Guest: Joey Dweck/Fast Mimickin

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USC study suggests “fast-mimicking diet” may be your best strategy for healthy weight loss
An interview with Joey Dweck, founder of WeightLossBuddy.com, the Internet’s top-ranked online weight loss support site

“Intermittent fasting” is a dietary regimen which allows an individual to eat normally for a period of time before switching to a short period of greatly reduced caloric intake.

The feast-then-fast eating plan, originally popularized in a book by Dr. Michael Mosley and recently refined by a team of USC longevity researchers, has been hailed by proponents as one of the most successful weight loss strategies in recent decades. Throngs of dieters, including celebrities such as talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, have reported using fasting diets to shed pounds and create new, trimmer physiques.

“Dr. Mosley writes in his book, The Fast Diet, that the power of intermittent fasting stems from the fact that after just a few hours of food deprivation, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems,” says Joey Dweck, founder of the popular online weight loss support site, WeightLossBuddy.com.

“Dr. Mosely recommends dieters undertake five days of unrestricted eating followed by two days of fasting. During the fasting period dieters are allowed two meals per day of roughly 300 calories each.” Says Dweck. “This diet regimen has been dubbed The 5:2 plan.”

“Studies showed Mosley’s plan lowered weight and improved blood sugar, inflammation and other aspects of metabolic health, but with its severe calorie restrictions required on two out of seven days, the protocol was hard for dieters to maintain over long periods,” says Dweck.

Noting Dr. Mosely’s work, researchers at USC’s Longevity Institute led by Dr. Valter Longo altered the structure of the 5-2 plan by increasing the days of normal eating to 25 followed by 5 days of restricted calories. The research team published their activities in the journal
Cell Metabolism (www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2815%2900224-7).

“Dr. Longo described his dieting regimen as a ‘fast mimicking diet’, the purpose of which was to periodically fool the body into thinking it was starving,” says Dweck. “Dr. Longo understood that strict fasting was hard for people to stick to, and it could also be dangerous, so he and his team developed a more complex diet than the 5:2 plan which triggered the same healthful effects in the body; everything except the feelings of hunger.”

As per findings of the USC researchers, the nutritional intake during the regimen’s 5-day fast-mimicking period should be: On day one, overall food intake should add up to 1,090 calories consumed as 10% protein, 56% fat, and 34% carbohydrate. On days two through five, dieters are allowed daily consumption of 725 calories in a ratio of 9% protein, 44% fat and 47% carbohydrate.

“Although the USC diet plan produced outstanding results for Weight Loss Buddy members, we saw that the calculations required during the five day fast-mimicking period were quite complex,” says Dweck. “Our company decided to make it easier for dieters by prepackaging daily allotments of food, snacks, and teas that mirrored the caloric values and protein-fat- carbohydrate ratios recommended by USC researchers. A five-day supply of these prepackaged daily nutritional allotments is now commercially available as The 5-Day FAST Diet.

Weight Loss Buddy has been helping individuals achieve their weight loss goals for nearly 16 years, and this is the first diet we’ve ever endorsed to our members,” says Dweck. “We’ve watched it consistently produce healthy results and we really believe in it.”

For information on the popularity of fasting diets:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/intermittent-fasting-diets-are-gaining-cceptance/?ref=health&_r=1