2 weeks Ago By Trisha Pasricha, MD
Many of my friends have been trying intermittent fasting for weight loss. Does it work, and is it better than other diets? Intermittent fasting has been shown to lead to some weight loss in several studies. But it might not work better than other dieting practices.
When scientists compared intermittent fasting to simply eating fewer calories throughout the day, they found that intermittent fasting wasn’t more effective in helping people shed pounds. Conventional dieting focuses on what you eat, but intermittent fasting focuses on the time you eat it – within an eight-hour window per day, for example. Because intermittent fasting doesn’t typically require monitoring calories or changing what you eat, it can feel easier to stick with.
Interest in the practice took off in the last decade or so, after experiments in animals showed that eating restricted to certain times had a profound impact on metabolic health and the microbiome. But in people, the weight-loss benefits linked to intermittent fasting may be because they took in less food in general – up to 550 fewer calories per day..
