A new study suggests that for obese people with inflammatory bowel disease, eating like you're fasting might ease symptoms—even without losing weight.

Other research found that people with a type of gut inflammation who followed a very low-calorie, plant-based diet a few days a week felt better, needed fewer steroid drugs, and had less inflammation—even when they didn’t lose weight. That’s surprising because weight loss is often assumed to be the key driver of improvement. The diet wasn’t exactly intermittent fasting as most people think of it, but it mimicked some of its patterns. The study linked in the post wasn’t actually the one showing these results, so the post’s framing is a bit misleading. Still, the findings suggest that how you eat, not just how much you weigh, might matter for gut inflammation.