People who don’t want to count calories or limit the food intake, but would like to slim down, could be using a short-term fasting instead. In a trial, two groups of participants who were allowed to eat anything but within a limited time frame, managed to lose 3% of their body weight within 10 weeks and improved their overall health.
Fasting for health
Short-term fasting becomes popular as the means to lose weight, but how long should you be fasting for?
Limiting food intake by only a few hours has been found effective for weight loss, scientists from the University of Chicago confirmed in the first ever human trials.
Many celebrities are into interval fasting. Some advocate 16-hour fasting, when you, for instance, eat the first meal at 9 am and the last one at 5 pm. The adepts swear it works for them. But does it, really?
This is what the scientists set to confirm.
Two groups of volunteers had been instructed to limit their food intake by either 4 or 6 hours daily: 1-5 pm or 1 to 7 pm. Both groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted but only within the allowed time frames. During fasting hours, the participants could only drink water or calorie-free beverages such as coffee without sugar or milk. People were asked not to change the type of foods they were eating and don’t change the exercise routine.
The third group (control group) people were told to maintain their weight and don’t change the diet or the level of physical activity.
For the following 10 weeks scientists monitored participants’ health, including blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin resistance, and other markers.
As the scientists discovered, participants in both trial groups lost on average about 3% of their body weight and their daily calorie intake dropped by 550 calories. Insulin resistance and oxidative stress level got reduced, while there was no effect among markers of blood pressure or cholesterol.
There was not much difference in effect among the groups that were eating meals within 4-hour or 6-hour time frames.
In other words, there was no extra benefit for people who were fasting for longer. 18-hour fasting, 6-hour feeding regime was good enough to lose the same amount of weight as on the schedule of 4-hour feeding.
Another study from 2019 found that eating within 10-hour window was effective in reducing symptoms of metabolic syndrome.
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