The FastDay Forum

Hello everyone,

I'm new to the 5:2 diet and am in my 2nd week. I haven't lost any weight, if anything I feel bigger than I did before...so I decided to work out what 25% calorie reduction actually means.

I'm 5'2, female, 8.7 stone and usually consume 1,400 cals through a healthy diet. In order for me to have any affect from 5:2 I would have to reduce my weekly intake to 7350cals (9800 weekly cals reduced by 25%). Using the 5:2 format this would mean I could only consume 1,270cals on my feed days...so the concept that I could eat whatever I liked on feed days is just not true.

Have I got the above correct? Is this what everyone else is doing i.e. calorie counting on feed days? Any guidance on this would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

[Moogie]

Most of us do not calorie count on feed days, we just eat as we normally would (ie, in your case 1400 cals) and cut back to 500 cals or less on our fasting days. Because of your lower feed day intake you would only have a weekly calorie deficit of 1800 cals which would equate to approximately half a pound of fat loss. So, you would have an effect from 5:2, just not a massive one on a weekly basis.

You can still eat whatever you like on feed days, it's just often misunderstood to mean 'eat however much you like'. This isn't the case. Eat whatever you like means that no foods are forbidden. You can have cake, crisps, takeaways etc but within the normal daily calorific intake for your needs. For most women this is around 2000 calories. Many of us have found in fact that this works better when we go over our daily intake a couple of times a week and stay a little under it on our other feed days.

The only time we suggest calorie counting on feed days is when users are struggling to lose weight and wonder why -in which case it can be wise for them to get an idea of how much they are actually consuming on feed days and whether it is vastly over or under their TDEE.

Hope that helps

I'm 5'2, female, 8.7 stone and usually consume 1,400 cals through a healthy diet. In order for me to have any affect from 5:2 I would have to reduce my weekly intake to 7350cals (9800 weekly cals reduced by 25%). Using the 5:2 format this would mean I could only consume 1,270cals on my feed days...so the concept that I could eat whatever I liked on feed days is just not true.

The weekly reduction is supposed to be about 20%

5 days at 100% and 2 days at 25% = 5.5 / 7 = 0.786 ie 21.4% reduction.

So I think you got a bit mixed between eating 25% of your calories on a fast day (75% reduction) and the overall reduction of "about" 20% in the week.

HTH

Hi Annaet, as Moogie has explained, because of your lower TDEE your weight loss will be slower at about 0.5 lb / week with 5:2. You could reduce your intake on feed days to lose faster, though this is not normally part of the 5:2 strategy and it might depress your metabolism further. Alternatively you could cut on the fast days to 350 calories i.e. 25% of your TDEE, but even so it would only increase your weight loss to 0.6 lb / week.

Your BMI is under 22 so you are well in the normal range - like me, that tends to mean that just because of the maths we lose more slowly . The direction of travel is more important than the speed!