Intermittent Fasting Plus Lower-Calorie Diet May Be Best

Overweight women who ate a lower-calorie diet and fasted 3 days a week lost more weight and had better cardiometabolic markers than women who only reduced their calorie intake, or only fasted, or did neither in a small, 8-week randomized trial.

“Obese women who followed a diet in which they ate 70% of their required energy intake and fasted intermittently lost the most weight,” said lead author Amy T. Hutchison, post-doctoral researcher, Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, Australia, in a statement from her university.

“Other women in the study,” she noted, “who either fasted intermittently without reducing their food intake, who reduced their food intake but did not fast, or did not restrict their diet at all, were not as successful in losing weight.”

The new findings from the Effects of Periodic Fasting Versus Daily Energy Restriction on Metabolic Health (PREFER) study were published in the January issue of Obesity.

In this cohort of close to 90 middle-aged and older overweight or obese women who were randomized to the four different strategies, the most successful participants lost about 0.5 to 1 kg per week.

“This study is adding to evidence that intermittent fasting, at least in the short term, may provide better outcomes than daily continuous diet restriction for health and potentially for weight loss,” said senior author Leonie Heilbronn, PhD, associate professor, University of Adelaide and South Australian Health and Medical Record Institute.

Invited to comment, Dorothy D. Sears, PhD, associate professor of medicine, University of California, San Diego, who coauthored a review article about the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting, told Medscape Medical News: “This represents another…study of intermittent fasting providing suggestive evidence of benefit.” However, she pointed out that it was “small and underpowered.”

The researchers agree, saying more research is needed and acknowledging that these findings cannot be generalized to a longer intervention or other populations.

“While the study confirms that intermittent fasting is more effective than continuous diet restriction, the underlying signal for limiting people’s appetite, which could hold the key to triggering effective weight loss, requires further research,” Heilbronn noted.

The group plans to investigate the effectiveness of long-term fasting on men and women in further trials.

Intermittent Fasting, Reduced Calories, or Both?

A continuous reduced calorie diet remains “the cornerstone lifestyle intervention to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease” in overweight people, Hutchison and colleagues write in their article.

However, intermittent fasting might be a better strategy, because people find it difficult to stick to a low-calorie eating plan.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/908041