The study, which was published in the journal Metabolism, says that you can lose weight without having to restrict your calorie intake every day. The researchers add that if you are obese, you wouldn’t even have to initially change the types of food you eat, ‘only the pattern of food consumption’ and this could make your more likely to stick to the diet in the long run.
According to Krista Varady, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who interviewed hundreds of dieters, ‘people get kind of sick of not feeling normal’ when they do the regular diet of decreasing their calories by 25-40%. ‘They get sick of feeling deprived every single day,’ Varady said. However, alternate day fasting, or ADF, which involves a ‘fast day’ of a restricted number of calories (400 to 500 for women, 500 to 600 for men) between two hours in the middle of the day and alternating with a ‘feed day’ where food is consumed ad libitum over 24 hours, ‘allows people to feel normal every other day’ as ‘It’s just a completely free day,’ Varady says.
Other studies have shown that alternate day fasting with a low-fat diet can help people lose weight, including one by Varady, but ‘We got this backlash from people saying, ‘you haven’t actually shown your diet can work in the real world because most people eat between 30 and 45% of their daily calories as fat’,’ Varady said, which caused her to ask: ‘would it still work if people were eating that typical American diet?’ The participants even ate foods that here 12% higher in fat than the average American diet, as the researchers ‘wanted to push it all the way to the top to see if it worked with a super fat diet’ though they warn that people ‘are in no way advised to increase their fat intake’ to this amount.
These participants, along with another group who ate a low-fat ADF diet, lost an average of 12 pounds in eight weeks, as well as decreasing their fat mass and LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol and triglycerides. There was no real difference between the two groups, which Varady surmised ‘I think it was because they were cheating less. I think they were just more happy with their foods. They probably felt fuller and more satisfied, and less likely to squeeze in another couple of snacks on fast day.’