The Every Other Day Diet

How it works: Eat - Fast - Eat

Fasting Days - Drink 8 to 12 cups of water (depending on your weight) throughout the day.
                      - Eat one 500 calorie meal at lunch or dinner.
                      - No snacking. Do not divide up the 500 calories.
 
Eating Days    - Eat normally to suit your appetite.
                      - Try not to binge and eat excessively high-calorie foods

By eating this way you will have 3 fasting days one week with 4 eating days. Then next week there will be 4 fasting days and 3 eating days. 

For more information see The Every Other Day Diet website (http://www.eoddiet.com/) or buy the book! You can also watch this interview on You Tube with Dr. Krista Varady talking about her research and book. 

The scientist in me needed to find journal articles with actual studies that support this type of diet regime. According to the EOD website "...people can lose between 10-30 pounds in 8 weeks while following this diet".  The study published in the Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders entitled The effects of modified alternate-day fasting diet on weight loss¹ shows an average weight loss of 13 lbs (6 kg) in 8 weeks by fasting 3 days a week and eating an 1800 calorie a day diet for 3 days a week and have 1 day a week with no restriction.  The author of the EOD diet has been researching in theis field for over 10 years. She recently published Alternate day fasting for weight loss in normal weight and overweight subjects: a randomized controlled trial ². Over the course of 12 weeks patients were monitored following the Eat-Fast-Eat protocol. The results of the study show an average of 11.4 lbs (5.2 kg) were lost.

She was invited to the Oxford University to give a lecture on her research. Very prestigious. You can watch her lecture on Alternate day fasting: a novel dietary restriction regimen for weight loss in humans here 

http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/video/alternate-day-fasting-a-novel-dietary-restriction-regimen-for-weight-loss-in-humans/380

I think the most interesting article I found was Alternate-day fasting and chronic disease prevention³. To think that we could get a handle on cancer or heart disease by fasting every other day! It will be very interesting to see where this research goes in the future. Keep up the amazing work Dr. Krista Varady!

¹ http://jdmdonline.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2251-6581-12-4

² http://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-12-146

³ http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/1/7.full