Raiding the fridge for something sweet or something to satisfy your hungry tummy is a big no-no for dieters as it will sabotage what you have been working so hard for.

A new study has shown that it's not about what you eat but it's about when you eat something that will cause to add the extra pounds. The researchers at Salk Institute has proven this and they stated that restricting food from 8 to 12 hours in a day may help prevent the chances of dieters having high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity.

The study has used a mouse model to test the effectiveness of the said strategy for dieters or for people who want to maintain a healthy weight.

In 2012, Dr. Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute said that they fed a high-fat diet to mice but observed both feeding one with a restricted time frame and feeding the other continuously in a 24-hour period. The results show that the mice with time-restricted diet were much healthier and leaner.

The study of the Salk Institute used a variety of diets on over 400 mice. The weights ranged from healthy to obese and the rodents were fed with varying time frames.

The researchers said that regardless of the diet mice are fed, whether with high fat, fat and fructose or just fructose, the mice consuming such food with a 9 to 12-hour window gained less weight. Although these mice were given the same amount of food, the time frame made a huge difference on the impave on weight.

However, Dr. Stephen Ginsberg, an associate professor of neuroscience at NYU Langone Medical Center, research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and an expert on the science behind calorie restriction, said that it might not be that effective on humans.

He says that people's tolerability should be a factor because most people will probably go nuts if restricted to eat in such long hours of the day. He adds, "It's really, really hard to translate this because our eating patterns are very different and our digestive patterns are really different."