I think you are confusing calorie restriction with fasting.
You can be regularly fasting AND eating the same amount of calories on average. You just eat more between fasts. Fasting just means there is enough period between your meals for your body to get stressed a bit and to have to go into fasting mode.
The idea here is that the act of fasting alone promotes positive changes. A side effect is that most people, usually, are not able to make up all of the calories in a short time. Meaning if you eat only every other day, it actually is quite hard to eat two days of calories within one day.
For me fasting is much more bearable than "dieting". For me dieting just means I am hungry constantly while fasting means I just need to survive until the next meal when I will be able to eat as much as I want and feel satisfied.
Also fasting is sort of self-regulating. As long as I can keep to the fasting period and I am not criminally overeating outside of it, I can reap the benefits of weight loss as if I was on caloric restriction but without having to think about it or counting calories.
Neither caloric restriction nor fasting necessarily means wasting of your muscles. Though if you fast long enough or restrict your calories enough at some point it will become unavoidable.
I personally think it all depends on your cost/benefit. Fasting brings positive effects you can't emulate in any other way. But you don't need to be fasting constantly, I personally think you can get a lot of effects by fasting occasionally (like one day a week, for example).
And without getting too much into details, I think if you are absolutely unwilling to do fasting and would prefer caloric restriction there still are better ways to do it. It is better to reduce your calorie ingestion by reducing hunger relative to your output.
For example, jogging every day in the morning, eating whole fresh fruit and vegetables some time before your meals, will have effect of reducing your hunger and making you eat less without having to be constantly hungry.
But the parent wrote "Does such caloric restricted diet allow one to maintain muscles and/or strength?" Which means he is asking about caloric restriction responding to comment about fasting.
I'd say the parent's question is perfectly valid: “He gets by on one meal a day of 1500 calories.” implies, in fact outright states, a calorie restricted diet as well as a temporally restricted one.
Most people would struggle to finish a meal with half those calories, and rightly so - it's excessive. Strongmen could go over that amount a day when bulking, maybe, and that's about the semi-practical limits of the human body (while maintaining at least some semblance of health).
You can be regularly fasting AND eating the same amount of calories on average. You just eat more between fasts. Fasting just means there is enough period between your meals for your body to get stressed a bit and to have to go into fasting mode.
The idea here is that the act of fasting alone promotes positive changes. A side effect is that most people, usually, are not able to make up all of the calories in a short time. Meaning if you eat only every other day, it actually is quite hard to eat two days of calories within one day.
For me fasting is much more bearable than "dieting". For me dieting just means I am hungry constantly while fasting means I just need to survive until the next meal when I will be able to eat as much as I want and feel satisfied.
Also fasting is sort of self-regulating. As long as I can keep to the fasting period and I am not criminally overeating outside of it, I can reap the benefits of weight loss as if I was on caloric restriction but without having to think about it or counting calories.
Neither caloric restriction nor fasting necessarily means wasting of your muscles. Though if you fast long enough or restrict your calories enough at some point it will become unavoidable.
I personally think it all depends on your cost/benefit. Fasting brings positive effects you can't emulate in any other way. But you don't need to be fasting constantly, I personally think you can get a lot of effects by fasting occasionally (like one day a week, for example).
And without getting too much into details, I think if you are absolutely unwilling to do fasting and would prefer caloric restriction there still are better ways to do it. It is better to reduce your calorie ingestion by reducing hunger relative to your output.
For example, jogging every day in the morning, eating whole fresh fruit and vegetables some time before your meals, will have effect of reducing your hunger and making you eat less without having to be constantly hungry.