Created by body builder and personal trainer Jon Benson, the Every Other Day Diet (or EODD for short) is a weight loss program designed to allow its participants to kind of have their cake and eat it too! While this may sound like an impossible feat to achieve with regard to dieting and weight loss (because, really, who are we kidding here: have your cake and eat it too and still lose weight?), once you see and understand how the program works, you will realize that it’s not such a far out idea at all.
The EODD diet plan is designed to work around a simple concept. By alternating caloric intake on an every other day basis, you trick the body into expecting that calories are not being limited, when in fact they are. How this works is that on what are called Feed Days, your caloric intake is up (up to 150% more) than on Burn Days where your caloric intake is less (as low as 50% of normal intake). This creates a synergistic condition wherein the body ends up burning fat stores for energy on those Burn Days.
How this works is, basically, if caloric intake is reduced too much, the body’s metabolic rate slows down, thereby inhibiting the body’s ability to lose weight. By keeping the body off balance, adding excess calories and restricting calories on alternate days, the body maintains a high metabolic rate, and will tap into the excess fat for needed energy.
On those low caloric intake days, protein intake is accentuated while carbohydrate intake is limited. When combined with a high intensity weight bearing program of exercise this can transform fat into lean muscle. Then you have the best of both worlds: weight loss combined with muscle development. This is the perfect combination for creating a healthy body. And it works for both men and women!
This process is also known as calorie cycling. It works like this: for two days you eat slightly more calories than your body requires. Then you eat less for two days, more for a single day, and less over the next two days. During the course of a week, you end up eating fewer calories than needed, which results in a caloric deficit and weight loss. For the program to work as outlined, participants are encouraged to exercise regularly in order to burn excess fat more quickly.
If done correctly, the result is increased muscle mass, lower levels of insulin (a hormone that in high amounts can lead to disease), increased energy, greater hormonal balance, and a higher output of Human Growth Hormone (the “youth” hormone). And as stated before, participants are allowed to indulge in their favorite foods on the Feed Days, which makes this diet approach much easier to take because it doesn’t necessarily feel like a diet.
This is a diet and exercise plan that can easily translate into a lifestyle change once you have finished losing the weight you wish to lose. A plan that you can use for as long as you live, which solves the all-important follow-up question of being able to maintain the weight loss after the diet has ended. Choosing this as a lifestyle solution makes sense: because it is based in real world statistics and not on Fantasy Land. Moreover, it provides a consistent result rather than an impermanent quick fix.