FastDay User Blogs

Hmm, it's been an age since I added to this blog. I don't think I'm a natural blogger TBH but partly because most of the time I spend on the forum is done on my phone rather than at the computer and the prospect of writing a whole blog entry on my phone is rather off-putting! But I digress.

I thought it might be time to write an update about my experience of changing from 5:2 to 16:8.

I decided quite a while ago that the easiest way to manage my diet during my 3-week holiday in Sweden would be to skip breakfast (which at the place we go to is fairly uninspiring anyway being just bread and jam) and not eat until lunchtime. As we have our evening meal fairly early at our holiday house, it would mean I would naturally be adopting the 16:8 format of intermittent fasting.

I also aimed to cut down on carbs as far as possible. In the run up to the holiday I had been increasingly convinced that cutting down on carbs would be A Good Thing, so to skip breakfast meant an easy way to achieve a reduction in carbs. This also meant I could save some carb allowance for treats

Brief aside for some background:
16:8 means fasting for 16 hours each day and only eating during the remaining 8 hour "eating window". In practice one just concentrates on keeping the eating within the 8 hours and so the actual fast length will be shorter some days and longer on others.

Our holiday home belongs to my mother in law and is on a very small island with no shop. The whole family congregates there during the summer and so it is very communal living style. The emphasis is on enjoying food and drink (apart from the dull breakfasts!) so I didn't want to cause comment from MIL about strange eating habits (MIL struggles with another daughter in law who is vegan so I didn't want to complicate things even more).

I decided to start the 16:8 approach a week before the holiday so I could see whether it would work for me. I found it fine as I was not getting up that early now that school had finished and I didn't need to get up at the crack of dawn to take DS to school, so I only had to kill 2-3 hours before the eating window would open...this was easily achieved with copious amounts of black coffee. Saying no to desserts if we had eaten dinner right at the end of the eating window was, perhaps, the hardest bit . I had been weighing daily for several months and was, by then, well-used to big ups and downs with the 5:2 approach, so I was amazed to find that the scales showed a small decrease each day (approx 100g) . There was also a small decrease in my waist.

I set off for Sweden feeling fairly confident that I would be able to keep any weight gain due to the daily fika (coffee and cake , with emphasis on cake) and nightly happy hour (cocktails , vodka and Swedish drinking songs ) under some kind of control. I considered taking the weighing scales but failed to convince OH that they justified the space in the luggage, so I just took my tape measure on holiday.

Apart from some surprise from MIL (who mentioned to OH that she wasn't sure it was OK to skip meals ), the rest of the family didn't bat an eye at me skipping breakfast. I made a big effort to keep carbs down at lunchtime and dinner so could indulge in the cake and cocktails and, amazingly, after a couple of weeks I discovered my waist had decreased in size ! When I got home again, the scales confirmed that I had lost weight on holiday....this is unheard of in the history of me going on holiday! Truly amazing

So, as it was still the summer holidays and I didn't need to get up early, I decided to carry on with 16:8 and in the month since getting back have lost a further 3kg, which is a tad faster than I had been losing with 5:2 before I changed .

How do I feel on 16:8? I am often hungry in the morning but a few cups of black coffee sorts that out and I'm happy to wait for lunch. Some days lunch is quite delayed (today it was 2pm) so I am usually fasting for at least 16 hours but sometimes up to 19 or 20 hours. I try hard not to snack between lunch and dinner and to keep the carb intake reduced compared with my feast days on 5:2 (just one or half a slice of bread with lunch and a small potato with dinner), but most days I have one treat (either cake with afternoon tea, or a dessert after dinner). I do also often feel a bit hungry in the evening. I am sleeping a bit better in general as I don't have those two fast days each week when I would get hardly any sleep. At the moment I don't mind feeling a bit hungry each day but I've discovered that if I have more than one treat and/or one glass of wine (I'm trying to keep wine just for weekends), then I will see no change or a small increase on the scales. I can see that if I treated the 8-hour eating window as being able to eat whenever I felt peckish then I would not be losing any weight. A rough calorie count suggests I am eating around 1200-1400 cals each day (=9100 per week) which compares with 2 x 500 + 5 x 1800 (10,000 per week) when I was doing 5:2, which explains the slightly faster weightloss .

I'm in two minds now as to what to do . Should I go back to 5:2, add a couple of 500 cal days to the 16:8 or carry on with 16:8? I like the idea of getting a reasonable night's sleep (a plus point for 16:8) but I am not sure whether the constant calorie restriction will in the end be detrimental (negative point for 16:8). I also like the ability to cut carb intake by skipping breakfast every day (positive point for 16:8) and I know that when I was doing 5:2 my feast days were too carb heavy (negative point for 5:2) but I feel that putting in a 500 cal day after only having 1200 the day before on a 16:8 day would make the 500 cal fast day really hard (negative point for combining both approaches). I am liking the faster weightloss though. Last, I feel guilty for being a mod on a 5:2 forum but actually currently doing 16:8!!!

I suspect that for now I will carry on with 16:8 but maybe allow more leeway at weekends and compensate by skipping both breakfast and lunch on a Monday if the weekend has been particularly indulgent, so a 6(16:8):1 if you will!