Is Intermittent Fasting as Effective as Counting Calories?
When Krista Varady began studying intermittent fasting two decades ago, she felt her research wasn’t taken very seriously. “All the previous diet fads focused so much on calorie counting or low-fat diets,” she said.
But a new study from Varady and a team of researchers, published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, showed that limiting food intake to a specific time window was as effective as calorie counting for weight loss. Varady, a nutrition professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and her collaborators enrolled 77 people with obesity in Chicago — most of them Black or Hispanic — in their study, then assigned the participants to one of three routines for six months.
The first group practiced intermittent fasting, eating all of their calories between noon and 8 p.m. each day. The second group could eat whenever they wanted, but they tracked their calorie intake and reduced the total they normally ate in a day by 25%. The last group was the control group, so did not change their regular eating habits.
Excerpted from NBC News
