Does Intermittent Fasting Help You Lose Weight?
Have you heard about intermittent fasting? It’s a diet where you restrict eating to something like an eight-hour timeframe and fast for the other 16. Another method is called alternate-day fasting, where you only eat 500 calories today, but you can have anything you want tomorrow. Celebrities like Jennifer Anniston, Hugh Jackman and Chris Pratt swear by it. Maybe someone you know does too.
Here’s what I want to know. Is there a link between intermittent fasting and weight loss? For answers, I’m looking at published research and talking to Dr. Krista Varady who researches intermittent fasting at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
“Is there a link between intermittent fasting and weight loss?” I asked her.
“Yes, there is a link between intermittent fasting and weight loss,” Varady said.
So, it works. But how well does it work? Varady co-authored this paper in the Journal of American Medicine/Internal Medicine. It looked at the weight loss associated with alternate-day fasting. Over a year, participants experienced a 6% weight loss.
Excerpted from WFAA
