The FastDay Forum

Welcome daisysunshine, I'm sure you & your husband will Find much inspiration & information on this forum. For me, the health benefits are great, after 5 months, I detailed the comparison bloodwork on my blog. Good luck & happy fasting.

Peebles, thanks for your post, it was very helpful. All the responses here have been very positive. It's good to have a ready reply for if it comes up. Finally, my diabetes doctor is fine with my doing IF, we just made some adjustments to my meds schedule.

[janeg]

Welcome @Daisysunshine and Mr Daisysunshine.
Hope you find this WOE inspirational and life changing like so many of us have.
Remember to drink plenty of fluids and take lots of measurements.
And do come back and let us know how it's going.
Join in with our fasting today thread for support too.
Good luck

One of my best friends is a dietitian, who specialised in eating disorders, and she won't even talk to me about fasting as she is so adamant it's unhealthy and bad for you.

My guess is most of us are here because we have weigh to lose, have tried various ways to slim over the years generally been unsuccessful and we have found 5:2 or variations to the IF theme have worked rather marvellously for us. Also on the journey since early 2013 we as a community have discovered about good fats, low carbs, a generally plant based menu etc. there is much more we have learnt and we have had heaps of fun and also there has been sadness and some fireworks.

Some of us fluid fast and we don't get ill as we only do it for IF. I am a fluid faster and will remain so as my preferred mode of fasting. I don't eat purposefully so my hunger switch doesn't get turned on. In winter some of my fluids are very low cal soups but I come in at about 350-400 cals on a fluid fast day. But some days it is lower. Some people even choose to have only water on a fast day. The way I see it is that I like my food and I am not going to do myself an injury if for one day a week I give my body a rest and ensure I keep my fluids up. I am sensible and my doctor is very happy I have managed to get my weight into a healthy weight range, believe me I am not about to fade away infact I have plateaued and still have a way to go to reach a BMI of upper reaches of healthy

There was a forum discussion a while ago about length of fasting not being safe. Forum members were able to make comments and the delicate issue of eating disorders and fasting was very tactfully canvassed. It is a fraught subject and very distressing for people who have eating disorders and those close too and supporting them. It seems to me that people on this forum are doing the best they can to get themselves into healthy weight ranges and then to maintain

[carorees]

I'm not sure either but I do remember reading ages ago posts from carorees and her issues with her BP control because of her medication which was an ACE and I remember reading some explanation for why it was happening (if I was savvy enough I'd be able to point you to the discussion but I'm not). Maybe you could pm her and ask?

Sorry for the delay in replying to this: I was away for the weekend.

When I started 5:2 I had high blood pressure controlled by ramipril (an ACE inhibitor), as I lost weight my blood pressure came down until after about 6 months it shot up again. My doctor tested everything possible that might have caused it and every test came back normal. I researched on the internet and found a scientific paper documenting paradoxical increases in blood pressure with certain antihypertensive drugs. This means that some people have an increase in blood pressure when they take tablets designed to lower blood pressure. I found that ACE inhibitors are more likely to cause this. I also found that with weight loss you can get a decrease in renin which is the chemical that starts the chain of chemical reactions resulting in an increase blood pressure when the body detects that blood pressure has fallen. ACE inhibitors act to prevent this chain of reactions taking place which is how they lower blood pressure. If there is low renin this kind of paradoxical increase in BP is more likely. So, I decided to stop taking the ACE inhibitor and my BP started to fall fairly quickly. I have now been off medication for about a year and my BP is in the normal range.

Here is the link to the paper on increased BP with antihypertensive medications: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20725055
And here is the link to the paper on renin lowering with weight loss: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17846979

Thanks for the welcomes, and carorees, thanks for the info about blood pressure medication. I hope to get off mine for good as I lose this weight.

I would also like to comment on the post about fluid fasting. I drink a lot of milky black tea throughout the day, and I've decided that about half my fasting day calories will come from tea with milk (I sweeten it with Stevia). I agree that the less I eat, the less hungry I get. Along with the tea, the remainder of my calories will be low carb and come mainly from protein with a little veg thrown in. Although not exactly following The 2 Day Diet by Dr. Harvie, I got a lot of great information from her books and will be fasting two consecutive days with about a hundred more calories a day than recommended by Dr. Mosley.

Carorees,

Thanks for the detailed explanation and cites.