Tasmanian researchers have found taking a break from dieting may actually improve weight loss, in a collaborative study with universities on the mainland.
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The study, led by University of Tasmania’s School of Health Sciences researchers in Launceston, investigated the body’s “famine reaction” in obese men.
They found taking a two-week break from dieting may be key to losing weight and keeping it off.
The research was published in the International Journal for Obesity on Tuesday.
UTAS School of Sciences head Professor Nuala Byrne, who led the study with a team of collaborators from Queensland University of Technology and University of Sydney, said dieting altered a series of biological processes in the body.
That then led to slower weight loss, and possibly weight gain, the study found.
“When we reduce our energy (food) intake during dieting, resting metabolism decreases to a greater extent than expected; a phenomenon termed ‘adaptive thermogenesis’ – making weight loss harder to achieve,” she said.
“This ‘famine reaction’, a survival mechanism which helped humans to survive as a species when food supply was inconsistent in millennia past, is now contributing to our growing waistlines when the food supply is readily available.”
Professor Byrne said, while researchers in the past had shown that as dieting continued weight loss became more difficult, this latest study looked more closely at ways to lessen the famine response and improve weight loss success.
However, she said, while this two-week intermittent diet proved more successful than continuous dieting, other popular diets that included cycles of several days of fasting and feasting were not any more effective than continuous dieting.
“There is a growing body of research which has shown that diets which use one to seven-day periods of complete or partial fasting alternated with ad libitum food intake are not more effective for weight loss than conventional continuous dieting.
“It seems that the ‘breaks’ from dieting we have used in this study may be critical to the success of this approach.
“While further investigations are needed around this intermittent dieting approach, findings from this study provide preliminary support for the model as a superior alternative to continuous dieting for weight loss.”
The study was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.
Two groups participated in the 16-week diet, which cut calorie intake by one-third.
One group maintained the diet continuously for 16 weeks while the other maintained the diet for two weeks, then broke from the diet for two weeks eating simply to keep their weight stable and repeated the cycle for 30 weeks in total to ensure 16 weeks of dieting.
Those in the intermittent diet group not only lost more weight but also gained less weight after the trial finished.
The intermittent diet group maintained an average weight loss of eight-kilograms more than the continuous diet group, six months after the end of the diet.
