14 DAY TRIAL // It's good news for people who are looking to lose weight but who aren't exactly fond of the idea of spending months on end carefully monitoring each and every bite and counting the calories in the cocktails served at their favorite pub.
In a nutshell, a recent paper in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology argues that, contrary to popular assumption, crash diets can be just as successful as long-term ones are when it comes to helping people lose weight and get back in shape.
Thus, researcher Joseph Proietto with the University of Melbourne in Australia claims that, having carried out a series of experiments involving human volunteers, he and his colleagues found that crash diets and long-term ones are no different in terms of enabling people to lose weight and keep it off.
Helping the volunteers get back in shape
As part of this research project, scientist Joseph Proietto and colleagues first found 200 obese adults who were ready and willing to lose weight. They then split the volunteers into groups, of which one was put on a crash diet and another on a gradual weight-loss program.
The people in the first group had to stick to the diet for 12 consecutive weeks. During this time, they were only allowed to consume about 450 to 800 calories per day. The folks in the second group, on the other hand, reduced their daily energy intake by 500 calories for a period of 36 weeks.
Following this initial proper dieting phase, the volunteers found to have lost at least 12.5% of their initial bodyweight were asked to stick to a so-called maintenance diet for 3 years. The goal was to determine which of them would have an easier time keeping off the weight they had previously lost.
Once this maintenance period came to an end, the researchers once again weighed the volunteers and looked to establish which of the two diets, i.e. the crash one or the gradual weight loss program, had proven most successful in terms of helping these people get fit.
Fairly unexpected results
The researchers say that, during the initial dieting phase, the crash diet proved way more successful than the gradual weight-loss program did. Thus, as many as 81% of the people in the first group managed to reach their target weight. The second group, on the other hand, had a success rate of just 50%, Science Daily informs.
However, during the 3 years that served as a maintenance period, as many as 71% of the participants in this study put the weight back on, regardless of which dieting group they belonged to. Simply put, both the crash diet and the gradual weight-loss program proved fairly inefficient in the long run.
In light of these findings, the specialists behind this research project urge that doctors looking to help their patients get back in shape do not shy away from encouraging them to embrace a crash diet, even if this goes against current global guidelines.
“The study indicates that for weight loss, a slow and steady approach does not win the race, and the myth that rapid weight loss is associated with rapid weight regain is no more true than Aesop’s fable,” Dr. Corby Martin and Professor Kishore Gadde commented on the outcome of this investigation.
Furthermore, “Clinicians should bear in mind that different weight loss approaches might be suitable for different patients in the management of clinical obesity, and that efforts to curb the speed of initial weight loss might hinder their ultimate weight loss success.”