What is the best diet not to gain weight in the long term: Mediterranean, paleo or intermittent fasting?

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Humans are strange beings. We spend our lives looking for solutions when, on many occasions, we have the key to our own noses. We underestimate what we have , striving to make the difficult difficult as if we wanted to cover each of our actions with a heroic dye.

Actions as everyday as ... eat! Possessed by the 'wellness', 'healthy' or 'weightloss' hastags we dive in the net (badly done) on the hunt for the last miracle diet that makes us look 'tipin' in record time even if we leave our health in the effort and the rebound effect gave us a month later, with two or three kilos more than we had at the beginning. We are better endorsed by the famous shift than the specialist and it looks like this.

What do we do to lose weight? Do we become 'a pataky' and try intermittent fasting ? Do we subscribe to the Paleo diet and eat again as our ancestors did very (but very) far away? Or do we eat the ' Mediterranean' , going from processed, sugar and bad fats?

The most sensible answer to all these questions is from a drawer: the first thing would be to go to a specialist who decides if we really need to lose weight and how much to subsequently recommend the personalized plan that we should follow.

EXPERIMENT

Starting from this base, a group of scientists from the University of Otaga (New Zealand) published a study last December in which we are given several very useful clues about what we should do with our diet.

To carry out their research, these experts selected 250 subjects who were somewhat overweight (but, despite that, were in good health) and invited them to select one of these three star diets: intermittent fasting, paleo and Mediterranean .

Subsequently, they compared the evolution of each candidate for 12 months , using as reference the calories burned daily (which accounted for an application), the weight and the proportion of fat (measured both at the beginning and at the end of the experiment).

In this way, they could observe that only between 35% and 57% of the participants , depending on the diet they had selected, had been able to maintain their regimen throughout the year.

Although everyone experienced small weight loss and adipose tissue , they found that the diet had been clearly more effective in some specific cases.

As expected, those who opted for intermittent fasting (the most common: dividing each day into 16 hours of fasting and eight to eat) managed to lose kilos much faster than the rest. However, the researchers found that maintaining it over time proved to be a much more complicated challenge than what it meant to eat according to the dictates of the Mediterranean diet.

A lot of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, olive oil seeds combined with a moderate contribution of fish, eggs, poultry and dairy integrated the menus of those who chose to eat Mediterranean style who, in addition, were allowed take red meat once a week (at most) and drink a glass of wine daily. On their list of prohibited foods were processed foods (which cost them the most to avoid), butter and sugary drinks. A plan that they were able to follow for 365 days.

Finally, those who chose paleo (which prioritizes the consumption of lean meats, fish, eggs, organic dairy, fruits, vegetables, nuts or seeds and excludes grain, such as wheat, rice, corn or oats) , although they did not present difficulties in maintaining it over time, they were the ones who lost the lowest weight .

With all this data on the table, the experts from the University of Otaga concluded that, although intermittent fasting helps us lose more weight and faster, the Mediterranean diet , named the best of 2020 by US News & World Report, Not only does it help us stay at our ideal weight but it is the easiest to carry throughout life.

That said, human beings are so rare that, sometimes, they have to come 'from outside' (in this case from New Zealand) to tell us how good we have 'at home'.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project