If you are looking to lose weight without having to use expensive anti-obesity drugs or undergoing bariatric or other stomach-trimming surgeries, then why not a leaf out of Elon Musk’s fitness book?

Musk is a fan of intermittent fasting in which you eat only during a certain window of time set according to their goals.

Intermittent fasting 16:8 means you eat eight hours and fast for 16.

Unless there are diet restrictions, one can eight within 8 hours of time. But it will work well when a person is making smart choices of nutrient-rich food.

This way they can limit the number of calories by restricting eating time and can lose weight.

Can 16:8 help lose weight?

According to a small study conducted in 2018, people practised 16:8 fasting for three months and lost almost 3% of their weight and lowered their blood pressure without feeling hungry.

Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago, told Today.com that she has been studying fasting for 20 years.

Varady’s study published in June 2023, showed that time-restricted eating without calorie tracking was effective similar to if they are monitored.

During the study obese were asked to either eat only between noon and 8pm or eat whenever they wanted, but track calories and decrease the by 25% from normal consumption. They did this for six months.

Varady told NBC News that both groups generally maintained the weight loss after their diets ended and lost 5% of their body weight over the course of a year.

The authors from the systematic review of 27 studies said Intermittent fasting “shows promise” for the treatment of obesity.

But research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in 2020 found obese adults who ate most of their calories by 1pm for three months didn’t lose more weight than those who followed a more typical eating pattern, including eating a big meal after 5 pm, according to Today.com.

“The bottom line is that how many calories you take in is really much more important than when you eat and that when you eat probably doesn’t impact your weight,” Dr Nisa Maruthur, the lead author, and associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told Today.com.

And the results of a 2023 study on the timing of meals, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, “did not support the use of time‐restricted eating as a strategy for long‐term weight loss,” researchers wrote.

The timing of meals was less important than the amount of food a person ate, they noted.

Is 16:8 fasting good for health?

There are several benefits of intermittent fasting. As it can help prevent heart diseases, cancer and neurological disorders according to studies and trials, according to a review of research in humans and animals published in 2019 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“The idea is that if you eat all of your calories within a relatively fixed time window… it’s better because it allows your body to do this metabolic catch-up during a fasting state when you’re not eating,” Dr Susan Cheng, the director of public health research at the Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles, told Today.com.

“I would say the jury is still out, but there is a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that is going to be favourable for cardiometabolic health.”