Imagine you have counted your calories, and you plan to have (say) chicken, rice and vegetables for your evening meal, accompanied by a glass of water. How do you eat your limited fast-day fare, to get the most hunger-satisfying results?
I remember reading a few years ago that a blended soup is the most filling way of consuming a fixed quantity of solid food and liquid. I probably only remember this because I have always found a good hearty soup to be very satisfying, so I tend to agree. I can't find the original research article now, without access to the online university library that I used to use (and I can't even remember who wrote it), but the BBC did a small demonstration study for a television programme, and found the same results: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8068733.stm
After an abandoned 5:2 attempt in the summer - which I am treating as an experiment to find out what didn't work for me! - my current 5:2 fasting plan has settled down into a 22-hour complete fast (allowing black tea, green tea, herbal tea, espresso and a maximum of one mug of vegetable bouillon), followed by a big bowl of homemade vegetable soup in the evening (typically well under 200 calories), followed by a further 18-hour fast (teas and espresso) before having something nice for lunch.
Obviously, not everyone will want to fast on less than 200 calories in a 42-hour period, and I'm not posting this to promote that approach. But I do find that converting ingredients into soup is a good way of making the food seem somehow more satisfying than it deserves to be, given the constituent parts, so I thought that the soup theory might be worth applying to the 500/600 calorie limit, if people are finding that they are getting hungrier than they would like.
The only problem with fasting in this way is that it sounds as though it might be monotonous. But if you don't eat soup the rest of the week, and if you vary the ingredients you use to make sure that each batch of soup tastes individually distinctive, you could probably devise a different soup every fast day for months or years on end. Certainly I'm not bored with it yet, and I normally never eat the same thing two days running or even twice in the same month! Actually, it is proving to be quite satisfying, and a lovely hot soup is very comforting to eat when you have been fasting all day.
Have any of you experimented with this and, if so, what have you found?
I remember reading a few years ago that a blended soup is the most filling way of consuming a fixed quantity of solid food and liquid. I probably only remember this because I have always found a good hearty soup to be very satisfying, so I tend to agree. I can't find the original research article now, without access to the online university library that I used to use (and I can't even remember who wrote it), but the BBC did a small demonstration study for a television programme, and found the same results: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8068733.stm
After an abandoned 5:2 attempt in the summer - which I am treating as an experiment to find out what didn't work for me! - my current 5:2 fasting plan has settled down into a 22-hour complete fast (allowing black tea, green tea, herbal tea, espresso and a maximum of one mug of vegetable bouillon), followed by a big bowl of homemade vegetable soup in the evening (typically well under 200 calories), followed by a further 18-hour fast (teas and espresso) before having something nice for lunch.
Obviously, not everyone will want to fast on less than 200 calories in a 42-hour period, and I'm not posting this to promote that approach. But I do find that converting ingredients into soup is a good way of making the food seem somehow more satisfying than it deserves to be, given the constituent parts, so I thought that the soup theory might be worth applying to the 500/600 calorie limit, if people are finding that they are getting hungrier than they would like.
The only problem with fasting in this way is that it sounds as though it might be monotonous. But if you don't eat soup the rest of the week, and if you vary the ingredients you use to make sure that each batch of soup tastes individually distinctive, you could probably devise a different soup every fast day for months or years on end. Certainly I'm not bored with it yet, and I normally never eat the same thing two days running or even twice in the same month! Actually, it is proving to be quite satisfying, and a lovely hot soup is very comforting to eat when you have been fasting all day.
Have any of you experimented with this and, if so, what have you found?
There's also a good selection on Good Housecleaning's website at 
