Is Time-Restricted Eating the Best Way to Keep Off Weight Lost?
By Kevin Kolodziejski
Fellow American cyclists, whether you’re currently carb depleted or not, you need to chew on this. There are people in this world who would do anything to be you.
No, I’m not currently bonking, nor did I hit the wall a day or two ago. I’m just writing what’s as easy to forget as the first PowerBars were hard to swallow.
That for many people, you are as worthy of emulation as Tadej Pogačar, but not because you just won your fifth Tour de France or can average 300 watts on a five-hour Zone 2 ride. But simply because however well or however powerfully you do it, you do your pedaling in the United States.
The reason so many people envy you is easy to digest. All things considered (and let’s be clear here, I do mean all things considered) we’ve got a pretty sweet thing going in the US of A, arguably the sweetest thing in the world. But dietarily speaking, it’s too sweet, too fatty, and too much of a thing. Live here long enough, eat the way we eat here long enough, and it tends to show up on the scale. That holds for anybody, but researchers can measure it especially clearly in immigrants, because the before-and-after is so stark. A study just released last week in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine shows just that.
Researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data from more than 22,000 foreign-born adults in the 2019 and 2021–2024 National Health Interview Survey and found those who had lived in the United States for 15 years or more had roughly twice the risk of obesity compared with those who had been in the country for less than five years.
Irony and Sadness in the Land of Plenty
You have to be able to see the irony and sadness in that. In a matter of 15 years, “Land of Plenty” stops being a statement about economic prosperity and becomes a statement about health. And whether you were born here or not, the Land of Plenty has plenty of ways of making you fat.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways of undoing that, one being cycling, another being eating properly. What’s a bit unfortunate about the second, though, is that, unlike cycling, just doing any form of it doesn’t get the job done. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet, which means you need to do what I’ve written time and time again in my weekly health and fitness newspaper column. That in order to get and stay healthy, you need to, albeit intelligently, experiment, experiment, experiment.
With that in mind, it’s good to keep in mind a study published online on June 2 by Clinical Nutrition. It suggests that if you need to lose weight and keep it off, it just may be worth your while to experiment with time-restricted eating.
The Time-Restricted Eating Study
Researchers from three universities in Granada, Spain recruited 99 overweight or obese individuals. The group was a nearly equal mix of males and females whose average age was 49. First, the researchers educated the 99 on the ins and outs of the Mediterranean Diet and the benefits of regularly engaging in exercise. Next, they instructed them to follow one of four eating patterns for 12 weeks.
One quarter only ate within an 8-hour window that started before 10 a.m., another quarter only ate within an 8-hour window that started after 1 p.m., the third chose when they wanted their 8-hour eating window to begin, and the fourth served as the control group by continuing to eat at their usual times. At the study’s conclusion, the average weight loss for those who did any form of time-restricted eating was 5 percent. That’s noteworthy for prior studies have shown that decrease is just enough weight loss in overweight and obese individuals to bring about better health.
Blood pressure and triglycerides decrease. Insulin sensitivity and high-density lipoproteins (the “good” cholesterol) increase. Joint pain and the risk of many cancers lessen.
What’s also noteworthy is that the researchers asked the participants to meet with them one year after the study’s conclusion, yet didn’t ask them to eat in any specific way until then. At that meeting, though, the researchers did ask if they had continued to eat as they had in the study.
The Year-After Follow-Up
The researchers discovered that those who had continued to eat as they had in the study and had been assigned a specific time-eating window had maintained “significantly greater body weight loss” when compared with the control group. Even so, that still meant these participants had regained half of the weight they lost during the 12-week study. But if you think that makes the study a failure, its authors will ask you to think again.
They see the maintenance of 50 percent of weight lost 12 months after a diet as “clinically meaningful and promising” since “even modest weight reductions have been associated with benefits in cardiovascular risk factors.”
Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.
A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.
