Fasting or Calorie Counting: What’s Best for Weight Loss?
When it comes to weight control, how do you measure success? Fitting comfortably into your clothes again? Liking what you see in the mirror? Feeling fitter? Those are all good measures in the short term, but the healthiest and most rewarding achievement is the long-term maintenance of a healthy weight once you’re in better shape. Unfortunately, weight maintenance has generally proven to be even more challenging than weight loss.
But now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center have determined that some approaches to weight loss yield more successful long-term results than others. Their six-year study, recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found that limiting the number of calories consumed by limiting meal size and meal frequency proved way more successful at long-term weight maintenance than the trendier approach of timed eating, or intermittent fasting.
The Study Design: Study participants included 547 men and women age 18 or older, with an average age of approximately 51 years. The racial breakdown was 79.9 percent White, 12.2 percent Black, 2.9 percent Asian, and 4 percent other/mixed race. Using body mass index (BMI) as a determinant for weight status, the researchers found that 138 participants were at an optimal (healthiest) weight, 169 were deemed overweight, and 240 were classified as obese. Data used in the study was collected from electronic health records, self-reported surveys, and linkage to a mobile app designed by the researchers to record eating and sleeping patterns.
Excerpted from Psychology Today
