Could your weight be down to the time that you're eating?
New research has indicated that it's not only what you eat but what time you're eating that could determine the amount of weight you lose.
The new study found that dieters who ate early lunches tended to lose more weight than those who ate their midday meal later on in the afternoon.
"We should now seriously start to consider the timing of food - not just what we eat, but also when we eat," said study co-author Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
His team's research included 420 people attending nutrition clinics in southeast Spain. Early eaters lost an average of 22 pounds - just over 11 percent of their starting weight - and late eaters dropped 17 pounds, or nine percent of their initial weight.
Study participants were on a Mediterranean diet, in which about 40 percent of each day's calories are consumed at lunch. About half of people said they ate lunch before 3:00 p.m. and half after.
Dr. Yunsheng Ma, a nutrition researcher from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, told Rueters Health people who eat later may have extra food in their stomach when they go to sleep - which could mean more of it isn't burned and ends up being stored as fat.
"One of the other aspects to this is, what we know is glucose tolerance for example - how well you can deal with sugar in your food - your body is better able to cope with that in the morning than in the evening," Scheer told Reuters Health.
Tagged in Healthy eating