It’s called the Alternate-Day Diet, and proponents say this diet plan makes it easier to lose weight, as well as helping with asthma symptoms, high blood pressure and cancer prevention.

Advocates claim that the diet works by triggering the health benefits of a very low calorie diet, which scientists have known for decades can increase longevity in animals.

Few humans could manage to stick to such diet of 800 calories a day, however. But tests on rats in 2003 by Dr Mark Mattson, an American Neuroscientist, showed they enjoyed all the health benefits if their diet was only cut on alternate days, reports the Mail.

Krista Varady, assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has conducted a 10-week trial on 16 overweight patients who ate 20 per cent of their normal intake one day, and a regular healthy diet the next. Each lost between 10lb and 30lb, more than expected.

Critics say that a disordered eating pattern such as this could cause long-term harm and be a gateway to a more dangerous eating disorder.

Source: MarieClaire.co.uk