Intermittent Fasting Is Not a Miracle for Weight Loss
The post is gaining traction with proponents claiming it can help you lose weight. It seems like everyone skips breakfast these days or drinks only water every three days. But is fasting really good for you? And (more importantly for some) will it help you lose weight?
The short answer is yes, refusing to eat will make you lose weight for a while. Intermittent fasting involves severely restricting food intake for specific periods of time, which actually results in weight loss. Until relatively recently, this was mainly behavior related to religious ceremonies or other spiritual matters. Now it’s a fitness craze. Writer Julia Bellouse explained how this works for Vox, breaking down the main types of fasting practitioners follow:
Intermittent fasting means no food or massive reductions in calorie intake (for example, 500 calories per day) only intermittently (like the very popular 5: 2 diet ).
Time-limited feeding involves consuming calories only during a four to six hour window each day (for example, skipping breakfast and eating only lunch and early dinner).
Intermittent fasts , the most extreme, usually last for several days or longer. These diets involve consuming only liquids with no calories or very few calories for extended periods of time to bring the body into a full fasting mode (rather than switching between fasting and feeding).
A mimicking fasting diet is a plant-based diet that involves eating very few calories – through light meals such as soups, energy bars, and energy drinks – for several days each month.
It is undeniable that some have fewer weight loss functions, but before you decide fasting is the best way to eat less, here are a few major misconceptions about “diet.”
There isn’t a lot of research on weight loss and fasting
In fact, there is not much scientific evidence about fasting as a weight loss tool. As Bellouse explains, most research has focused on the potential health and longevity benefits of less food. Fasting proponents say that eating three meals a day is a relatively new phenomenon for humanity, since we have lived without agriculture for quite a long time.
Scientists studying fasting are primarily focused on whether it improves health outcomes for diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. And this is indeed the case, according to Walter Longo, director of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute:
“Many organs begin to contract [during intermittent fasting],” Longo explained. “Many cells start to die, and we have evidence that many of the cells killed by this process are bad. Then the stem cells turn on, and we see how the body begins to regenerate. “
But this study only covers a few months of training – a fairly short period in a person’s life. Other studies on the long-term health benefits of fasting have been inconclusive.
It’s hard to do
The best diets are not diets at all; these are changes in your lifestyle that you can manage and sustain. It is difficult to describe a diet that is more complex than “don’t eat”. Many people dropped out of Longo’s research because they could not adhere to the requirements of fasting, even with regard to science.
You can lose weight, but it is important whether this is a sustainable behavior for you. Bellouse shared this observation from a fasting researcher doing another study in 2018:
“The dropout rate has reached 40 percent. Thus, despite the statistical significance of the weight loss results, the clinical significance and practicality of maintaining the [intermittent fasting] regimen are questionable. “
If you cannot starve, you will not lose weight and will probably feel pretty lousy all the time.
It may be unhealthy
Fasting studies did not cover all groups. They don’t know what negative impact this might have on the elderly, children, or underweight people. It can also be dangerous for people with a history of eating disorders, according to psychologist Debra Safer:
“The research data generally shows that eating disorder patients do their best when they eat and eat regularly,” Safer said. “Intermittent food restriction is often one of the behaviors that people with eating disorders engage in as part of their eating disorder, and often leads them to overeat and / or purge.”
Thus, for people with eating disorders, fasting is “potentially dangerous because it interferes with efforts to build and maintain hard-won, normalized eating patterns.”
Longo also added that fasting can increase the risk of gallstones if done incorrectly and should not be attempted by people who “have diabetes and are taking insulin or any other medication, or if you have metabolic disorders.”
Other forms of calorie restriction are more effective
If you are determined to cut calories in your diet, fasting is still not the most effective way to do it. Try your normal day-to-day restrictions instead.
Researchers studied randomized controlled trials of intermittent fasting and found that people who fasted lost, on average, 4 to 8 percent of their original weight. So fasting worked, but interestingly, it didn’t trump regular, continuous calorie restriction (“eat less every day” diet) or lead to dramatic weight loss.
There are people (those who do not fall into any of the groups with the potential to suffer dangerous health consequences) for whom fasting is beneficial. They prefer to simply limit the time they eat rather than counting calories or worrying about what they are consuming. Fair. Just be aware of the costs and benefits of avoiding regular meals, because there may not be too much of the latter.
Lean diets are becoming more and more popular, ahead of science. That’s why. | Vox