Studies prove that people who ate a lot less in two years they had a brighter day and more satisfying nights. The findings come from a new analysis based on the CALERIE 2 trial, in which scientists told a group of 218 generally healthy weight people to either cut 25% of their overall calories for two years or stick to their usual eating patterns.
The diet worked; people who fasted lost an average of 10% of their body weight or about 16.5 pounds. But the scientists also looked at other measures throughout the study, including quality of life, depression, sleep and sexual function, using standardised scales.
According to the results people who lost weight, also gained a lot have brighter moods, better sleep, improved quality of life after being on the diet for a year and better sexual functions after two years of fasting.
“What people report is that after they ‘get over the hump’ and start to lose weight, their hunger levels subside a bit and they start to feel the benefits of the weight loss,” says Corby Martin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, the study’s first author. “They find it easier to move around, their joints hurt less, they feel better.”
Adding to it he says that cutting calories for a full two years is not at all easy and says “Even though they achieve those benefits, it is just really hard to adhere to these diets over the long term, at least in today’s society, they’re minnows trying to swim upstream, in a world where it’s very easy to overconsume calories.”
Martin and his colleagues conducted a research to see if people have stuck on to their diets or not, while some gained weight others stuck to the experiment. A formal analysis is coming soon.