Research

Hormonal

Increasing the regularity of meal times (reducing mealtime variability) leads to significant weight loss without requiring calorie restriction or changes in macronutrient composition.

Use a smartphone app to track your meals for two weeks to identify your most frequent eating times. Then, create a personalized schedule that restricts your meals to those specific times for six weeks. Do not worry about changing what or how much you eat; focus only on making your meal times consistent and regular. This approach led to an average weight loss of 2.6 kg in the study without calorie counting.

ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
Our results show that the more regular the meals of participants of the experimental group became, the more weight/BMI they lost, averaging 2.62 kg (0.87 kg/m²); p < 0.0001... Strikingly, weight loss was not related to changes in self-reported calories, food composition, and other food-related factors.
Isabell Wilming et al. · 2024

Why this rating

Randomized controlled trial with a reasonable sample size (n=100 completers), but it is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, and relies on self-reported dietary data.

Source

Time to Eat - A Personalized Circadian Eating Schedule Leads to Weight Loss Without Calorie Restriction: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Isabell Wilming et al. · 2024

DOI 10.7554/elife.96837.1

preprint · n=148
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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