It is a sign of the times: Lots of diets and lifestyle changes come at us at dizzying speed as the new year begins.

Join a gym? Check.

Sign up for a meal delivery service? You bet.

Join a popular diet/attend a meeting/hire a nutritionist? Yes, sir.

What a lot of people are talking about now is intermittent fasting. It’s also called time-restricted feeding (TRF) and has been shown to provide potential benefits for cardiometabolic health including improving body composition, reducing inflammation, and improving blood lipids.

What Dr. Matthew McAllister, assistant professor, Department of Health and Human Performance, Texas State University, has learned from intermittent energy restriction (IER) research is that a set amount of time fasting and a set amount of time eating is improving heart health and reducing factors such as diabetes.

“What we are doing is TRF. It is a way to use fasting each day to promote various aspects of cardio-metabolic health,” McAllister says. Subjects are instructed to consume calories in one 8-hour period—for example between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. or between 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. For 16 hours of the day there is no eating or drinking—aside from water—just activity or sleeping.

McAllister says that subjects are not reducing calories, just adjusting the time in which they eat. “The reason I wanted to do this study...my initial thought was that if you are going to restrict the time, you would eat less [sic] calories. And the reduction of daily calories would cause weight loss and other health benefits. But these benefits are found with no change in caloric intake—things like loss in body fat, reduced blood pressure, reduced inflammation.”

Graduate student Lilliana Renteria explains that the research studied two groups, consisting of 22 healthy, active men. One group ate the same amount of calories that they normally eat, and the other group was allowed to eat as many calories as they wanted. Both groups benefitted equally from the diet.

“We do have evidence of reduced blood pressure, reduced body weight, and improved blood cholesterol,” McAllister says. The evidence also indicates that subjects could benefit with alternate days of fasting during a week. McAllister says they plan to bring the study to populations that have greater health risks, such as firefighters, who have the highest risk of heart disease. “They have disrupted sleep and other occupational stressors that increase risk for heart disease. They have periods when they eat at random times.”

Article edited for content and clarity.