The FastDay Forum

The science in his first edition was so sloppy, I would have ignored the diet had a friend not had such good results. It was only when I realized that the effect 5:2 has on calories is enough to explain all its effects that I got excited by it.

And since Moseley isn't a practicing doctor and appears, from what I read in his first edition, to be almost painfully ignorant both about diet and things like blood sugar health, he is probably the last person to write the book we need to read.

from your comments above @Peebleswhat would you say are the worst 5 paragraphs in the book and why (refer to page numbers if you like, as i have the book here. Dont know food/nutrition science well enough to judge but you may be able to enlighten me (us)

If only i made money from evangelising lol. Had someone comment that i had lost weight (saw them 2 years ago).. and i believe husband and wife are fasting today and Thursday ... and they never heard of the diet before

It is no from me as well

Nope. The cynic in me says it's a money making thing. Sorry.

Nope. The cynic in me says it's a money making thing. Sorry.

If it educates and gets the word out there about this fantastic eating regime, with a bit of a boost in marketing via a new book and all the associated press, it can't be such a bad thing. Sometimes I personally feel indebted to MM and colleagues for my change in eating/healthy lifestyle, loss of weight and hopefully a longer life. So that's priceless.

I won't be buying the book but if it gets more people to try this wonderful WOE then it's a good thing. I think this forum is up with the best of them when it comes to information on fasting and nutrition, and it is regularly updated - unlike a book.
Like @Juliana.Rivers, and most of us here I too am 'indebted to MM'. He is my hero, he has changed my life and in a way introduced me to everyone here. So three cheers for MM! hip, hip..........

...horray

@Juliana.Rivers,

I don't have a copy of the book, as I got mine from the Public Library. But what I still remember was him saying something about how before he started his diet his fasting blood sugar was slightly elevated though not diabetic, then he reported his fasting glucose test value which was, in fact, fully diabetic--unless you were using the diagnostic criteria that were in use before they were revised, worldwide, in 1997.

This really surprised me because it would have taken half a minute to check this on Google. Elsewhere I believe there were other less glaring statements that made it clear that Dr. M is completely unaware of how blood sugar works or should be treated. Most importantly, while he said something mushy about how the diet might not be suitable for diabetics, he did not spell out WHY. In fact, it is only unsuitable for diabetics who are using a specific group of older oral drugs or injecting certain kinds of insulin because those drugs are dosed with the assumption that the person is eating a large amount of carbohydrate and without that carbohydrate they will hypo.

But anyone with diabetes using a whole other set of drugs approved after 1997 or who understands how to use the DAFNE insulin protocol (which has even spread to the UK a decade after it was used in the US) would be fine fasting.

OTOH, fasting alone is not the best dietary approach for people with diabetes. They really need to back off the carbs. So to suggest that the diet reversed his prediabetes (which was really diabetes) as his book does, again shows a lack of medical awareness.

My guess is that after a few years of maintaining with one fast a week, Dr. M's fasting blood sugar is very likely to rise again and over time his post meal numbers are likely to deteriorate, as that is what has happened to most people I've heard from who began to develop diabetes in the pattern he describes (fasting blood sugar elevated first) whether or not they lost weight. It's apparently a genetic thing. The appropriate dietary treatment is to cut down on carbs every day not just two days a week. This is more likely to preserve what insulin secreting ability the person still has.

Beyond that there were a few citations of the very few studies of non-intermittent fasting, on which the claims of its benefits were based, but non-intermittent fasting works quite differently from intermittent fasting. That's because a 4 day fast will completely drain glycogen and put people into a ketogenic state after day 2. Thus most of the benefits of that kind of fasting are the benefits you see from a strict low carb diet, but with 5:2 as he describes it you never get into a ketogenic state because it takes between 2 to 3 straight days of eating less than 100 g of carbs a day for that to happen.

And of course, what we are doing in 5:2 isn't even, technically, fasting, as we are eating, just not very much, on fast days. This, of course, is a benefit, not a problem with 5:2. Actual fasting often causes changes in thyroid function that we would all like to avoid (euthyroid syndrome, where T3 is present but not in its activated form, leading to exhaustion and slowed metabolism.)

The other thing I found annoying about the book was that it didn't go into any of the issues that arise when people attempt to fast, which are so well covered on this board. It really did seem like an opportunistic book written to cash in on the huge amounts of money available to anyone with an M.D. who comes up with a new Miracle Diet to be sold to the desperate people who have failed to lose weight on all the other miracle diets.

The advances for those kinds of books can be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars and their earnings in the millions. So doctors are always coming up with new, and often fake twists with which to attempt to cash in. In this case, as I said before, the diet is a good one, though it is actually a tweak of the Johnson Up Day Down Day (JUDDD) diet which has been around for several more years and has been actively discussed all this time in another online diet board.

So to me this is another of those books that is written in a style that automatically would make any medical professional who knew anything about the topic completely discount it as hucksterism, just like the Atkins diet, which though it was an excellent diet was written up in such a hyperbolic, huckstery way that it took decades for it to get taken seriously. That approach while it makes money for the author makes it TOUGHER to get the concept into widespread use.

@Juliana.Rivers,

I don't have a copy of the book, as I got mine from the Public Library. But what I still remember was him saying something about how before he started his diet his fasting blood sugar was slightly elevated though not diabetic, then he reported his fasting glucose test value which was, in fact, fully diabetic--unless you were using the diagnostic criteria that were in use before they were revised, worldwide, in 1997.

This really surprised me because it would have taken half a minute to check this on Google. Elsewhere I believe there were other less glaring statements that made it clear that Dr. M is completely unaware of how blood sugar works or should be treated. Most importantly, while he said something mushy about how the diet might not be suitable for diabetics, he did not spell out WHY. In fact, it is only unsuitable for diabetics who are using a specific group of older oral drugs or injecting certain kinds of insulin because those drugs are dosed with the assumption that the person is eating a large amount of carbohydrate and without that carbohydrate they will hypo.

But anyone with diabetes using a whole other set of drugs approved after 1997 or who understands how to use the DAFNE insulin protocol (which has even spread to the UK a decade after it was used in the US) would be fine fasting.

OTOH, fasting alone is not the best dietary approach for people with diabetes. They really need to back off the carbs. So to suggest that the diet reversed his prediabetes (which was really diabetes) as his book does, again shows a lack of medical awareness.

My guess is that after a few years of maintaining with one fast a week, Dr. M's fasting blood sugar is very likely to rise again and over time his post meal numbers are likely to deteriorate, as that is what has happened to most people I've heard from who began to develop diabetes in the pattern he describes (fasting blood sugar elevated first) whether or not they lost weight. It's apparently a genetic thing. The appropriate dietary treatment is to cut down on carbs every day not just two days a week. This is more likely to preserve what insulin secreting ability the person still has.

Beyond that there were a few citations of the very few studies of non-intermittent fasting, on which the claims of its benefits were based, but non-intermittent fasting works quite differently from intermittent fasting. That's because a 4 day fast will completely drain glycogen and put people into a ketogenic state after day 2. Thus most of the benefits of that kind of fasting are the benefits you see from a strict low carb diet, but with 5:2 as he describes it you never get into a ketogenic state because it takes between 2 to 3 straight days of eating less than 100 g of carbs a day for that to happen.

And of course, what we are doing in 5:2 isn't even, technically, fasting, as we are eating, just not very much, on fast days. This, of course, is a benefit, not a problem with 5:2. Actual fasting often causes changes in thyroid function that we would all like to avoid (euthyroid syndrome, where T3 is present but not in its activated form, leading to exhaustion and slowed metabolism.)

The other thing I found annoying about the book was that it didn't go into any of the issues that arise when people attempt to fast, which are so well covered on this board. It really did seem like an opportunistic book written to cash in on the huge amounts of money available to anyone with an M.D. who comes up with a new Miracle Diet to be sold to the desperate people who have failed to lose weight on all the other miracle diets.

The advances for those kinds of books can be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars and their earnings in the millions. So doctors are always coming up with new, and often fake twists with which to attempt to cash in. In this case, as I said before, the diet is a good one, though it is actually a tweak of the Johnson Up Day Down Day (JUDDD) diet which has been around for several more years and has been actively discussed all this time in another online diet board.

So to me this is another of those books that is written in a style that automatically would make any medical professional who knew anything about the topic completely discount it as hucksterism, just like the Atkins diet, which though it was an excellent diet was written up in such a hyperbolic, huckstery way that it took decades for it to get taken seriously. That approach while it makes money for the author makes it TOUGHER to get the concept into widespread use.

I am reading your angst @Peebles. Is there any diet book that you think was written up well ? (any diet)

sometimes diet books are written for the lowest common denominator or low reading age so that it can be understood by the masses which means it leaves out the juicy bits that people like yourself want to read. it would be worse if it actually gave wrong facts and which you are implying it has done in the original MM book.

I'm really looking forward to The Diet Fix being available on kindle. I love Yoni Freedhoff's blog so much, I imagine the book is also good. He doesn't specifically advocate IF (or any particular diet for that matter), but much of what people here say about sustainability of 5:2, 16:8 etc., fits in well with his way of thinking re: the impossibility of long-term suffering.

If it educates and gets the word out there about this fantastic eating regime, with a bit of a boost in marketing via a new book and all the associated press, it can't be such a bad thing. Sometimes I personally feel indebted to MM and colleagues for my change in eating/healthy lifestyle, loss of weight and hopefully a longer life. So that's priceless.

I too am indebted to MM - but that doesn't mean I have to buy every edition of the book and/or spin off or recipe book blah blah and I AM a cynic (so shoot me) but the diet industry is big business and why are x number of books basically rehashing the same thing any different - and like @peebles I remember being nonplussed at his assertion in the first book that his blood glucose made him 'nearly diabetic' (or whatever he said) when it quite clearly made him DIABETIC by most people's standards. And I thought Krista Varady wasn't too happy at having her science misquoted either.

I won't buy it either. Maybe because I found what works for me a long time ago and I reached my goal weight nearly one year ago. OH is the person who introduced me to fasting, he does it regularly for 30 something years now and it always worked well for him, he is a pretty handsome 56 years old man - I am 40 -, fit with everything working fine (he has a healthy heart, his blood analysis is perfect) and that's what convinced me to give it a try. The first book gave me some tips but, I mus admit, this place here has been most helpful than the book...

I also am a cynical one who think that it's more about the money anyway......


@coffeetime Your avatar fury friend is a real beauty

Don't think I'll be buying it. Everything you need to know about the Fasting Day is right here!

Bean

sometimes diet books are written for the lowest common denominator or low reading age so that it can be understood by the masses which means it leaves out the juicy bits that people like yourself want to read. it would be worse if it actually gave wrong facts and which you are implying it has done in the original MM book.

I think you have hit the nail on the head @Juliana.rivers. I can be a literary critic about the tone or style of "Wheat Belly" or "New Atkins Diet Revolution" but I judge on whether it is useful to me and "the masses". The guidelines in these books may not be the ultimate, fully detailed scientific truth, but they help many many people. I approach a book written by a practising doctor with respect because I believe their initial motive was to help their patients, and formed their style by communicating the principles to them. Not much time for the bandwagon leapers like journalists and celebs. I do not include MM in that category, but there are an awful lot of 5:2 and 5:2 type books now.

@coffeetime Your avatar fury friend is a real beauty

Thanks @Manderley, that is Maisie, the naughtiest Jack Russell you could ever meet but she does look sweet in the photo.

I'll borrow it from the library, like I did the first one (same thing I did with Johnson's and Varady's books).