A study suggests eating later in the day can directly impact our biological weight regulation in three key ways: through the number of calories that we burn; our hunger levels; and the way our bodies store fat.
With obesity now affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide, this is a valuable insight into how the risk of becoming obese could be lowered in a relatively simple way – just by eating our meals a few hours earlier.
Earlier studies had already identified a link between the timing of meals and weight gain, but here the researchers wanted to look at that link more closely, as well as teasing out the biological reasons behind it.
“We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk,” said neuroscientist Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in 2022 when the study was published.
Yeah, we’re actually both in complete agreement. I’m just getting shit in this thread too for saying a calorie is a calorie too :P. So, I feel like I’m going insane because of this dude who’s super mad and all of the downvotes for what seem like completely reasonable statements to me, and nobody is actually explaining where I’m wrong… I think weight loss is just a pretty emotionally charged topic.
In some sense I think there are two meanings of calorie to people. There’s the actual physical energy definition, and there’s the slightly more informal usage of “how much food I consumed” and while ultimately they’re both supposed to be measures of the same thing they’re not really the same because like… I dunno, if you chug a gallon of mineral oil or something and all of your food goes through you undigested (I don’t know if that would work, but it feels like it would haha), you’re not actually going to absorb those calories. This shouldn’t make a difference for what a calorie actually is, but I guess it changes what it means in practice for people? Like if a pancake and a pineapple have the same amount of calories when you burn them in a bomb calorimeter, but you only absorb 80% of the pineapple’s calories as opposed to 100% of the pancakes due to indigestible fibre or whatever, that calorie measurement isn’t actually useful to people. But fundamentally, in the physics sense of everything, if you burn a calorie you actually absorb… it’s gone and you don’t have anything left to store as fat to gain weight. What time you consume calories won’t change this (maybe it changes your metabolism or something and you ultimately burn fewer calories, but if you actually burn all of the calories you actually absorb… I don’t understand how you could gain fat. The carbon is gone).
Haha, same - yes, I think you are right - I think we come from the perspective that a calorie is what the definition says it is, which is an energy unit. And this makes the saying “a calorie is not a calorie” sound wrong. Yeah, seems like it’s an emotional trigger for some, which is understandable.
I don’t get why this is such a problem to point out that maybe they themselves use the word calorie in a different context than it was actually intended to be used. And this does not help the confusion surrounding the topic.
The problem, I think, is that a calorie is used to describe the energy content of something and not for anything else. It is useful for food since the inherent value of energy that we need to transform every day to survive can also be expressed in calories (and so can be almost anything), which makes it easy to eyeball how much energy we can “absorb/transform” from a given product. But this does not describe how healthy or nutritious or anything else the product is or how your body is going to deal with it; it just describes the energy content of the thing.
A calorie is a measurement of energy and nothing else.
And I am sure you are right; at the end of the day, you can boil it down to one number that’s either negative, 0, or positive, i.e., your calorie deficit. If it’s negative, you used more energy than you took in, so you will need to take that energy from somewhere, which will result in some form of burning of fat or other tissues to transform the stored energy into something we can use actively, which then means you will lose weight over time. Energy can’t be created, at least not to my limited knowledge, only transformed. Of course, given that your body works within the normal human norms.
Anyway, thanks for the nice interaction. 😄
I wish you all the best this year! Have a great life!