Patriot Health Digest
Intermittent fasting has been proven to be a good solution if you want to have clear eating guidelines, but don’t want to limit the foods you eat.
If you have been working on your intermittent fasting schedule to discover what is most effective for your health and weight loss, a team of nutritional scientists has found an exact two-day program that could get you results.
For a meta-analysis that was released just last week in Nutrients, six scientists from the University of Illinois’s Nutrition and Kinesiology Dept. started a review of previous studies to see how intermittent fasting changes sleep among people who are obese or overweight. Although these researchers have concluded that “sleep duration and quality remained unchanged” based on the new study, they made another important discovery during their work.
Weight loss participants which they studied responded to the time-restricted eating plan—which the scientists define as consuming all food within a four to ten hour time frame—combined with alternating-day fasting. Alternating-day fasting allowed 600 calories on the “fasting” day, then changing up with a “feast” day which allows participants to consume whatever they wanted and how much the wanted within the four to ten hour time frame.
(Although, if you have ever done intermittent fasting, you may have found that even the most healthy foods sound tasty when mealtime finally comes around!)
The researchers said that this fasting method gave an average weight loss rate of around 1% to 6% when compared with the patients’ baseline.
The team said this weight loss ranged from “mild to moderate.” However great you believe losing up to 6% of your body weight would be, most nutritional experts recommend slow and balanced methods to keep your weight on the healthier side.
Just keep in mind that whatever or whenever you eat, it is important to get the right nutrients in!
And among the most important thing with fasting and almost all other diets is to avoid sugar. Refined and added sugar are some of the worst things you can do for your health. Also especially dangerous is the high-fructose corn syrup in sodas.
Author: Blake Ambrose
