Next time you stagger into a Waffle House in the wee hours of the morning and order the Texas sausage egg & cheese melt (1,040 calories), consider this new research finding: At roughly that hour, the most basic operations of the human body throttle back their caloric needs by about 10 percent compared to the rate at which they will burn calories in late afternoon or early evening.

Maybe you’d prefer to come back around dinnertime.

This pattern of calorie use doesn’t significantly vary based on whether you’re the waitress working the graveyard shift or a 9-to-5’er stopping in for breakfast after eight hours of shut-eye, the researchers found. Humans’ “resting energy expenditure” — the body’s use of calories to power such basic functions as respiration, brain activity and fluid circulation — follows a predictable cycle that waxes as the day progresses and wanes as night sets in.

The new study, published last week in the journal Current Biology, offers further evidence that circadian rhythms dictate not just when we feel the urge to sleep but how complex mechanisms like metabolism operate across a 24-hour period. It may help explain why people who keep irregular sleep schedules, including swing shift workers, have higher rates of obesity and are more likely to develop metabolic abnormalities such as type 2 diabetes.

And it demonstrates that whether we hear it or not, our body’s clock is always ticking, locating us in our daily cycle with uncanny precision.

At “hour zero” — roughly corresponding to somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m. — our core body temperature dips to its lowest point and our idling fuel use reaches its nadir. From that point, at first quickly and then a bit more slowly, the body’s “resting energy expenditure” rises until the late afternoon/early evening. After reaching its peak at roughly 5 p.m., the number of calories we burn while at rest plummets steadily for about 12 hours.

And then, just as surely as day follows night, we start again.

These new findings are a reminder that no matter how 24/7 our schedules have become, our bodies were built for a slower, simpler world in which humans moved around all day in search of food, ate while the sun was up, and slept when the sky was dark.

Today, our appetites and the all-night availability of tempting food may induce us to eat well after sundown. And our jobs may demand that we sleep during the day and wait tables, care for patients or drive trucks through the night. But our bodies still adhere to their ancient, inflexible clocks.

The study’s findings also come with an implicit warning: When we disregard the biological rhythms that rule our bodies, we do so at our peril.

Resting energy expenditure accounts for the majority of the minimum calories we burn in a day. Just to spend a day eating, sleeping and breathing uses up 60 percent to 70 percent of our “resting energy expenditure.” So a serious mismatch in the time when calories are consumed and the time when most of them are burned could prompt the body to make decisions — like storing calories as fat — that aren’t necessarily healthy.

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a good 12-hour fast, when aligned with darkness and our bodies’ nocturnal response, may be a way to prevent or reverse obesity.