The best time to eat your biggest meal of the day when trying to lose weight

A health expert has revealed the best time to eat your biggest meal of the day if you're trying to lose weight.

Dr. Michael Mosley believes that people should follow the old saying to "eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper".

The thinking behind this is that you'll burn more calories and improve your metabolic health, keeping your blood sugar and cholesterol levels in a healthy range.

By eating this way, you tune in to the body's natural daily rhythms, which are largely driven by our internal body clocks.

Read too Avoid five bad morning habits to have a flat stomach

Basically, people need the first meal to help fuel you through the morning, and you don't want to fill your stomach at night while your body is getting ready for sleep.

However, a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism made the surprising discovery that when you eat doesn't seem to make much of a difference in how many calories you burn or how well your body processes the sugars and fats in the meal you just ate.

In the trial, researchers at the University of Aberdeen recruited 30 healthy or overweight men and women and put them on a diet where they would spend four weeks eating most of their calories in the morning or evening, and then switch to .

The meals they ate were high in protein and relatively low in carbohydrates – 30 percent of their calories came from protein, 35 percent from carbohydrates, and 35 percent from fat.

Read too According to the study, certain breakfast products violate the legal limits of pesticides

Being on a controlled high-protein diet, the volunteers lost a good deal of weight – around half a stone on average – partly because eating more protein helps keep you fuller longer by reducing levels of the hunger hormone, ghrelin.

But they lost just as much, just as quickly, whether they ate a big breakfast or a big dinner, and there was no difference when it came to the effect on blood sugar levels.

The only difference was that when they ate a big breakfast, they felt less hungry during the day than when they ate a big dinner.

Dr. Mosley told the Daily Mail that he was "really surprised" by the findings because some previous studies had found that when you eat can make a big difference. /Telegraph/