With today’s busy lifestyles and packed schedules, it doesn’t feel as though we have much choice as to when we can eat our meals. We eat when we can manage it. This has caused many of us to work eating into a multitasking experience. We eat our meals and snacks while emailing, watching television, walking, or even driving. But really, what time should you eat to for a healthy weight?

For people who are dieting or attempting to maintain a healthy body weight, this practice of eating while completing other tasks can work against those efforts. According to the findings published about a study in the Journal of Health Psychology, there are several activities that are simply terrible for us when combined with eating. In fact, at the very top of the list of bad activities to blend with meals is walking.

The study was conducted by University of Surry researchers in England. They examined weight outcomes among three groups of women in order to measure the impact of distracted snacking. All three groups were given a cereal bar. The first was asked to eat it while watching a five minute clip of the “Friends” television series. The second group was asked to eat the bar while they were walking. The third group was asked to eat the cereal bar while they were sitting down and chatting with a friend.

Following the experiment, each of the groups of women were asked to fill out a survey and to taste test certain foods including potato chips, chocolate, grapes and carrot sticks. This was done to answer the question “what time should you eat”, but also to figure out which times are the worst to eat.

Once the respondents had left, the study researchers measured the amount that was eaten by each group of women. What they found was that the women who had walked while they ate their cereal bar ate five times more chocolate than the two other groups of women.

These study results suggest that it isn’t as much the time of the day that you eat your meals as much as what you’re doing when you consume the food that will help to decide what you’ll want to eat and how much of it you’ll consume before you feel satisfied by your snack. This is interesting as it is extremely common for people to take on other activities while they are eating meals and snacks, so choosing the combination of activities that will go with eating could be critical to the success of a diet strategy or of one for healthful weight maintenance. So, what time should you eat? Eat when you can focus on the food best, but definitely not when walking.