Stop Counting Calories With Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is a way of shedding the pounds, looking after your health and most importantly – the plan means you don’t have to count calories. Many people who fast intermittently will have days where they don’t eat, while others will restrict their food for anywhere between 10 and 20 hours.
A recent study found that fasting periods don’t have to be long for your weight loss journey to be successful. While many advocates of the diet give themselves an eight hour window to eat each day, research published in Cell Metabolism found that shorter periods of fasting were just as good.
In order to test the effectiveness of intermittent fasting, a research team at the University of Chicago compared 58 adults with obesity. They were split into three groups and each followed a different diet for a 10 week period. One group ate between 3pm and 7pm, fasting for 20 hours. Group two ate between 1pm and 7pm – fasting for 18 hours. Group three ate a normal diet at usual intervals. The researchers found that both groups who had followed the intermittent fasting plan lost around 3 per cent of their body weight and there was no difference in the two groups as to which group had lost more weight than the other.
Excerpted from Brinkwire
