Maybe, maybe not. I think this is sort of comparable to a fast, once calories are that low. Most people would burn through so few calories fairly quickly, returning to the fasted state more quickly than they would with a more mild calorie restriction. Just like with fasting, a common occurence with a very low calorie diet as opposed to a milder calorie restriction is a strong decrease in appetite. At that point, pattern of food intake might not even matter--with 200 calories at breakfast, lunch, and supper, people will pretty much have burned through the calories from the last meal before they get to the next meal.

Six months isn't really long enough to be certain that people will be able to stick to the maintenance plan on a long-term basis, though.

One interesting thing here is that the Newcastle diet includes 46 percent carbohydrate in the shakes--so by the time you add what's in the non-starchy vegetables, you're probably looking at about 60 or 70 grams of carbohydrate a day. It would be interesting to see a study with a complete fast, or with the same calories but distributed differently (Turtle replaced most of the carbohydrate with fat, for instance), and what that does to the reversal of liver and pancreas fat. First guess would be that it would accelerate it (yay, team ), but you can't really tell until the experiment is done.