Alternate Day & Intermittent Fasting—Magic for Weight Loss or Just Another Fad?

There has been an explosion of diet books (The Fast Diet, The 5:2 Diet, The 8-Hour Diet, etc.) suggesting that manipulating the time frames you (allow yourself to) eat within can create metabolic-magic leading to easier and/or greater success with weight loss.

There are multiple possible time frame variances among these protocols, including:
a) limiting eating to the same 8-hours daily,
b) an alternating pattern of under- and over-eating days,
c) having two fasting days per week and eating normally the other 5 days,
d) having regular splurge days (in the middle of stretches of calorie restriction), and on and on.

Some authors even suggest you can splurge and eat as much as you want of whatever you want, on the non-fasting days and still lose weight. That’s the kind of promise that causes diet books to fly off shelves!

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Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.^[i],[ii]

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The Game of Weight Loss has Rules

What are your odds of winning a challenging game that you don’t know the rules to? Not so great. Likewise, if you're trying to lose weight but don't understand how your body works, your odds of success aren't good.

You need accurate information about how your body works:

• How many calories do I need to eat?
• How many calories should I burn in activity each week?
• What changes can I expect during weight loss (in my energy needs)?
• How do I stabilize at my goal weight?

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Starvation Mode: Fact or Fiction?

Starvation-mode (or starvation-response) is the popular theory that the body “reacts” to dieting by lowering its metabolic rate in order to preserve itself. According to the theory a dieter could be following a reduced-calorie eating plan—to the letter—and still not lose an ounce. Furthermore, the purported solution is that one needs to eat more in order to lose weight.

The theory is an attempt to explain why people aren’t losing weight although they report (to their weight loss coach, or fellow dieters) that they are indeed following their diet and exercise program.

What are the problems with the theory?

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Eating More Often Does NOT Boost Your Metabolism!

How many times have you heard the advice to eat more often (i.e. three meals, and two or three snacks per day) because you will supposedly burn more of the calories you eat because eating more often boosts your metabolism?

If you think the claim sounds a little fishy, your instincts are good—the claim that eating more often boosts your metabolism is completely false.

Here’s all you need to know. A small part of your total energy expenditure is called the thermic effect of food (TEF). TEF simply represents the amount of energy (calories) your body uses to digest your meal. On average TEF amounts to just 10% of the calories in your meal.

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