A fashionable time-restricted diet, combined with high-intensity exercise, could help women lose twice as much weight.

Equally trendy is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), where busy people exercise in short bursts.

Time-restricted eating (TRE), where people have a short 'window' for meals, eating breakfast late and dinner early, is popular among celebrities like Jennifer Aniston (pictured arriving at a premiere for the Murder Mystery film in Los Angeles, June 2019).

The rest of the women — a control group of 33 — carried on with their usual diet and physical activity for seven weeks.

Compared to the control group, people on the time-restricted eating regime lost 4.6 pounds (2.1kg) in body weight.

But those doing both together lost about twice as much, shedding almost eight pounds (3.6kg) on average compared to the control group.

Equally trendy is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), where busy people exercise in short bursts.

Intermittent fasting diets fall generally into two categories - time-restricted feeding, which narrows eating times to 6-8 hours per day, also known as the 16:8 diet, and 5:2 intermittent fasting.

The study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, asked people doing time-restricted eating to consume all meals and snacks within a 10-hour daily window.

Indeed, people who did the time-restricted diet and high-intensity exercise had better long-term blood sugar control compared to the control group, which may help to prevent type 2 diabetes.

Women on the time-restricted diet lost 3.5 pounds (1.6kg) of fat from their body, compared to the control group.

However those on both the diet and the exercise programme lost almost twice as much fat, shedding almost seven pounds (3.1kg) compared to the control group.

Those doing this HIIT alongside the time-restricted diet had a significant reduction in dangerous fat wrapped around their organs, which is linked to a higher risk of heart disease and stroke, compared to the control group

No difference was found in cholesterol levels or blood pressure, among those doing HIIT and TRE, but the researchers say there could be stronger effects if people did the diet and exercise for longer than seven weeks, or were more unhealthy to start out with