How trendy diet, exercise helps shed weight TWICE AS FAST

Intermittent fasting, combined with high-intensity exercise, could help women lose twice as much weight compared to doing either on their own.

Time-restricted eating (TRE) – where people have a short ‘window’ for meals, eating breakfast late and dinner early – is popular among celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston.

Equally trendy is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which involves exercising in short bursts.

Now a study has found doing both may help women lose about twice as much weight as TRE or HIIT on their own.

Researchers recruited 131 overweight women, aged 19 to 45, asking a quarter to do TRE, a quarter to do HIIT, and a quarter to do both, for seven weeks.

The rest – a control group of 33 women – carried on with their usual diet and physical activity.

The results, published in Cell Metabolism, found that compared to the control group, participants on the TRE regime lost 4.6 pounds (2.1kg) in body weight.

Those doing HIIT lost almost four pounds (1.8kg).

But those doing both shed almost eight pounds (3.6kg) on average compared to the control group.

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology said eating for a shorter period each day means people cut the calories they consume, and exercise helps the body burn fat more efficiently.