Cheat Days in Between Your Diet Plan May be Key to Weight Loss: Study

"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," said lead author Nuala Byrne, Professor at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Researchers investigated the body's 'famine reaction' to continued dieting and its impact on weight loss in people with obesity. For the study, the team of researchers studies two groups of participants put on a 16-week diet - one group maintained the diet continuously for 16 weeks; the other group maintained the diet for two weeks and then broke from the diet for another two weeks.

Participants who took a two-week long break from their diet plan not only lost more weight but also gained lesser amount of weight after the trail finished. They also maintained an average weight loss of about eight kilograms more than the continuous diet group. "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," Byrne added. The latest study focused on ways to lessen the famine response and improve weight loss success.

With Inputs from IANS