Eight-Hour Eating Window Plus Exercise Did Not Cut Liver Fat More Than Usual Care

That is the main finding of the TEMPUS trial, published in Nature Communications in 2026. It is a randomized controlled trial, the design best suited to testing whether an intervention causes a change. It enrolled 187 adults with obesity in Granada, Spain. About half were women.

Participants were split into four groups. One got usual care: education on the Mediterranean diet and physical activity. The others did 8-hour time-restricted eating, supervised exercise, or both. The main outcome was change in liver fat, measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) after 12 weeks.

Compared with usual care, liver fat changed by −0.4% with time-restricted eating, −0.8% with exercise and −1.1% with both. None of these differences was statistically distinguishable from usual care. The groups also did not differ from one another. The authors write that the findings do not support greater short-term liver fat reductions from these approaches.

The trial has limits worth knowing. The people who assessed the main outcome and the statisticians did not know who was in which group. The staff delivering the interventions did, which is hard to avoid in diet and exercise studies.

The press coverage, a University of Granada release carried by Medical Xpress, headlines fat loss and fitness. It reports that liver fat fell in all four groups, and that both eating-window groups lost about 2.2 kilograms (4.9 pounds) more weight than usual care. It also says the combined group lost more body fat than usual care and exercise alone, and that the two exercise groups improved cardiorespiratory fitness. Those figures come from the coverage. The coverage leads with results that were not the trial's main question.

The coverage also reports that, among people who had fatty liver at the start, about 30% of those combining the eating window and exercise no longer met the diagnostic criteria, versus 6.5% on usual care. It adds that men in the combined group had a larger liver fat drop than usual care, while women did not. Co-lead author Alba Camacho Cardeñosa cautioned that "for now, these analyses alone do not allow us to conclude that the intervention works differently depending on sex."

The most telling detail concerns durability. According to the coverage, one year after the program ended there were no differences between groups in liver fat change. The weight and body composition differences seen at 12 weeks were no longer detectable. The coverage did not say whether participants kept to their assigned routines, so the reason for the fade is unknown.

For you

For personal health, the realistic reading is modest. In this trial, an eight-hour window did not move the main liver measure beyond what education alone achieved. Any extra weight or fat loss, per the coverage, did not last. That suggests the timing of meals may matter less than whether a pattern can be sustained, though this trial did not test that directly. The researchers themselves say longer interventions and strategies to maintain benefits need study.

What to watch next

Longer trials, especially in people with high liver fat, that test ways to help benefits last.