CosBeauty Magazine #85

feature
Alternate Day
Fasting
Professor Krista Varady created the
Every-Other-Day Diet, based on
her groundbreaking research into
‘alternate-day modified fasting’ at
the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Proponents describe it as ‘the diet
that lets you eat all you want (half
the time) and keep the weight off!’
The plan involves alternate
‘fast’ and ‘feast’ days. Fasting days
consist of a single 500 calorie meal
at lunchtime. But then there is no
restriction on what, when or how
much is eaten on feasting days.
The two key attractions are:
• The promise that ‘you’ll lose
weight and improve your health
– while eating anything you want
and all you want, every other day’;
• Where most diets include a
daunting set of rules to be obeyed
– what you can eat and can’t eat,
how much you can and can’t eat,
when you can and can’t eat – here
there is only one rule: eat no more
than 500 calories on Diet Day,
eat anything you want and as
much as you want on Feast Day.
That’s it. No counting calories,
carbs, fat or protein. No avoiding
any particular food; all foods
are allowed. No complex meal
preparations and plans.
Two Days Per
Week Fasting
Developed by popular UK TV
medico Dr Michael Mosley, the Fast
Diet involves fasting for two days
per week. People maintain their
usual eating routines for the other
five days. Dr Mosley sums up: ‘If we
were to distil the Fast Diet into a
single soundbite, it would all come
down to 5:2. That’s five days of
normal eating, with little thought
to calorie control and a slice of pie
for pudding if that’s what you
want. Then, on the other two days,
you reduce your calorie intake to
500 calories for women and 600
calories for men.’
Proponents claim that since you
are only fasting for two days of your
choice each week – and eating
normally on the other five days –
there is always something new and
tasty on the horizon. In short, it’s
easy to comply with a regime that
only asks you to restrict your calorie
intake occasionally. It ‘recalibrates
the diet equation, and stacks the
odds in your favour’.
Importantly, the plan is designed
as a ‘well-signposted path towards a
longer, healthier life’; weight
loss is ‘simply a happy adjunct to
all of that’.
Hence, according to Dr Mosley,
this eating plan can not only help
people lose weight, but offers an
array of other health benefits:
‘Studies of intermittent fasting
show that not only do people see
improvements in blood pressure and
their cholesterol levels, but also in
their insulin sensitivity.’
And how did he come up with
the recommendation that women
have 500 calories and men have
600 calories on a Fast Day?
Dr Mosley explains: ‘We used
the rule of thumb that women need
2,000 calories and men need 2,400
calories per day and on a Fast Day
you should eat a quarter of a normal
day’s recommended calories.’