The FastDay Forum

Hello all,

I was following the 5.2 plan at the start of the year and lost 4 kg. In short, I fell bady off the wagon, and have put back on my 4 kg as well as an additional 3 kg and I am now the heaviest I have ever been.
I really regret stopping as I felt great when I was following the plan so I've started back again. Completed my third fast day yesterday and have not lost anything, also I've noticed that today I am ravenous, MUCH more than I remember being last time I followed the plan. I am hoping that things improve and I will start to see some progress soon....and wanted to wish all newbies and ' old' newbies well.

Hi,
I am also in the same boat as you, started last year, couldnt figure it out and have since taken a further four kilos on, so now have decided to give a real shot. I know I felt much better in myself when I was doing it, but I think my fail last time was not eating anything at all on my fast days. This time I will try eating the 500 calories I am allowed on fast days, and see how it goes.......
Good luck in your fight with the flab

Welcome @RooRoo and @MrsLarsen and good luck.
It has to feel like the time is right and sounds like your time is now!
Plenty of helpful tips and support here to help you stay on track xx

Hello @RooRoo and @MrsLarson. I can totally understand where you are both coming from and I really do hope that this time around you will find success. Just take a look around this forum and you will find so much inspiration from people. One thing's for sure, you are definitely not alone.
Go girls!
Bean

Completed my third fast day yesterday and have not lost anything, also I've noticed that today I am ravenous, MUCH more than I remember being last time I followed the plan. I am hoping that things improve and I will start to see some progress soon

RooRoo - I've been fasting since 2011 and seen a fair number of people for whom IF didn't 'take' the first time but who attained their goals after subsequent reboots because somehow, people knew this was the best method for them and they just needed to get their heads straight before they managed to implement IF successfully into their WOL.

The feelings of hunger may well settle down when you've established what works for you on both your FDs and non-fast days as what we eat on the latter can set us up for a good or less comfortable FD.

You already know about the Fasting Today threads and it's possible that it might be helpful for you to post on those or to check in both to lend/receive support?

As for scale weight - it's easily measured and thus the most obvious metric but in many ways it's arbitrary and not particularly informative when it comes to all of the changes that are happening. As you already know, if you give this a few weeks, you may well be able to report more changes - and not all of them relating to the scale.

Good luck attaining your goals.

A restarter here too! The main thing about this or any WOE is getting your head in the game. We have to just make up our mind that we're going to do it and then proceed. As my boot camp trainer says, "Mind right, body right!"

As Ssure said, there will be changes that may not reflect on the scale. Let's strive for feeling good and better fitting clothes and let the pounds fall where they may!

Welcome back @RooRoo and @MrsLarsen and @Lori- wishing you all success glad to see you have found each other and I looking forward to getting to know you all. Hum coming up to midnight so sleep is calling

[carieoates]

Hello there, welcome back and a big welcome to all newcomers.
As already said...measure, keep it simple, use the tracker and come back to let us know how it's going.

I have restarted again this autumn and finding it much harder this time. Pounds are fluctuating up and down week by week and I can feel like I'm not getting anywhere. I have lost 4lb overall in 6 weeks - 2lb in the first fast! The other 2lb have been going on & off since then - currently off! I know I have probably been eating too much of the wrong stuff on feed days and maybe going over on fast days, so I shouldn't be surprised! I think my body feels happy enough like this so if I can maintain like this over Christmas (the meals out start soon!) then I will be happy.

Sorry to thread-butt, just wanted to share that you aren't the only one struggling second time around!

I wonder if some of the rebooters/restarters on this thread who don't have buddies might find it useful to buddy up with other restarters here? As you're at similar stages and will have some insight into how others might be feeling at a comparable point?

@greenmonster, as for the bouncing the same 2 lbs - it's cold comfort but I used to do that for 16 weeks at a time before dropping every day for 5 - 10 days and then moving to another plateau.

I don't know how I feel about this as there's not sufficient evidence to support it as yet but there's a notion that when we use up our body fat (which is what we're trying to do), we sometimes put water into the fat cells as a temporary placeholder. When the body adjusts to believing that you're not imminently about to stuff that fat cell full of fat again, it can release that water and put those fat cells into a deeper form of 'archive' storage. So, some of us seem to empty fat cells, fill them with water - rinse and repeat until we hit a period where we dump the water and then seem to do this again.

It's a nice narrative and it tells me a story about my own weight fluctuations and lengthy plateaus when I was losing my weight. At some point, there will be a useful scanner technology that will reveal whether or not this is true - but it doesn't exist as yet. Until then - it's perhaps as good an explanation as any to account for the weight change pattern of some people.

[Moogie]

Welcome all It's really reassuring to know I'm not the only one struggling to shift anything this second time around but I think an important part of it is being involved in the community - being here helps to keep us on track!
@SSure thanks for that post, I've not heard about that before but it does sound plausible and could explain a thing or two. I wonder if @carorees has any thoughts on the matter? Very interesting!

Welcome to all re-starters - wishing you well on your weight loss journey!

Watch the calories, resist temptation when necessary and the weight loss should follow.

Above all, if you have a problem, feel free to share it here - there's always good advice to be had!

[carorees]

I don't know how I feel about this as there's not sufficient evidence to support it as yet but there's a notion that when we use up our body fat (which is what we're trying to do), we sometimes put water into the fat cells as a temporary placeholder. When the body adjusts to believing that you're not imminently about to stuff that fat cell full of fat again, it can release that water and put those fat cells into a deeper form of 'archive' storage. So, some of us seem to empty fat cells, fill them with water - rinse and repeat until we hit a period where we dump the water and then seem to do this again.

It's a nice narrative and it tells me a story about my own weight fluctuations and lengthy plateaus when I was losing my weight. At some point, there will be a useful scanner technology that will reveal whether or not this is true - but it doesn't exist as yet. Until then - it's perhaps as good an explanation as any to account for the weight change pattern of some people.

I did try to find out if there was any evidence to support this and found one study that did find increased water content of adipose tissue after weight loss.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12833111

Through experience I know if your head isn't in the game, it's going to be difficult to bring about a true downward trend in weight loss. There is some kind of difficult to reach switch in their - but, it can be reached!

@carorees,

The bad thing about that study is that the water appears to have stayed in the cells for the whole year. So waiting it out will take a lot of patience. OTOH the weight loss here was so brief and so minimal that it doesn't tell us anything about what happens to people who lose 10% or a lot more of starting weight over a much longer time period.

The data I've seen suggests that some significant change kicks in at 6 months into successful weight loss that makes most people stall there. It goes beyond lowered calorie need due to weight loss. Probably a confluence of all the various weight control hormones kicking in to defend against starvation.

Do you have any handy references about weight set points? I hadn't looked into that theory,but having just bounced up off the exact same weight for the third time, I'm coming to think there is something to it. The first two times I thought I had become more lax, but this time I kept doing the same diet and still bounced up as soon as I hit that 137 lb weight, which is where I actually feel slim.