The timing of your meals may have an impact on your ability to lose weight, or so is the conclusion of a building body of research that supports the practice of limiting meal times to designated points of the day. However, the actual benefits of following this form of dietary practice may not be as straightforward as you initially are led to believe.
The promise of this dietary plan is that by designating certain times of the day to meals, you will inherently lose weight as you give your body time away from food. In reality, this practice is likely to reduce how much you tend to eat during the day, taking into account the fact that you are likely to grow full as you are eating your daily meals, and the inability to snack during non-meal times will lead to weight loss success.
The Timing Problem
The issue with this approach to weight loss is that for any weight loss program to be truly successful, the changes that you make to your diet must be sustainable and intrinsically controlled. If the only thing that is preventing you from indulging in a snack is the time of day, then eventually, the clock will turn and you will still overeat, or indulge in something unhealthy.
What’s more, this approach to losing weight doesn’t take into account hunger—which is hands down the largest obstacle that prevents a majority of dieters from successfully losing weight. While this dietary plan encourages you to cut off your eating habits for designated points of the day, that doesn’t provide a solution for any hunger that you may experience during those non-meal times.
Weight loss surgery, on the other hand, reduces hunger by physically reducing the capacity of the stomach, making you feel full with less food, and helping you to feel full for longer periods of time in between meals.
There are several good ideas that can come out of reducing how much time you spend eating throughout the day, even after weight loss surgery. Cutting out after dinner snacking, for example, or limiting when you eat to only planned meals rather than having spontaneous snacks can make a huge difference in your day.
Before you make any changes to your dietary plan, talk with your weight loss surgeon. It is important to always be judicious and to put time and planning into any dietary changes you are interested in putting your body through.