Research shows that fasting on alternate days has health benefits, including lowering the amount of inflammation in the body. That's important because inflammation has been linked to many chronic diseases and keeping it under control can increase longevity. And now there's growing evidence that fasting can be an answer to weight loss , too. New approaches to fasting are far from the water-only or liquid-diet images you may have of it. What many researchers have been testing are variations on what's called intermittent fasting -- typically one day on, one day off. Read more: Major Steps of Losing Weight Like No Other For a pilot study done at the University of Illinois at Chicago, participants alternated fasting days with regular eating days and lost about a pound a week over the course of a 12-week study. It's important to note that on the fasting days, they still ate one meal, which consisted of about 25 percent of their normal daily calorie intake. ...