The FastDay Forum

Very interesting responses. @MaryAnn you seem to be yet another one who is sailing in the stormy seas of stressful life situations ... There was a thread recently by @rawkaren about this, am sure there is something in this stalling weight loss.

I've really been doing straight 5:2 since I started, along with missing breakfast (16:8) about 3 months in (a year now) and have lost 20lb ... But very slowly like @janeg I have taken an interest in all the variations, but have not really incorporated them on a regular basis. Now very near goal weight (1lb above for the last few weeks!) and am sticking with it, and not thinking too much about it (and enjoying ice cream, desserts, strawberries, cream, chocolate ...). It does seem to work, and as I am like many in not wanting to count calories or have an overly fussy regime, I know I will stick to it.

Nice to hear from everyone who has done 5:2 for a long time so happily.

I think there should be something permanent on the home page of the forum called something like So you Want to Try 5:2 aimed at newbies which sets out the 'rules' simply, and encourages them to stick with it for 3 months before resorting to any tweaks. Trouble is, so many people start because they have a looming weight loss deadline, and want to try something that will speed things up, and start experimenting before they have discovered what fasting alone will achieve for them.

But the discussions about low carb, Windows etc evolved out of experiences where people were doing basic 5:2 for a long time but were not happy with the results, stuck on long plateaus, achieving nowhere near 1lb loss a week, suddenly unable to stick to the Fast, mysteriously gaining weight etc So are extremely valuable. Not sure how to 'protect' newbies from this?

[janeg]

Good idea @barbarita. Seems another good point for reintroducing the 'bubbles'.

[carieoates]

Wow a great thread. I will have to come back to this as I'm on holiday and just checking in.

What I love most about this way of eating is the RELAXED way I now feel about food/ weight fluctuations/etc. Sometimes I stop and wonder: is that really me taking these food things so calmly!!!
I can experiment with ease. My first bout of maintaining didn't really work. I am on my second bout now and doing well. I never ever count calories, TDEE or otherwise. I have been dong 6:1 in maintenance as recommended in THE BOOK. I love the advice on the new site - about eg. maintaining. The maintaining window is brilliant. So this week I am doing 5:2. And am already in the window with my first fast.
The only thing I do differently than at the beginning, is that I eat differently on Fast days. No longer calorie counting there either. I just have coffee and tea and water until 15:00. Then I have a little snack of yoghurt (very low fat). Then I have supper at 18:00 with Hubby. I do not worry about time windows or recipes. I cook normally. I have eaten low carb for year on end (that just stopped working for me on its own) so I do that, too, but far less strenuously than I used to. Tonight Hubby and I are having "Herb Baked Chicken", I'll have no rice with it, and have less than normally. And it works wonderfully. This 5:2 way of eating has really, really improved the quality of my life. I just ignore all the really complicated advice on fasting and do my own thing, mostly as in THE ORIGINAL BOOK, by Spencer and Mosley. Thank you all.

See I come form a totally different place to most people as I hadn't ever dieted before. I had cut down on the food I eat but never followed a diet as such. I saw 5:2 as a way to still eat the food I wanted but without having to resort to living on salad and being able to go out for a meal without blowing a whole diet. I also knew that I could sustain this for the rest of my life and saw it as a lifestyle change rather than the dreaded 4 letter diet word. Now here comes the but I have to count my cals on a normal day if I didn't I would and have when I haven't go over my TDEE. I don't see it as a problem and I don't mind doing it that is my personnel choice and that's what I like most about this it's freedom and the fact you can tweak it to what works for you and not making food the enemy and bad, most overweight people have enough food issues without adding in that. My MIL put it a lovely way for me Look at the TDEE as money you have to spend on food for that day and then you can't go over.

Thinking of you @MaryAnn re yr job situation and hoping something just right for you comes along..sometimes one door shuts,another opens
The thing about eating sweets..i think it goes right back to childhood when we were givensweets/ candy,lollipos - basically sugar - to dry our tears after we had fallen over/ been brave about an injection, or as a reward for good behaviour.pity they didnt give us carrot sticks instead,so we wd now equate carrots as treats rather than sugar!

The only thing I do differently than at the beginning, is that I eat differently on Fast days. No longer calorie counting there either. I just have coffee and tea and water until 15:00. Then I have a little snack of yoghurt (very low fat). Then I have supper at 18:00 with Hubby. I do not worry about time windows or recipes. I cook normally. I have eaten low carb for year on end (that just stopped working for me on its own) so I do that, too, but far less strenuously than I used to. Tonight Hubby and I are having "Herb Baked Chicken", I'll have no rice with it, and have less than normally. And it works wonderfully. This 5:2 way of eating has really, really improved the quality of my life. I just ignore all the really complicated advice on fasting and do my own thing, mostly as in THE ORIGINAL BOOK, by Spencer and Mosley. Thank you all.

your take on 5:2 fast days after a while is almost precisely mine after 15 months.
- no calorie counting
- Restrict eating till mid arvo and break fast with something light and "good for you"
- Eat (roughly) normally for dinner though maybe with less carb just because tend to be too many calories and i have less room for protein and fibre.[/list]
- reduce sweets considerably (none or little chocolate, never any icecream (switch to yoghurt)

too easy hey.

[quote="barbarita"]Nice to hear from everyone who has done 5:2 for a long time so happily.

I think there should be something permanent on the home page of the forum called something like So you Want to Try 5:2 aimed at newbies which sets out the 'rules' simply, and encourages them to stick with it for 3 months before resorting to any tweaks. Trouble is, so many people start because they have a looming weight loss deadline, and want to try something that will speed things up, and start experimenting before they have discovered what fasting alone will achieve for them.

@barbarita I agree with you. All too often someone posts after a couple or 3 weeks about their non existent or slow or stalled weight loss and people - with the best of intentions trying to be helpful - jump in with suggestions of tweaks they could try. I think we really need to emphasise that weight loss can be slow to start and continues slow for some of us.I would really encourage people to make their trackers public as it is interesting to see how much variation in weight loss there is. I know it might feel embarrassing to declare how heavy you are but we are amongst friends here.
On the subject of the trackers @Moogie or @caroreesI wonder if it is possible to alter the time frame of the tracker similar to Libra. When one has been on the plan for some time ,as I have, the tracker looks like a relatively smooth downward slope whereas there have been plenty of wobbles along the way. Seeing those may also encourage people just starting out

@CandiceMarie,

My mom, who tended to be anorexic, and who was a wretched cook, raised me along the principles healthy eating as understood in the 1950s. Only one piece of candy a day, jello (Jelly to Brits) for dessert as she erroneously believed it was full of healthy protein. Carrot sticks for snacks, etc.

I never had a good piece of cake until I got to high school where they sold it in the cafeteria. I never had anything to eat that wasn't boring and bland until I moved in with a college roomate who was a fabulous cook and she got me cooking my way through various ethnic cookbooks.

Net result: I adore candy, pastry and food and always have. And since my problems with blood sugar make it inadvisable for me to eat much carbs, that has only worsened their appeal to me. I have gone for literally years without eating sweets and treats, when eating a very low carb diet, and now as a result, I can barely stand the sight of meat and could live happily on chocolate and pastry for the rest of my life.

So my guess is that a lot of the appeal of candy and treats is that we know we aren't supposed to eat them. In short, they represent SIN. And of course, as we get older, sex drive wanes a lot faster than appetite. So gastronomic sin becomes a lot more attractive than those carnal ones that made my 20s and 30s so interesting!

It seems to me that we are all actually singing from the same hymn sheet but we use different words when we describe the same thing. For instance, I read that a lot of fasters on here say they don't eat on a fast day til at least the afternoon and then have something a few hours later, I also do this and describe it as an eating window even though I never actually apply any clock times or other restrictions, it's just how I naturally eat and calling it a window is just an easy term which people on here recognise without explanation. I never use the term outside of this forum. I read that a lot of people eat very low or no carb whilst I say that I restrict them somewhat. Some of us are trying to reduce sugar from our diets whilst others say they are sugar free wherever possible. I still maintain that we are all doing the same thing but we all see our own actions slightly differently to everyone else's. I would always recommend new fasters do 5:2 because, for me, it was hugely successful but I found I just naturally evolved into the WOE which I now do. At the end of the day I consider that everyone here is an Intermittent Faster however they chose to describe themselves and however they approach their weight loss. 5:2, 4:3. 6:1, 16/8, 19/5 what do the numbers matter or in what combination you use them? I have never felt that there is pure or basic way to do this, there are as many variations are there are people doing it. If you find a method of IF that works for you then, in my opinion, you have found your own personal holy grail whatever you or anyone else calls it.

Ballerina x

Great thread, everyone. It's so funny because I have been thinking the same thing lately.

I have been fasting (I also dislike WOE for the acronym's connotation) for one year now. My fastiversary is Aug. 15. I was religious to a fault at the beginning. I even kept a journal, where I recorded everything from the calorie counts of various favorite foods (speaking of which, I didn't like MM's book with its very unhelpful list of calorie counts for food by 100 grams. That was completely unhelpful for me, so I had to search out the calories of foods in other ways, and found the counts to be wildly different depending on where you got the information....but that's another thread, I guess) to my weight and measurements to my feelings and more. It was great. Somewhere down the line, I stopped recording everything except for my weight and measurements. But I love my journal.

My experience was that once I got used to the calories of different foods, I stopped weighing all of my foods and just "knew" what foods I could eat on a fast day. I would fast for 24 hours with zero or at least less than 25-30 calories, and then eat a good, healthy meal of lean protein and veggies. I think really it's Eat-Stop-Eat I've been doing (because I believe that 24 hours of true fasting is particularly good for you, as opposed to eating small amounts of calories throughout the day). Anyway, after around 5 months of pretty strict 5:2, I started adding in the eating windows.

And, as my posts on this forum attest, I got confused and sort of lost the plot a bit. And then I wondered why I was feeling a little adrift. I made goal in June, but since then, I've put on another couple of pounds (I think because I was only fasting once a week and then doing the 16/8 to 19/5 five days a week--I give myself Saturday off). Part of this small weight gain is undoubtedly due to menopause, but I don't want to let these two pounds turn into five, which then might turn into ten, and then I'll be back to where I started.

So, the last week, I've been back to 5:2. Maybe I'll dust off the old journal again!

Thanks for the comraderie and help on this forum.

@CandiceMarie,

So my guess is that a lot of the appeal of candy and treats is that we know we aren't supposed to eat them. In short, they represent SIN. And of course, as we get older, sex drive wanes a lot faster than appetite. So gastronomic sin becomes a lot more attractive than those carnal ones that made my 20s and 30s so interesting!

@Peebles nice take on this about SIN. Gastronomic sin vs carnal sin. Focus on food rather than the flesh... With 5:2 of course, eating that cake on a non fast day is really not a sin anymore and we can enjoy it without the guilt. Though i guess like some carnal pleasures, they are more enjoyable when you shouldnt be having it.. but thats probably talk for another forum.

What a great thread! I saw the original programme today and that is what made me start. I have always been more interested in the health benefits but do need to lose weight.
I have pledged to myself that I will stick with 5:2 for the whole of August and see what happens. I will not count calories or measure what I eat on feed days. I know from past experience I will naturally eat less anyway. I have to plod quietly on and listen to my body. If I want any 'sinful' foods I will have it. I want to get back to eating to relieve hunger not to ease emotions, a big one for me. There is so much more to being overweight than food!
Thank you all for your comments.

But the discussions about low carb, Windows etc evolved out of experiences where people were doing basic 5:2 for a long time but were not happy with the results, stuck on long plateaus, achieving nowhere near 1lb loss a week, suddenly unable to stick to the Fast, mysteriously gaining weight etc. So are extremely valuable...

While I accept all your points throughout the thread about keeping it simple for newbies, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. You have built up a wealth of information on this forum which is a fantastic resource. I have learned so much in the seven months I have been here. I thought the idea behind changing the forum name from 5:2 to Fast Day was in order to incorporate the various methods of Intermittent Fasting, widening the range.

By all means encourage the newbies to stick to 5:2 for a while, but I'd just like to say that I have really appreciated the rich array of your different methods and experiences which have helped me find what works well for me. I'm sure others do too.