What’s the Best Fasting Schedule to Lose Weight?
Metabolism and nutrition researchers have nailed down an exact calorie-intake schedule for slimming down. Intermittent fasting is shown to be a solid solution if you could use clear dietingguidelines, but don’t want to sacrifice the foods you love. If you’ve been tinkering with your intermittent fasting schedule to figure out what’s most effective for you, a team of nutrition and physiology scientists in Chicago has zeroed in on a precise two-day program that just may get you results.
For a meta-analysis that was published Friday in Nutrients, six researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Nutrition and Kinesiology Department initiated a review of past studies to see how intermittent fasting affects sleep among adults who are overweight or obese. Although the scientists have concluded that “sleep quality and sleep duration remained unaltered” based on this study, they made another key discovery in the process.
Weight loss participants in the studies they reviewed responded to time-restricted eating—which the researchers define as eating all food within a four- to 10-hour window—combined with alternate-day fasting. Alternate-day fasting allowed for 600 calories on the “fasting” day, alternated with a “feast” day when participants ate ad libitum—in other words, as much as they wanted of whatever they liked within that four- to 10-hour timespan.
Excerpted from Eat This, Not That!
