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She says counting calories doesn't work for everyone trying to lose weight because you have to monitor everything you consume closely around-the-clock.ĭOROTHY SEARS: It's difficult for people to do that, even me. Dorothy Sears directs Clinical and Community Translational Science at Arizona State University. because people generally like to eat later in the day when they fast. STONE: She says they settled on noon to 8 p.m. Mainly we're cutting out, like, I think after-dinner snacks honestly. So all we're doing is cutting out, like, you know, around six hours. VARADY: People eat within, like, usually like a 12- to 14-hour window.

STONE: She doesn't believe it was anything too complex.

VARADY: We call it, like, an unintentional calorie restriction or, like, a natural calorie restriction that just happens. Varady says the thing is, the fasting group wasn't told to cut down on calories. STONE: And both groups lost on average about 5% of their body weight. So both groups reduced their energy intake by about 400 calories per day. VARADY: You can basically achieve the same amount of energy restriction by just, yeah, counting time instead of counting calories. At the end of the year, here's what the scales showed. And the last didn't make any changes to their eating. Another had to count calories and cut their daily intake by 25%. One could only eat between noon and 8 p.m. STONE: So they recruited 90 adults with obesity from the Chicago area and then randomly assigned them to three groups. KRISTA VARADY: We really wanted to see, can people lose weight with this over a year? Can they maintain the weight loss? Varady is a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago. But Krista Varady says it wasn't clear just how well this worked over a longer stretch of time. Research has found this can help people lose weight over the course of a few months because they end up eating less. WILL STONE, BYLINE: One of the most common forms of intermittent fasting is to simply limit the amount of time you eat during the day, usually to about six to eight hours. So what if you could get the same results with a simpler approach, intermittent fasting? NPR's Will Stone reports on the results of a new study. Many people are told to count calories if they want to lose weight, which can be time-consuming and hard to keep up.
