Many people think skipping meals is a good way to lose weight, but a new animal study reveals that it can have the opposite effect on the body, Science Blog reported.

Researchers at Ohio State University found that skipping meals sets off a series of metabolic miscues that can result in abdominal weight gain.

"This does support the notion that small meals throughout the day can be helpful for weight loss, though that may not be practical for many people," Martha Belury, senior author of the study, said in a statement. "But you definitely don't want to skip meals to save calories because it sets your body up for larger fluctuations in insulin and glucose and could be setting you up for more fat gain instead of fat loss."

In the study, mice that ate all of their food as a single meal and fasted the rest of the day developed insulin resistance in their livers, a telltale sign of prediabetes. These mice initially were put on a restricted diet and lost weight compared to controls that had unlimited access to food. The restricted-diet mice regained weight as calories were added back into their diets and nearly caught up to controls by the study's end.

However, the fat around their middles -- the equivalent to human belly fat -- weighed more in the restricted-diet mice than in mice that were free to nibble all day long. An excess of that kind of fat is associated with insulin resistance and risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

"Even though the gorging and fasting mice had about the same body weights as control mice, their adipose depots were heavier. If you're pumping out more sugar into the blood, adipose is happy to pick up glucose and store it. That makes for a happy fat cell -- but it's not the one you want to have. We want to shrink these cells to reduce fat tissue," Belury said.

The findings are detailed in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.