Research

Energy balance

Alternate-day fasting does not produce superior weight loss, weight maintenance, or cardioprotection compared to daily calorie restriction in metabolically healthy obese adults.

If you are obese and metabolically healthy, alternate-day fasting is not a magic bullet for better weight loss or heart health compared to simply eating less every day. It is equally effective for weight loss but may be harder to stick to long-term, as evidenced by higher dropout rates. Choose the diet you can sustain consistently.

StrongRefutesHIGH confidence
Alternate-day fasting did not produce superior adherence, weight loss, weight maintenance, or cardioprotection vs daily calorie restriction.
John F. Trepanowski et al. · JAMA Internal Medicine · 2017

Why this rating

Randomized clinical trial, 1-year duration, large sample size (n=100), intention-to-treat analysis.

Source

Effect of Alternate-Day Fasting on Weight Loss, Weight Maintenance, and Cardioprotection Among Metabolically Healthy Obese Adults

John F. Trepanowski et al. · JAMA Internal Medicine · 2017

DOI 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0936

rct · n=100Cited 628×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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