Eat Every Other Day Diet
It is surprising what some of us will go through to lose weight and still be able to enjoy eating. In my case, it may border on self-medicating but that is probably more of an Oprah's Book Club moment than it is a topic for a great article. So back to the great article. As I was saying, being able to eat every other day on a diet would be better for some of us than slogging on day after day on water cress soup, but is only eating every other day harmful? Will you lose weight only eating every other day? These are a few questions that come to mind.
Fitness and nutrition author Jon Benson wrote about his eat every other day experience:
"Today I went for some New York-style pizza here in Austin, Texas. Do I feel 'guilty'? No way... in fact tomorrow I will feel LEANER. What the what? I had to set up my body for this bit of metabolic trickery of course. You cannot just "eat pizza" and shed the pounds... I wish you could! But my personal System for fatloss not only "allows" pizza (and all my other favorite foods)... it DEMANDS that I eat it."
So it seems to work for some people.
Eat Only Every Other Day?
If you simply decide to just eat every other day and hope that you will lose weight you probably won't. I know I have tried it. Yes, I did start to lose weight, but I was really hungry on my fast days and over ate on my feed days. It kind of gave me the feeling that I could run to Pizza Hut to eat every other day. Then I began to cheat on my fast days, rationalizing it away by saying to myself that I would do it only this once. In the end, an eat every other day diet just made my situation worse.
What about Eat-Stop-Eat?
This is a diet where you pick two 24 hour periods a week to fast. I tried this also and had the same results as eating every other day. In fact eating every other day initially gave me better results and it didn't cost me the $49 that the Eat-Stop-Eat ebook did. Now don't get me wrong. The Eat-Stop-Eat ebook is a great ebook. It was my fault that I didn't follow what it said. It is a great diet guide that my brother's wife follows with wonderful results. I just rationalized too much.
The Eat Every Other Day Diet!
Jon Benson, whom we quoted earlier, actually developed his system for eating every other day into a diet guide named The Eat Every Other Day Diet or EODD for short. Its name is more poetic license than a real description of the system. Jon took the idea of eating every other day and applied the concept of caloric cycling and consulted with nutrition experts and came up with a system.
How did the EODD system work form me?
Under this system you eat a lean protein diet punctuated with "feed days" where, if you'll excuse the trem, you pig out. You never actually fast. It is funny how this system really worked for me. I was never starving because of fasting and I always had my "Feed Day" to look forward to. By using the EODD system I also could schedule my "feed days" to correspond with holiday eating, picnics and date nights with my wife.
Even though eating every other day didn't work very well for me because I just didn't have the will power to only eat every other day, it did lead me to a system of Caloric Cycling (EODD) that does work form me. I believe that losing weight is more of a matter of finding a system that works for you than it is of finding one system that works for everyone. The EODD Diet works for me but maybe the Eat-Stop-Eat system would work for you. How do you know until you try. Do not look at your failures as defeats, they are simply part of the research you are doing to find a diet system that works for you.
