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The great big meal-timing myth...

One of the more common recommendations in most diets is to eat your largest meal of the day in the morning, and avoid eating after a certain time of day. The idea is that reducing your calorie intake as the day progresses makes weight loss faster and easier.

Your body responds differently to a meal consumed in the morning than it does to the same meal eaten in the afternoon or evening. If you were to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning, for example, your blood sugar and insulin levels would be lower than if you ate the same meal later in the day [4].

Assuming that you're sleeping during the night and awake during the day (rather than working shifts or doing a lot of traveling across time zones), the ability of your body to deal with sugar starts to change around 2.00pm. The effect appears to be greater in women than in men.

The term "afternoon diabetes" was coined to describe this variation in blood sugar levels. That's because of the increased risk for a false-positive diagnosis of diabetes in the afternoon, compared with the morning.

Blood sugar and insulin levels aren't the only hormones affected. Eating a meal earlier in the day, for instance, helps to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol . But the same meal doesn't have the same effect from mid-afternoon onwards [8].

These are just a few examples of the way circadian rhythms affect the way your body responds to food. But, how much does all of this really matter? Assuming that your calorie intake is set at an appropriate level, does eating less at night really make much of a difference to your rate of weight loss?

The link between late-night eating and weight loss appears to come from research published...

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