As long as you’re in a calorie deficit you lose the same amount of weight right? No matter if you eat the calories through out the day or in one hour for example?
Jason Fung has a video about this.
In a nutshell, everytime you eat you trigger an insulin response in your body that’s not conducive to losing weight. On the other hand, when you go more than 10-12 hours without eating your body goes through other metabolic processes the are more conducive to losing weight. By confining eating to specific windows of time, whether that window be 8 hours, 4 hours, one hour a day etc the body is given a chance to turn to the other fuel source, namely your fat, to burn once it has run out of the easier to use carbs that are processed by insulin. When insulin is present, the hormone the body uses to burn fat will not be present, sort of like how a room can’t be pitch black if someone turns even a small light on. So it is harder to lose weight when eating multiple small meals throughout the day than confining eating to a specific time window.
No, our metabolism can shift up or down in response to our behaviour. Hormone signalling relating to a fast also has an effect. Longer fasts (like over 24h) can slow down your metabolism.
There’s also the psychological aspect which will have an impact on our eating behaviour. Eating low calorie all the time would make some people feel hungry all the time and unsatisfied and potentially lead to bingeing behaviour. Limiting it to a window might make this less likely.
Metabolism can be changed by human behavior, but studies have shown that there is not a huge weight loss increase doing intermittent fasting as compared to other diets. So yeah, it doesn’t really matter when you eat