Fasting: Fast Track to Fat Loss

Well, 3 stars for anything which promotes fasting with even moderate intelligence. Ponce de León didn't find the fountain of youth of course, but we have the next best thing. Best of all it requires literally doing nothing — specifically doing nothing with food. Just stop. There are nuances to everything and devils to all details, though, and Bryant promotes calorie counting in this book, an approach that is, to my mind, antithetical to fasting. It leads me to believe that however great the author's research, his understanding of intermittent fasting is incomplete, and his understanding of nutrition out of date. Given the proper environment, the appetite can perfectly regulate itself. This is one of the primary benefits of IF. Doing without food resets the body to a healthy relationship to food. What's more, calorie counting itself, whether fasting is included or not, has been proven ineffective. Calorie counts for almost all foods are way off and vary greatly. Beyond that there is the understanding that calories in/calories out is just bad science. The biological processes which comprise digestion are astoundingly complex and not at all quantifiable from such a binary and simplistic perspective. The long and short of it is that the body will tend to increase metabolism with more calories and decrease it with less. It's only the ingestion of excess calories continually over time that contribute to obesity, and even here it's only a sliver of the story. See “Nature Wants Us to Be Fat” by Richard Johnson for a more sophisticated understanding of weight loss.

Intermittent fasting absolutely works and represents perhaps the most natural, perfect way of eating, something in line with how we've evolved to deal with food. This isn't a bad book on the subject; it's just not a particularly good one. As with most things, your best bet is to read many books and not latch onto any one particular theory, at least not until your education is more complete.