In Dr. Michael Mosley’s popular new book The FastDiet: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting, he prescribes that adherents eat their typical diet five days per week and then spend two days consuming a quarter of their normal calories. This amounts to about 500 for women and 600 for men. For those of you who know what fasting is, you probably are already wondering where the fasting piece is for this diet.
The primary reason that Mosley’s diet is not fasting is because even intermittent fasting typically requires complete abstinence from food for at least one full day as time. On Mosley’s “fast” diet, adherents eat between 500 and 600 calories. Because of this, Mosley’s diet is really a calorie restriction diet, not a fasting nor intermittent fasting diet.
According to Mosley, he spent months researching medical findings on intermittent fasting. He tested it on himself and watched his cholesterol and insulin resistance go down along with about 19 pounds of fat. Of course, medical doctors who have spent years in school studying and researching would most likely feel that a few months of study is not long enough to become well versed in any subject.
Still, there are advantages that real intermittent fasting has over a standard calorie-restricted diet such as Mosley’s. Studies suggest that when you do intermittent fasting you lose almost exclusively fat. Researchers have found that on a standard diet you lose about 75 percent fat, 25 percent muscle. With intermittent fasting, it’s between 85 and 100 percent fat.
Researchers suggest that true intermittent fasting is most beneficial for people who are overweight or obese. When someone is successful at losing weight, they are really losing fat, and hopefully little muscle.
The bottom line is this: Mosley’s diet may actually be a healthful and practical way to lose weight. However, don’t believe that it is any real type of fasting anymore than not eating between dinner and breakfast is any kind of real fast.
Authors: Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer
Year of Release: 2013