Intermittent fasting.Photo: Getty
Intermittent fasting became a dieting buzzword in recent years,with people promoting the system of confining the hours they eatto around six hours a day, and “fasting” during the other 14 to lose weight.
The study,published in theNew England Journal of Medicine, followed 139 people with obesity as they stuck to a calorie-restricted diet over the course of a full year. All the women in the study ate between 1,200 and 1,500 calories a day, while men consumed 1,500 to 1,800, but the group was split in when they could eat — a control portion was allowed to consume those calories at any time of the day, while the others could only eat between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
The researchers, from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, found thatthere was no difference in the results from each group. Both the time-restricted eaters and the control group lost weight — around 14 to 18 lbs. — but it didn’t make a difference which plan they were on. That was true across multiple measures, from body fat and lean body mass to waist circumference.
Intermittent fasting also did not lead to improvements in weight-related health factors such as blood glucose levels, blood pressure or insulin.
“In this 12-month trial, we found that the 8-hour time-restricted–eating regimen did not produce greater weight loss than the regimen of daily calorie restriction, with both regimens resulting in similar caloric deficits,” the study authors wrote. “Among patients with obesity, a regimen of time-restricted eating was not more beneficial with regard to reduction in body weight, body fat, or metabolic risk factors than daily calorie restriction.”
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The results were so significant that Dr. Ethan Weiss, a diet researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who had long thought that intermittent fasting was effective and has followed the eating pattern for the last seven years, asked the study researchers to analyze the data four times,he toldThe New York Times.
“I was a devotee,” he said. “This was a hard thing to accept.”
Weiss said that he now sees that “there is no benefit to eating in a narrow window,” and that “these results indicate that caloric intake restriction explained most of the beneficial effects seen with the time-restricted eating regimen.”
The researchers said that their study does have limitations — they did not look at how many calories the participants were burning each day, and the findings may not apply to people of other demographics.
They also pointed out that while intermittent fasting didn’t provide any additional benefit, thepeople following the plan still lost weight, and their findings “suggest that the time-restricted-eating regimen worked as an alternative option for weight management.”
source: people.com
