A new study from the School of Health Sciences at the university of Tasmania in Australia found that continuous dieting may actually hurt your attempts to lose weight.
The benefits of taking a break from dieting
The findings, which were published in the International Journal of Obesity, found that taking a two-week break from dieting helped men lose more weight than men who dieted continuously.
The researchers enrolled 51 obese men between the ages of 25 and 54 into their diet study. They put half the men in a continuous calorie-restricted diet for 16 weeks and the other half in a calorie-restricted diet for 30 weeks but with two-week breaks after every two weeks of dieting. During the breaks from diet, the men in the latter group increased their calorie intake enough to keep their weight stable. Within the 30 weeks, they engaged in diet for 16 weeks total.
The men who took the diet breaks lost more weight than those in the continuous diet group. In addition, when the researchers checked in on the men after six months, they found that despite ceasing the calorie-restricted diet, the men who took breaks from diet had maintained a weight loss of 17.6 pounds more than the men who dieted without interruption.
The theory behind the method
The research team speculates that the downfall of continuous dieting without breaks may be due to biological mechanisms that are triggered by calorie restriction.
As the study leader, Dr. Nuala Byrne, explains, “When we reduce our energy intake during dieting, resting metabolism decreases to a greater extent than expected—a phenomenon termed ‘adaptive thermogenesis’—making weight loss harder to achieve. This famine reaction, a survival mechanism which helped human to survive as a species when food supply was inconsistent in millennia past, is now contributing to growing waistlines when the food supply is readily available.”
