The FastDay Forum

Me too. We grow organic and i make my own cheese, butter and yogurt from milk we buy form the farm along the road. I hate processed food and believe even if i eat fresh homemade cream cakes which are high in calories, it's still better for you than the shop bought fake stuff. I love baking too, i'v got a really sweet tooth but i make effort not to bake everyday so i don't get too fat. I am a healthy weight, but with both of my pregnancies i was eating too much and put on too much weight but lost it all within 6 months from breastfeeding That's the best diet really lol

[carorees]

I must be a freak then! Never eat ready meals or junk food, I cook all meals from scratch, eat plenty of home grown veg and fruit, eggs from our own chickens, meat from friends or the farm shop, make my own bread, pasta, mayonnaise, breakfast granola, yoghurt, cakes, biscuits etc but was still close to being morbidly obese before starting 5:2. You don't have to over eat by much each day for it to build up to a lot of weight over the years. It did take 40 years or so to reach the weight I was. It might take several years to reverse it but I'm hopeful.

There are a lot of Americans who do nothing but eat out. You get inexpensive food there and loads of it. It's a completely alien way of life to us Brits. I'm sure that learning to cook will help enormously for many of this doctor's patients but his research is obviously skewed heavily towards the country and associated lifestyle in which he practices.

The criticism of the "live longer" science behind 5:2 is well founded as it's a lot of extrapolation from scant studies but as a weight loss strategy it's undoubtedly sound. Equally this guy's approach obviously works on morbidly obese junk food addicts but that doesn't mean that he can extrapolate it across the whole of humanity. As Ben Goldacre says: "I think you''ll find it's a bit more complicated than that."

Im only 27 and im running about after my 2 young kids all day and iv been breastfeeding for 4 and a half years and still counting, so i probably burn off quite a lot of calories. No doubt when the kids grow up if i keep eating this amount of sweet things i'll put on loads of weight too over the years. I'm hoping keeping busy on the farm will keep me fit till im too old to do it anymore. But i regularly overeat and my weight fluctuates up and down and im sure when i stop breastfeeding im going to have to really watch what i eat or it'll just sky rocket. So i hope fasting will prevent that happening.

Exactly Demi, a good few of the contributors are as you may well be in 30-odd years time. You see, many of us were thin whilst bringing up the family, and multi tasking, like women do. But once they left home we forgot to stop cooking for a family, and just shared it all out between the 2 parents left at home, and this, added to the reduction in physical activity by not needing to tidy up etc after the offspring, has got us where we are today, as the weight creeps on barely noticed, or ignored.
Whether we have spent a lifetime consuming poor quality food, or the best that nature can provide, we still have a problem, so......5:2 is a solution which works, from whichever camp you come from--- fresh and natural (goody goody) or pre- packed, highly processed stuff, ( oh my goodness, what an existence that must be), . or even a combination of the 2 (probably the majority of us).
Dr Simpson came over as pompous and arrogant, regardless of how intelligent he is, in contrast to Dr M, who has shown us all a workable, free solution to get rid of the excess weight plaguing many lives. Dr M knows that 5:2, is work in progress, but I am more than prepared to be part of a long term experiment, if that is what it is called in scientific circles. It is working for me, the weight is shifting at an alarming rate, the fat is dissolving, the mood is elevated, the physical energy is way beyond all expectations--- please don't expect me to hang around for conclusive, scientific results. This will do for me for the rest of my life.