 8 hours per day. After he analyzed the data and saw the results of his study, he stopped his daily fasts and began eating breakfast again.
“My bias was that this works and I’m doing it myself, and so I was shocked by the results,” he said.
In our Book Why Diets are Failing Us we outlined why traditional diet approaches like calories in and calories out and intermittent fasting offer very little in the way of weight loss and they also are harmful because they result in the loss of lean muscle.
To discover a new breakthrough in weight loss that is backed by two new peer-reviewed studies please click on the link below.
