How to Use the Intermittent Fasting Method Eat. Stop. Eat.

How to Drop Weight If You Are Tired of Restrictive Diets

If you’ve had trouble following your current diet plan, you might do well with a diet that is tracked on a weekly basis.

It’s hard to follow a strict diet plan every day. The demands of most popular diets require users to keep a log of everything they consume and keep constant track of calories – and many times, people fail at their diets because they don’t fee like they’re able to keep up with all the details. Constantly monitoring caloric intake is simply too tedious for most individuals.

Strict Diets Often End in Failure

Here’s an illustration: An article published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2007 shared the results of a study of several diet plans with strict calorie tracking requirements. The study gathered 311 overweight females and randomly placed each of them on either the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, the Ornish Diet, or the LEARN Diet.

Before the women began dieting, they were given handbooks and were required to attend a series of classes so they could learn about their individual plans. When they were finished with their classes, they were required to give a report proving that they understood how to follow their diet plan. Then they were instructed to follow their individual plans for one year.

After a year had passed, none of the women had lost more than ten pounds. All of the women lost some weight during their first two months of dieting, but after the first two months had passed, weight loss slowed significantly. Some women even gained weight.

This may surprise you, but only one of the 311 women who participated in the study followed her diet exactly as she should have. All the other women failed to follow details in some area or another. It may not come as a surprise that direct correlations were found between how well each female followed her plan and how much weight she lost.

It’s clear that diets which require daily monitoring of caloric intake are difficult to follow because of psychological reasons. When individuals are faced with the stress and repetitiveness of tracking each bite of food consumed, they are often tempted to give up entirely.

Simplify Your Diet with Eat. Stop. Eat.

The Eat Stop Eat method is a little-known way to simplify your weight loss plan.

Men and women who follow Eat Stop Eat are only required to monitor their diet and exercise during one 24-hour period per week by fasting and weight training. The diet was created in 2008 by Canadian research scientist Brad Pilon, who had previously spent more than a decade working in the nutrition and health field.

Eat Stop Eat users are required to count their calories on a weekly basis rather than daily. With Eat Stop Eat, dieters only need to reduce their caloric intake over the course of one week.

The way to do reduce calories on Eat Stop Eat is to fast for 24 hours either once or twice a week. Pretty simple, right?

Example

If you need to consume 2,000 calories in order to maintain your current body weight, for example, you would need to reduce your caloric intake by 250 calories daily in order to lose a half a pound per week. However, if you follow the Eat Stop Eat method, you are able to eat as you normally would six days out of the week and then fast for one or two days.

You’re still reducing your caloric intake, and you’ll still lose the same amount of weight, but you’ll be able to diet more flexibly and enjoy your favorite foods.

Using a full body workout and 2 fasts, your weekly schedule might look something like this:

• Monday – Full body workout, eat maintenance calories
• Tuesday – rest + fast
• Wednesday – Full body workout, eat maintenance calories
• Thursday – rest, eat maintenance calories
• Friday – Full body workout, eat maintenance calories
• Saturday – rest + fast
• Sunday – rest, eat maintenance calories

Consider starting with just the Saturday fast to see how your body responds. Then test the mid-week fast to see how your body responds. Eventually you should be able to incorporate both fasts if it works for your body and lifestyle.

Using a 2-day split like Werewolf Muscle Training (M/Tu/Th/F), you would probably choose to fast on Weds and Sat, or just Sat depending on how the Weds fast affects your recovery and training for the rest of the week.

Think Weekly, Not Daily

One of Eat Stop Eat’s motivational mottos is “Think weekly, because nothing changes in one day.” Managing your calories weekly rather than daily produces much less stress, and, as a result, your weight loss results will probably be greater than with most normal diets.

While most Eat Stop Eat users fast one day per week, more experienced and more motivated individuals may fast twice in one week. Users exercise in order to build muscle. Experienced users may be able to fast and exercise on the same day.

While many think fasting can cause the body to store up fat, Brad Pilon says the consumption of small amounts of calories over long periods of time will have no negative effects on metabolism. As long as you exercise, you can still retain and build muscle while fasting. Fasting can even cause cholesterol to be reduced, prompting the body to burn some of its own fat.

Read other popular Diet Reviews including Atkins, The Zone, Nutrisystem, (coupons available here) and more at Diets.md

Tags: Diet, dieting, eat stop eat, ESE, fast, fasting, fat loss, IF, intermittent fasting, lose fat, lose weight, nutrition, weight loss

This entry was posted under Diet, Intermittent Fasting, Nutrition Tip, Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.