A new diet which is all the craze in the UK involves not eating at all. “The Fast Diet” was published in January, and has been at the top of the best seller book list on Amazon’s British site for much of the time since then. According to the founder of Short Books publishing house, Rebecca Nicolson, “it is selling like hot cakes.” Naughty pun, Rebecca.

As the title suggests, the main premise of “The Fast Diet” is intermittent fasting. The authors have provided a diet ratio of 5:2, so for every five days of eating and drinking anything you like, you have to fast for two days. In this instance, fasting is not a total ban on food, but total food consumption on fast days may not exceed two eggs and a slice of ham for brekkie, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for supper.

This method of eating and fasting was trialled by Dr Michael Mosley, who filmed the process for a BBC documentary last August, called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” But where did this idea come from?

It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.

Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change.

According to scientific research there are many benefits of intermittent fasting, namely lowering the risk of cancer and heart disease, increased energy, and obviously weight loss.

The book states that fasting for just a few hours, your body turns off its fat storing mechanisms and turns on the fat burning mechanisms.

The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed.

Dr Mosley argued:

Our earliest antecedents, lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.

Even though most of Britain and its elite have been singing high praises about the diet, the National Health Service had this to say:

Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.

[Source: NY Times]