Dr Michael Mosley has been sharing nutrition and diet tips with the UK since the 1980s and has explained the one easy trick you can adopt to lose weight that doesn't involve reducing the amount of calories that you eat.
Mosley is the brainchild behind the 5:2 diet and most recently the Fast 800 diet. Journalist Lydia Stephens tried the Fast 800 diet for a week and couldn't believe the results. In an article on the Fast 800 website, Dr Mosley said it was a "diet myth" that it is better to eat several small meals a day, rather than a couple of large ones.
Read more: The one food Dr Michael Mosley says could help reduce your waistline
He said: "A common belief is that if you spread out your food into lots of small meals this will increase your metabolic rate, keep you less hungry and help you lose weight. Well, in a recent study, researchers at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague decided to test this idea by feeding two groups meals with the same number of calories but taken as either two or six meals a day.
"Each group ate around 1,700 calories a day. Despite eating the same number of calories the 'two meal a day' group lost, on average, 1.4kg more than the snackers and about 1.5 inches more from around their waists. They also felt more satisfied and less hungry than those eating little and often."
The study looked at 54 people with type 2 diabetes, both men and women age 30-70. The diet in both groups, whether they were following the two meals a day, or six meals a day, had the same macronutrients. While both groups lost weight on the reduced calorie intake, those who only ate breakfast and lunch, lost more than those who ate six smaller meals in the day.
One reason behind this could be the reduced eating window that those who had two meals a day followed. Time restricted eating has grown in popularity in recent years.
According to Johns Hopkins Neuroscientist, Mark Mattson, when the body has gone a few hours without food, it exhausts its sugar stores and starts burning fat instead. He said: “If someone is eating three meals a day, plus snacks, and they’re not exercising, then every time they eat, they’re running on those calories and not burning their fat stores.”
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