This question can be overwhelming, as there are so many options to choose from. So, what diet technique should you choose? Will you do intermittent fasting, calorie counting, or go carb-free? All of these are on trend in the diet management lifestyle.
With some ongoing trials, researchers have found that limiting your food intake for a short period every day is not more effective than simple calorie counting.
A year-long experiment concluded that calorie restriction is more critical than intermittent fasting when it comes to weight loss plans.
The Fasting Diet Trend
Fasting diet trends have increased, as advocates claim they are effective for losing weight while improving your metabolic health. Still, the dietary strategy takes on many forms:
- First, you get alternate-day fasting when you eat every other day
- Then you have intermittent fasting, which includes fasting all day once or twice a week
- Lastly, you get a time-restricted feeding pattern where your eating window is limited and spans over a few hours daily.
The research focuses on a type of time-restricted feeding method known as the 16:8 diet. It involves limiting your food intake to eight hours daily. The trial limited their fasting cohort to only eat between 8 AM and 4 PM.
In this trial, researchers used 139 subjects that were overweight to obese but healthy. The subjects were split into two groups, with one group using the time-restricted intermittent fast. The others could eat food at any time. However, both groups needed to limit their calorie intake daily.
Men could eat at most 1,800 calories, while women could eat around 1,500 calories in the year trial. By restricting the calorie intake of the groups, the researchers could hone in on specific weight loss objectives and the metabolic outcomes of those who were on time-restricted feeding.
As prior studies showed the possibility of some benefits of fasting diets due to reducing calorie intake, they focused on whether fasting for 16 hours daily helped somehow.
The Results
With the 12-month baseline, researchers found that the group in the time-restricted feeding lost 9% of the body weight. Hence, it was compared to a 7.2% drop found in the other group. Therefore, they concluded that weight loss is mainly driven by calorie restriction and not necessarily affected by time-restricted feeding patterns.
Furthermore, the calorie-to-time restriction had similar effects on body fat reduction, blood pressure, visceral fat, lipid levels, and glucose levels during the year of intervention. The newly written research indicated that calorie intake restriction helped explain most of the beneficial effects seen in the time-restriction eating program.
Still, researchers advise that the subject’s findings result from several study limitations, and it should only be interpreted that all intermittent fasting methods are helpful to a certain degree. For example, you may still benefit from calorie reduction strategies if you have habitual eating patterns spanning 24 hours as well.
In some cases, intermittent fasting can help with cardiovascular to pre-existing metabolic problems. One of the diet’s strengths is that it is an easy diet strategy to follow for a long time.
What Will You Choose?
When you look at the real world, the truth is that many people will find the 16:8 plan easier to follow than restricting calories and carbs. All you need to do is narrow your eating window. Before you start looking for an intermittent fasting strategy, we recommend that you contact a weight loss doctor first to discuss what works best for you and your body.
