New diet claims you should eat one meal a day to lose weight

Diet books are full of advice on when not to eat, from skipping snacks to having ‘diet days’ where you barely eat anything.

But could you get by on just one meal a day?

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A new diet book suggests that having one, large meal a day is a good way to provoke your body into burning fat by effectively ‘fasting’ for the rest of the time.

Dr Xand van Tulleken told Get the Gloss that you are hungry during the day, but he simply focuses on having his one meal at night.

Tulleken, author of How to Lose Weight Well, says that the upsides are that you don’t have to calorie count, or spend time liquidising vegetables.

Other nutrition experts are less sure, with some suggesting that a one-meal-a-day diet is hard to sustain – and that dieters will simply put the weight back on.

Dr Van Tulleken, ‘’I have a nine-to-five job for quite a bit of the time in which I teach and do research. I start the day with a cup or two of black coffee and then eat all my calories in the evening in a big, tasty meal.

‘There’s a large amount of medical evidence that indicates that fasting is a safe and effective way of losing weight. The scientific research on fasting makes compelling reading (OK, it’s not the new Dan Brown or Gillian Flynn but I enjoyed it!): it does seem that you can lose weight by fasting even if you don’t reduce your overall weekly calorie intake.

‘The way in which this works isn’t clear but some researchers describe fasting as being a good kind of stress on your body, like exercise, and that it promotes fat burning.

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