The FastDay Forum

I posted somewhere that from the beginning of August I was going to stop entering everything I consumed on CalorieCount but as I haven't been able to access the website earlier this week I have already had a few days headstart. I had been doing this since 27 April when I started 5:2 to help me learn portion sizes : calories and it just became part of my daily life. Anyway the good news is that I'm still maintaining - even though I am indulging in some 85% dark chocolate a bit more often! Now I plan keep weighing daily for the next couple of weeks and then from there weigh weekly. Trying to get good habits before winter as I know that will be my biggest challenge!

I wrote the following replies a while ago but forgot to post them. I know I have exchanged posts with MaryAnn since she posted in this thread, and so the following may be a bit repetitious...

@MaryAnn, as you may have read, I also struggle with maintenance. My biggest issue is not controlling what I eat when I am not in charge of the catering. I feel I am now much better with not eating for emotional reasons, but that is helped tremendously by no longer being in paid work. I am sure that if I was in your situation, I would be eating lots of sweet foods - because that is exactly what I did during my last few years of working when I was highly stressed (which was one of the reasons I decided to retire early).

As you may also have gathered, I now believe that eating for emotional reasons MAY decrease if you can focus on your actual hunger, eat mainly whole foods until you are satisfied, and also check when hungry:
1 Will this food feel good when I am eating it?
2 Will this food feel good once it is in my stomach?
3 Will this food feel good 1-2 hours after I have eaten it?
- a la the Don't Go Hungry (DGH) diet.
Also having a list of ten things you can do as an alternative to eating when stressed (I know I am telling you how to suck eggs...)

@Peebles, I am not sure if you were around much when I was spouting forth about the DGH diet. It seems to me an optimal way of eating. Have you considered this approach? You may recall that I was suffering a lot with continual hunger mid last year, which I think was likely to be the famine reaction, and reintroduced breakfast most days - as suggested by carorees. This helped enormously. It was only this year that I read both Amanda Sainsbury-Salis' books (from the local online library) and thought that her approach sounded very sensible - particularly for maintenance.

I'm struggling with a pesky lb, but I probably should not be too bothered about it. I can find the will power to make sure I don't go any higher- but if the scales go lower they wont stay there. I have been doing a lot of extra walking in the last couple of months and am wondering if by some miracle some fat has turned to muscle!

Rejoice, rejoice, been at goal weight for 5 days and today a pound under. I wonder if this has anything to do with restarting on GTF Chromium supplements after finding a bottle in stock. They are supposed to help with carb cravings and although I do not eat the most concentrated carbs I now find I am not ravening after fruit and milk sugars so much.

Rejoice, rejoice, been at goal weight for 5 days and today a pound under. I wonder if this has anything to do with restarting on GTF Chromium supplements after finding a bottle in stock. They are supposed to help with carb cravings and although I do not eat the most concentrated carbs I now find I am not ravening after fruit and milk sugars so much.

I've been away from posting and updating my tracker for a while because of family visiting--we went out to eat a lot! My pattern is to weigh daily and to schedule a fast day whenever the weight is consistently 2 pounds over my goal. So this summer I went from early May to just last Thursday without needing to fast at all! I have no idea why.

My fast on Thursday brought my weight down to 134 (goal is 135) yesterday and again today I was 134. I feel so very lucky to have found this WOE.

Best of luck to all

My maintenance for July goes on. I did OK first part of July until I had my son and his girlfriend visiting. I made nice food for them. I found it impossible to fast while they were here. They wanted to cook, mostly very carb-full food, which I could not refuse. The result is that my weight is up, now that they've gone. I am 53.5 kg. That is I kg 200g heavier than I would like to weigh for July. I am doing ad eating window, 20,5 hours: 3,5 hours. The weight loss is very slow, but I find this more manageable than the 5:2 I was doing before. I feel I've been fasting too much this summer. We'll see at the end of July how much I weight then

Hi maintainers!

I only did 1 fast this week because there was a major family event, complete with a large dinner on Monday. I'm feeling a bit more under control now, but as always happens when I don't fast, my blood pressure surged again. <sigh> This is so frustrating.

I am now experimenting with using a second medication to control my carbs, because I think what is driving my hunger has been largely eating too many carbs on non fast days. I was eating a reasonable amount of carbs before I started fasting without getting into overeating, but the combination of fasting and eating carbs on non-fast days seems to be something I can't handle.

If the medication keeps my blood sugar in the normal range, I'm hoping I won't get into that intense craving state I have been getting into. I will have to keep fasting to keep the blood pressure under control, it looks like, as I can't take most of the drugs for various medical reasons and the one I can take doesn't work very well. I had many months of normal blood pressure while doing 5:2 for the year after decades of struggle.

And yes, I realize that not eating carbs might be very helpful, but I have eaten a ketogenic low carb diet for many many years and just can't face the though eating that way full time any more. Plus, oddly, eating ketogenic LC did not improve my blood pressure at all. Never did figure out why, which is why 5:2 was such a surprise to me.

@Sassyone, I did take those 2 months off after my year on 5:2 thinking that perhaps the starvation reaction was what was happening, but I have maintained very happily for almost a decade at a weight that is a good 3 lbs lower than what I weigh now, so that explanation doesn't work for me. I think the problem is blood sugar related. I'll know better in another month when I control my blood sugar more tightly with the help of a fairly safe medication I have used in the past. My biggest problem, ironically, with blood sugar control now is that my blood sugar is a bit too close to normal, making it very hard to control with drugs that worked far better for me when my blood sugar was far worse. Knocking 150 mg/dl off a high when your high is 250 is far safer than when the high is only 180 mg/dl, but going up to that 180 mg/dl from a normal fasting level and then dropping back down again can make me very, very hungry.

Hi @Peebles, glad to hear that things seem to be under more control for you?

I am not sure that I was very clear in my post to you, maybe my mention of the famine reaction was a distraction. In your 2 months off fasting, were you eating according to the "Don't go hungry" principles, ie eating only when sufficiently hungry, mainly whole foods, until satisfied? I find that when I adhere to this, I don't ever need to feel hungry, and my weight is maintained. Not sure if I can lose weight this way, but that is probably because I am aiming for a weight lower than my body wants...!!! And when I don't have access to whole foods, it also becomes a problem.

But I still think that eating whole foods according to your body's needs is the optimal way of eating - no calorie counting! And even if you eat other foods, or overeat, if you listen to your body, it will help you compensate for that. But you do need to learn how to read the body's signals, which is not always easy. And apologies for always saying "you" - I mean it in the generic sense.

But I do appreciate that taking medications that impact on blood sugar may confuse the body's signals and make it harder to use hunger as a guide to eating?? I have forgotten why you need meds... It must be for more than just controlling carb intake?? Anyhow, best wishes for finding solutions that work for you.

Back from a nice holiday in the Dutch countryside, mainly cycling around to discover all the nice places. The benefit of having a liking for cycling as a past time hobby? Burning in the order of 10,000 additional calories in two weeks, an amount that I am not eating extra even when on holiday 'eat as you please' diet. As a result I return on my bottom end of the maintanance range: 62 kg.

Nearly the end of July and still within my two pound 'wiggle room' despite being halfway through my time of looking after our two granddaughters! I have been up to three pounds over my target of 147 pounds but only for one day and am now safely back to 148 pounds. I haven't fasted at all for the last two weeks because I have no intention of fasting in front of two impressionable children but seem to be maintaining - probably because I am 'on the go' more with them around. My body seems happy with 147 pounds at my height of 5' 7". I know that for many people this would seem rather heavy but I am right in the middle of 'normal' BMI range and am not intending to make my life miserable by striving to reach a pre-children goal from 45 years ago!
I hope that those of you who are struggling to maintain find a satisfactory solution. Sometimes accepting a slightly higher target can be helpful in reducing the problem. Just a thought - but it works for me!

@Sassy1, I have a fairly rare form of non-insulin dependent, non-insulin resistant diabetes. My blood sugar is actually much better these last few year than it has been for 15+ years for reasons no one understands, but it is harder to control when it is closer to normal because I can't use insulin. Insulin at meal times made it really easy to control my blood sugar for quite a while and kept me from getting the hunger I get now when my blood sugar goes up and down in the supposedly prediabetic range.

All quite unusual and not relevant to most people as it is a fairly rare form of diabetes.

My weight shot up this past week, but so did my BP and body fluid for some reason. I actually visited my friendly and reasonably smart doctor as I was also short of breath and feared the worst. But he did an ECG and told me everything was perfect. I have something odd on my lung X-ray but I think is it the same lesion that I was told about 14 years ago, probably from a bad attack of pneumonia in my 30s. The doc will be checking that again next month to make sure it isn't growing. I don't smoke, so I'm not too worried.

I am consoling myself that I still weigh less than I did in Feb of 2014, but the margin is shrinking. <sigh> I'm going to visit my son in a few weeks--the one with the wonderful restaurant, which has expanded its menu, so there is no way I'm going to be not eating far too much food that week.

Maintenance Month 013

Goal weight 120 lbs, range 118 - 122 lbs
Entry weight 122 lbs, exit weight 121 lbs, average 121.26 lbs
Highest 123 (4 days), lowest 119 (1 day)

Best thing about this month was climbing Blencathra at 119 lbs and getting to the top in 1hour 15 minutes (2.25 miles, 2150') and down in 1 hour without so much as a peep from my knees. 3 years ago I climbed Ben Nevis at 129 lbs and the entire descent was agony, even with neoprene supports on both knees and trekking poles. Do not wear the knee supports now and only carry one pole for occasional use. I am sure it is my entire eating regime that gets the credit, not just being 10 lbs lighter.

I don't have access to scales at present, can't help feeling that's just as well!

End of month report from me.
52.5 kg
Is it 2 pounds or two kilos??? I am a bit confused. I think in kilos, so I have a wide fluctuating room. One kilo down or one kilo up. (down never seems to be an issue with me!!!) If we go with kilos, I AM within my maintenance range at the end of July. Hurrah!