Thread: Lose weight faster by eating carbs in the evening only

Lose weight faster by eating carbs in the evening only

If you are slimming you'll lose weight quicker if you confine your carb intake [like pasta, rice, bread, potatoes and fruit] to the evenings. Nutritionists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered this when they put about sixty overweight policemen and women on a six-month diet.

Intermittent fasting is popular the sports world, not least because of the good results that trainers and athletes have had with this. Take a look at the website of bodybuilder, trainer, consultant and writer Martin Berkhan [leangains.com]. The essence of intermittent fasting is that, instead of trying to divide up the different classes of food you eat, as many dieticians recommend, you concentrate your food intake so that you have relatively long periods of not eating.

There are several ways of doing intermittent fasting. Berkhan advises that you only eat during an eight-hour period of the day, and that you plan your workouts in the first part of that eight-hour period. Your biggest meal, which is also the one containing the most carbs, you plan for after your training session.

That this approach may be effective is confirmed by the Israeli study, which will soon be published in Obesity. In the study, test subjects with a BMI of over 30 followed a diet that contained 1300-1500 calories per day. The energy was derived for 20 percent from proteins, 30 percent from fat and 50 percent from carbohydrates.

The control group divided their carb intake over the day; the experimental group ate as much of their carbs as possible at the evening meal. The experimental group ate a breakfast of nuts and low-fat yogurt or cream cheese, and lunch consisted of meat with vegetables.

Concentrating the carbohydrates in the evening meal resulted in a higher weight loss, as the table below shows. The control group lost five kg fat; the experimental group lost seven kg.

interesting