There is a lot of ill informed comment about HIIT and the effects on weight loss and insulin resistance. For an academic study try looking at
www.hindawi.com/journals/jobes/2011/868305 which is a paper by Stephen Boucher from the Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales. It was published in The Journal of Obesity in 2011. It looked at 14 different pieces of research and found that HIIT did reduce body weight in nearly all cases. The main point to notice is that there has to be a big difference between the High Intensity work and the recovery work. The Wingate Test used 30 seconds High Intensity and 4 minutes Recovery, Tabata used 20 seconds HI and 2 minutes Recovery. Dr Moseley was using something close to the Tabata regime.
But the thing which is not made clear to most people is the level of intensity of the HI bit. Even this site speaks of 2 or 3 minutes Hi plus a short recovery period, which is nonsense, as you cannot do 2 or 3 minutes of HI if it is really HI. Hi is sprinting either on a bike or on a treadmill, or on a track. If you think that you can sprint for 2 or 3 minutes then you are kidding yourself! Sprinting is what you do for 100 or 200 metres, even a 400 metre race is just below sprinting speed , and so you are talking about durations of under 30 seconds. The other element is the level of effort involved, which means the resistance level that you set on the bike if you are doing it in the gym. The way to do what Dr Moseley did is to set the resistance at a high level for the HI bit and lower it again for the Recovery bit, not leave it at some low level for the whole period. I have used HIIT ever since I saw his Horizon programme ( not all the time but twice a year for 3 months each time) and I am currently setting the resistance at 300 watts for the HIIT part and 70 watts for the recovery, I sprint the 300 watts for 20 seconds at 150 RPM and recover for 2 minutes at 70 watts and 80 RPM. I do three sets of this work with a recovery at the end to make 10 minutes each time. I then do Steady State work on the treadmill or resistance work on the weights for a further 45 to 50 minutes. I do this regime 4 days/week with a Spinning Class on the 5th day.
My weight came down from 80kg to 70kg but has gone up to 73kg as the muscle mass has increased. I use around my body weight for the leg lifts and abdominal exercises and twice my body weight for the leg thrusts which is around what I used to do 50 years ago so my muscle mass has recovered significantly despite a working life which was sedentary. I am not saying that I can run as fast as I did when I last competed in1966 but my body weight and strength levels are not far off those days.
My blood sugar levels have been around the 5 to 5.5 level for the past 3 years having come down from a level of 9.5 when diagnosed with T2. The sensible thing to do is what Michael Moseley has done which is combine the HIIT with the 5:2 diet, that will ensure the weight loss and the improvement in Insulin Resistance.