It's (always) worth skimming the article, or at least the headline. From the subheadline:
> *Given the same energy intake and expenditure*, intermittent fasting two days versus one day per week increases weight loss in overweight men and women
This study isn't saying "2 day IF is a miracle weight-loss cure and you should just do it bada bing bada boom weight loss solved". It's holding everything constant except the number of fasting days, and finding that it's (quite dramatically) more effective in the short-term.
This is a data point, not a weight-loss plan. It doesn't call for "skepticism", just careful reading and limited application (or for a start, reading the article/headline at all).
Nutrition is intensely complicated and devilishly difficult to study. But for scientifically-literate people who take it seriously, data points like this shed light on limited portions of the "solution space". This is crucial to mapping out the space enough to understand how to improve your own diet; it's not amenable to an impatient approach that expects every study to be a magic bullet.
Even ignoring the signal that this provides, the absolute minimum value of this study is that somebody who's already doing a time-limited IF-1 diet can switch to a time-limited IF-2 diet. That's valuable in and of itself.
> If you want to know how to lose weight for a few weeks you don't need a peer reviewed journal, just go get a "women's health" magazine and read about several ways that really do probably work to lose weight in that timespan.
With the same improvement in hunger levels, hormone profile, and cardiometabolic health (all mentioned in the for both the control and treatment)? I highly doubt it. Even assuming that IF isn't sustainable[1], people do have short-term weight loss goals sometimes, and IF provides a path to do so that keeps metabolic and hormonal health in mind relative to traditional crash dieting.
[1] I've been doing it for....five years now? Not only did I lose a reasonable amount of weight early on, it's been helpful for maintaining during a life phase of suddenly-expanding waistlines among my peers. Plus it's trivial to dial it up slightly when I do feel the need to tighten up a little.
