Does intermittent fasting work?

Diets come and diets go. One of the most popular today is “intermittent fasting" in which, as the name suggests, the idea is to limit one’s food intake to certain time windows. The general consensus, says Nichola Ludlam-Raine, a dietitian and spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, is that intermittent fasting seems to work roughly as well for weight loss as traditional calorie-counting does. Dr Collins’s team, for instance, has published a randomised-control trial suggesting that intermittent fasting improves the metabolism of fats more than ordinary dieting does. A review paper published in April 2024 looked at 23 other studies and concluded that intermittent fasting was slightly better than ordinary dieting for overweight people when it came to improving levels of cholesterol and insulin.