Just Six

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Anchor lead: Does limiting your eating to just six hours a day result in weight loss? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Confining food consumption to just six hours a day will help you lose weight and keep it under control, advocates say. Yet a study by Nisa Maruthur and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, which provided food to participants and allowed one group to eat as they usually did, while the other ate earlier in the day and over fewer total hours, did not demonstrate a difference between the two groups.

Maruthur: Our study shows that its probably still about calories in calories out. So if restricting your window helps you to restrict that that’s probably good. And then the other thing we’ve known about dietary patterns and trying to improve lifestyles is that you have to do something that works for you. And so if eating between twelve and six is not going to make your miserable and it works for you then that’s the other thing that’s really important. That’s what we’ve seen with all the studies of different dietary patterns is that any dietary pattern can be healthy; it has to be one you can follow.  :27

Maruther notes that being mindful of other personal habits such as sleep and  and integrating them with eating behaviors may also be important. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.