Another study has shown that "intermittent fasting," or eating less often, helps people lose weight and keep it off. While the idea of "eat less, move more" seems to have fallen out of favor; simply not consuming as many calories as a body needs to operate for a day is always a good bet.
Doesn't Intermittent fasting just mean periodically not eating? The less frequently you eat, especially if you follow the current American tradition of feasting until one is packed full of corn-syrup-laden calories, the fewer calories you should consume, in theory. A person's physiology, circumstance, or caloric intake can defeat weight loss goals in many ways, regardless of how infrequently they eat.
I eat once a day, for the most part. It's too hard to cook for and clean up after me 2-3x a day. I learned that being this lazy has a particular name in fasting parlance: "OMAD" or One Meal A Day.
"We really wanted to see if people can lose weight with this over a year. Can they maintain the weight loss?" says Krista Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois Chicago, who has studied intermittent fasting for the past two decades and led the new study.
Varady's research finds that intermittent fasting can indeed help people lose weight and keep it off over the course of a year, with effects similar to tracking calories. The results of the clinical trial were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The amount of weight loss wasn't dramatic — equivalent to about 5% of body weight — but the findings are encouraging to researchers in the field, in part because they underscore that people could keep this habit up over a long stretch of time.
"That is pretty exciting," says Courtney Peterson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wasn't involved in the research. "This study has the most compelling results suggesting that people can stick with it, that it's not a fad diet in the sense that people can do it for three months and they fall off the wagon for a year."
