Dieters who ate early lunches tended to lose more weight than those who had their midday meal on the later side, in a new Spanish study.

The finding doesn’t prove bumping up your lunch hour will help you shed those extra pounds. But it’s possible eating times play a role in how the body regulates its weight, researchers said.

“We should now seriously start to consider the timing of food – not just what we eat, but also when we eat,” said study co-author Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

His team’s research included 420 people attending nutrition clinics in southeast Spain. Along with going to regular group therapy sessions with nutrition and exercise counseling, dieters measured, weighed and recorded their food and reported on their daily physical activity.

Study participants were on a Mediterranean diet, in which about 40 percent of each day’s calories are consumed at lunch. About half of people said they ate lunch before 3:00 p.m. and half after.

Over 20 weeks of counseling, early and late lunchers ate a similar amount of food, based on their food journals, and burned a similar amount of calories through daily activities.

However, early eaters lost an average of 22 pounds – just over 11 percent of their starting weight – and late eaters dropped 17 pounds, or nine percent of their initial weight.

What time dieters ate breakfast or dinner wasn’t linked to their ultimate weight loss, according to findings published Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity.

One limitation of the study is that the researchers didn’t assign people randomly to eat early or late – so it’s possible there were other underlying differences between dieters with different mealtimes. Certain gene variants that have been linked to obesity were more common in late lunchers, for example.