NUTRITIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF INTERMITTENT FASTING IN THE WEIGHT LOSS PROCESS

Abstract

Restrictive diets are those that involve calorie restriction, which are most often adopted by people who want to lose weight quickly. Intermittent fasting is currently the most adopted form of restrictive diets. The objective was to analyze intermittent fasting as a weight loss strategy, demonstrating its harm to individuals who practice such diet control. This is a systematic review of the literature using the Pubmed, Scientific Electronic Library OnLine (Scielo) and GOOGLE Academic databases in order to identify scientific articles published in the period from 2013 to 2023. The descriptors used were: “fasting”, “calorie restriction” and “weight loss”; and their English counterparts: “fasting”, “caloric restriction” and “weight loss”. As well as the explicit mention “consequences of intermittent fasting”, “nutritional consequences of fasting”. During the research to prepare this systematic review, it was noticed that some articles discuss the benefits of intermittent fasting, however, most of these studies show that more research is still needed to be carried out. It should be noted, therefore, that the effects of intermittent fasting on human health are still unclear, which makes it necessary to encourage more research into this type of diet, since currently this diet has been adopted deliberately without any professional prescription.