Cure holiday bloat with the 'two-day diet'

Masterfile

Raise your hand if you can’t fit into any of your jeans? Not even your fat jeans. Me too. Even my sweat pants feel snug. 

But don’t freak out or start wearing your bathrobe to work. There is a cure for holiday-related muffin top and it involves less pain, suffering and self-hatred than you might imagine. It does come with a price though. You will have to give up carbs for 48 hours. 

According to a recent study (via Marie Claire), you don’t need to go on a strict diet to slim down, all you need to do is eat modestly and cut carbs from your daily diet twice a week. 

Dr. Michelle Harvie, a researcher for the Breast Cancer Prevention Project in Manchester, England put 100 women on three different diets to see which programs proved the most effective for weight loss overall. 

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the daily dieters who came out on top. In the end, Harvie determined that those participants who only dieted two days a week lost more weight than those who stuck to a diet every day. 

Here’s what the women ate on those two days: 

“Two pints of semi-skimmed milk, four portions of vegetables (80g/portion), one portion of fruit, a salty low calorie drink and a multivitamin and mineral supplement.” 

Harvie calls the two-day plan the “Intermittent Diet.” 

The Intermittent diet approach isn’t easy, however. It necessitates reducing your caloric intake to 650 calories a day during those two days—and you’re prohibited from eating bread or carbohydrates. You can eat normally and eat carbs on the five other days you don’t diet. But “normally” for the purposes of the study means eating along the lines of the Mediterranean diet. 

Aside from weight loss, the two-day diet has potentially beneficial implications for a woman’s long-term health. The study suggests that eating this way as means of losing weight can reduce the risk factors for breast cancer up to 40 percent.