Fasting on alternate days may help shave off the kilos better than other intermittent fasting and calorie-restriction diets, according to a new study.<\/p>\n
While scientists have called for more work to confirm the findings, a new review suggests the so-called feast-and-famine approach to dieting may have greater benefits when it comes to weight loss.<\/p>\n
Alternate-day fasting involves a 24-hour fast on every second day and has become more popular in recent years.<\/p>\n
Other intermittent fasting approaches to dieting have also grown in popularity, including time-restricted eating and whole-day fasting.<\/p>\n
With the former, people only eat for a certain number of hours in the day, with an example being the 16:8 diet, which involves a 16-hour fasting period, followed by an eight-hour eating period.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the latter includes the 5:2 diet, which involves five days of eating and two days of fasting.<\/p>\n
Researchers from Scotland, the United States, Canada and Germany wanted to compare fasting methods to continuous energy-restriction diets by looking at all of the available evidence.<\/p>\n
They examined data from 99 studies involving more than 6,500 people.<\/p>\n
Those involved in the studies had an average body mass index (BMI) of 31 and almost nine in 10 (89%) had pre-existing health conditions.<\/p>\n
The research team found that both intermittent fasting diets and calorie-restricted diets led to weight loss.<\/p>\n
But compared with continuous energy restriction, alternate-day fasting was the only strategy to show benefit in body weight reduction.<\/p>\n
People on such diets lose 1.29kg more, according to the study, which has been published in The BMJ medical journal.<\/p>\n
The authors said that alternate-day fasting showed a \u201ctrivial\u201d reduction in body weight when compared with both time-restricted eating and whole-day fasting.<\/p>\n
\u201cMinor differences were noted between some intermittent fasting diets and continuous energy restriction, with some benefit for an alternate- day fasting strategy with weight loss in shorter duration trials,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll intermittent fasting strategies and continuous energy-restriction diets showed a reduction in body weight when compared with an ad-libitum [as desired] diet.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf three intermittent fasting diets (i.e. alternate-day fasting, time-restricted eating and whole-day fasting), alternate day fasting showed benefit in body weight reduction compared with continuous energy restriction.\u201d \u2013 PA Media\/dpa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fasting on alternate days may help shave off the kilos better than other intermittent fasting and calorie-restriction diets,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[372,44564,105,374,4434,16,15,734,2488],"class_list":{"0":"post-232780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-diet","9":"tag-fasting","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-intermittent-fasting","12":"tag-nutrition","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-weight-loss","16":"tag-wellness"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114785306774732141","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}