Research

Energy balance

Energy-restricted diets (ERD) are superior to Time-Restricted Eating (TRE) for improving diet quality and reducing body fat percentage in overweight females, despite both interventions yielding similar weight loss.

If your primary goal is to lose body fat and improve your diet quality, a structured energy-restricted diet is more effective than time-restricted eating. Calculate your maintenance calories, subtract 500, and follow a balanced macronutrient distribution. This approach will yield better body composition results than simply restricting your eating window without counting calories.

ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
Energy-restricted diet yielded better results in weight loss and improvement of body composition and diet quality compared to TRE. Also, a decrease in total cholesterol level was found in the ERD group.
Özge Mengi Çelik et al. · BMC Nutrition · 2023

Why this rating

Pilot study with small sample size (n=23, n=13 in ERD group) and short duration (8 weeks).

Source

Time-restricted eating (16/8) and energy-restricted diet: effects on diet quality, body composition and biochemical parameters in healthy overweight females

Özge Mengi Çelik et al. · BMC Nutrition · 2023

DOI 10.1186/s40795-023-00753-6

rct · n=23Cited 20×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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