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You almost certainly have a friend, colleague or aunt on Facebook who raves on intermittent fasting – a tendency to weight loss that, according to its followers, helps you lose weight without wasting time.
There are many forms of intermittent fasting (also called time-restricted feeding), but they are all characterized by periods when you eat a lot, followed by periods when you eat very little, or nothing. Popular methods include:
The 5: 2 diet: You normally eat five days a week, but two non-consecutive days reduce the number of calories to about a quarter of your usual consumption.
Alternate fast day: Similar to 5: 2, except that you normally eat a day, then reduce your calorie intake by about a quarter of your usual calories the next day.
The diet 16: 8: Every 24 hours, you fast for 16 consecutive hours, then eat for the remaining eight hours. You can wait 10 hours for breakfast and finish your dinner at 18 hours. Consume only water (or another non-calorie beverage, such as black tea and coffee) outside this time period.
Preliminary studies of intermittent fasting diets suggest that they actually help some people lose weight.
But there are some caveats, and one of the most important is that intermittent fasting does not seem to work better than calorie restriction to the old – that is, that you would lose the same amount of weight by eating less overall.
This is supported by a new German research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, presented as the largest study on intermittent fasting to date.
A research team from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg University Hospital recruited 150 overweight people and put them under one of three dietary regimens for one year:
One group reduced their total daily calories by 20%; a second group followed the 5: 2 diet, effectively reducing their overall weekly calories by 20%; and he was simply advised to a third group to follow the dietary guidelines of the government.
At the end of the 12 months, calorie cutters and 5: 2 dieters lost about the same percentage of body weight on average, including similar amounts of visceral fat – the fat stored at the bottom of the abdomen, which is especially bad for your overall health.
The researchers also found no differences in metabolic values, biomarkers or gene expression between the two groups.
The results of the study suggest that there is no magic secret to the 5: 2 diet, which does not work by causing changes in your body that magically accelerate fat loss – it essentially makes you eat less, which is finally the most important factor for losing weight.
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"For some people, it seems easier to be very disciplined two days instead of counting calories and limiting food every day," explained the lead author of the study, the Epidemiologist DKFZ, Tilman Kühn. in a report.
Note that the use of "some people" because there is another great warning to intermittent fasting: it will not help everyone losing weight.
In the Kühn study, calorie cutters and dieters of 5: 2 lost weight as a group – but there were significant individual variations within these groups, and some participants in two diets had even taken small amounts of weight.
The "best" diet for weight management is ultimately a balanced diet, not too restrictive and long-lasting. If intermittent fasting ticks all these boxes for you, try it. If this is not the case, keep experimenting to find something that does.
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