Has Anyone Read The Fast Diet or The 5:2 Diet?
 

I have these books on order from amazon, but they haven't arrived yet. They both focus on eating 500 calories per day two days a week, then whatever you want (just eating regular, no pigging out), the other 5 days. This sounds very livable to me.

I know there's a thread here for intermittent fasting, and this way of eating is considered intermittent fasting, but it's less stringent.

Anyone doing this way of eating?

Cycling your calories seems like a good idea and really seems to work for some people. However, I can't get behind any diet that says you should only eat 500 calories in a day, even if it's only 2 days a week. That's just waaaay to low. Never mind being hungry, how can you get all your nutrients in?

I read through the website for the book briefly so I'm definitely not an expert on this diet, but it seems again to all come down to calorie counting.

Would it not be easier to create a smaller deficit every day than an extreme one 2 days a week?

I don't like the "eat what you want" on the other days. I have heard some people eat lots of fast/processed food on those days which cannot be healthy. I would support the 5:2 if it were with a balanced diet even on the "normal days".

Myself, I do a variant where I just skip dinner every day. Initially, I ate what I liked for breakfast and lunch (like with the 5:2). But I soon realised that eating a healthly breakfast and lunch, cutting back on the sugar and fats, didn't just make me feel better but also maximized the weight loss too!

Apparently the women they interviewed who was on the Fast diet, ended up losing 20 pounds..but it took her 7 months...So if your looking for weight loss that is moderate to quick in timing, this one will take you awhile to get off the pounds. I guess you will have to figure out if you like eating more or smaller clothes sooner.

PS : Not trying to sound harsh or judgemental. I myself am on an Intermittent Fasting lifestyle/diet and its not easy all the time, but i also moniter what i eat..so the weight is coming off.

There are many different ways to IF and this is another variation. With the benefits of fasting becoming more well-known, I don't know why people still poo-poo the idea. Maybe if more of us fasted now and again, we wouldn't be here. :dizzy: Going without or greatly minimizing food intake for a couple days a week is what a lot of naturally thin people do.

Some of us have bodies who get used to what we're doing very quickly and calorie-cycling works. JUDDD is one of the better known versions and there are tons of success stories. I'm on another forum where one woman has lost over 100 lbs. and she looks fabulous. There are several more who have lost upwards of 50 lbs. or more. They haven't lacked for nutrients on a down day - it's amazing what you can feed your body on 500 nutritious calories.

If you add the calories on your Up Day and Down Day calories, divide them by 2, you get a typical daily calorie intake number. Mine is 1249. I'd much rather divvy it up and have one day where I can eat what I want heartily (and no not "junk"), then have to deal with that small number every day. As for the smaller deficit, the body needs a pretty wide deficit for it to work. I had a hard time seeing any loss and once I counted my calories for a few Up Days, I saw I wasn't eating enough. Once I ate up to those, the weight began coming off.

Intermittent fasting is becoming such a well-known benefit and it really makes me shake my head when people continue to say what a bad idea it is or gasp at 500 calories. And it might be for those who have eating disorders. But for the majority, IF can be a huge benefit.

I'm not a success story yet. It has worked for me in the past but I let myself get derailed. My body has changed since having major surgery last year and it's holding on to every flipping pound, sadly!! I'm mixing JUDDD and 5:2 in hopes of further shaking up my body.

Egads, I hope I don't come across like I think I'm some expert or something - not my intention. :^: I'm struggling to lose weight like the rest of us. I just felt a need to throw in my penny thoughts because there are many, many people doing some form of IF and having great success. :D

I did a version of this for awhile, with juice fasting two days a week, non-consecutive, lost weight, now I'm adjusting to eating mostly fruits and veggies those days I was juice fasting.

I didn't check to see if I was eating/juicing 500 calories, probably more than that, made sure if I was hungry I juiced or had a low sodium v8. I think just changing things up on your body a couple times a week or every other day during the week would be good.

We tend to get stuck in a rut, speaking for myself mostly, I could eat the same dang thing for breakfast for months...anyway, I believe in taking a little from here and there and mushing it into a progam that you can follow for life.

This week, I'm eating the oranges/grapes/apples, etc. that I was juicing, scale still seems to be headed in the right direction, I feel good so I'll keep doing it for awhile, until it doesn't feel right, then I'll try something else.

best of luck to all :sunny:

LavenderDreams People poo-poo this type of diet, because it's a widely accepted fact that eating less than 1200 calories a day is not healthy for the body. Maybe you don't agree with this, but at this point there are more studies proving this point then there are in favour of low calorie IF. That could change.

If someone has only a small amount of weight to lose and is looking for a "diet" to help them get it off, then I guess I can see why this would appeal to them. But anyone with a large amount of weight to lose needs to be thinking about a life change. How to eat day in and day out, making sure to get the nutrients and satisfaction from their meals without resorting to the type of eating that made them gain the weight.

Since at the end of the day, this type of diet still focuses on calorie counting. I do not understand why you would want to eat so lightly for 2 days, when you can have healthy and tasty meals everyday of the week. You do not have to cut 700 calories a day out of your diet so that you can have dessert, or a beer.

I don't doubt that people have lost a lot of weight on this type of diet. But I would be very surprised if many of them lost it much faster than those cutting their calories in a more traditional fashion.

I also wanted to add, that I do think calorie cycling is a good idea, and have read a lot of positive things about it. But these articles usually refer to someone who needs about 1400-1500 calories a day (plus exercise), lowering it to 1200 for 3 to 4 days and then having a day with 2000-2500 and then going back down to 1200 again.

I too am not an expert on any of this and of course this is just my opinion. :)

I agree

This plan is working for me. I lost 2.5 lbs. after 5 days on this plan with 2 fast days of 500 calories. I ate well on the other days. I will continue eating this way...I love it!

I'm tailoring The 8 Hour Diet and the 500 for 2 days to my eating habits. I go to the gym during the week, and evidently need that to keep the calories moving around (that's my term for weight loss). However, on the weekends, while I stick to the 8 hour eating window, 1200 calories and 100 g of carbs or less, I never wake up on Monday morning with any weight loss.

So, I'm trying it starting this weekend. Maybe it will work for me. Maybe not. I do have to say though that I love this idea of IF -- it is much more in keeping with my normal eating habits.

If you google JUDDD there is a LC site that has a lot of active participants on this plan. I have done it. I lost a significant amount of weight both times. I did down days of 600-700 calories and lost regularly. I started doing a different IF plan in January mostly just for a "changeup."

I found that if I ate mostly protein and healthy fat on DD with very few carbs hunger was not an issue. I started at we'll over 200 pounds and on the JUDDD EOD plan there is a calculator that allows you to chose a percentage and eat higher than 500 if you choose. There are lots of maintainers in that LC group. People find long term success and use the plan for maintenance not as a temporary short term diet. If you read the books and/or do some online research there are studies to back it up, too.

People "poo poo" fasting plans without reading the books, doing the research or even understanding the key concepts. It's a shame more people don't have an open mind to it. If they actually tried it instead of dismissing it without even giving it a chance, they might discover it is a good and easy plan with lots of merit. Fasting is pretty common in many other cultures.

I didn't 5:2 this past week and kind of missed it, the scale was up a bit, but due to TOM, not the change, tried a kind of "maintenance week" eating moderately, it definitely made a change to the eating this weekend, not craving all the "treats" so hopefully I'll have a good start for next week.

am going to 5:2 with juice fast for the 2, Sunday, Tuesday, is the plan at the moment.

best to all :sunny:

I'm one of the biggest proponents of intermittent fasting you're likely to find.

This form of intermittent fasting is similar to Eat Stop Eat.

Bottom line is that calories matter. You can't eat whatever you want 5 days a week and 500 calories 2 days a week and lose fat unless over the course of the seven days you're in a caloric deficit.

Simple math - if you maintain on 2,000 calories a day you would need to eat less than 14,000 calories a week to lose weight.

If you eat 500 kcals 2x a week and then eat 3,000 kcals 5x a week you'll have ingested 16,000 calories and you'll gain fat.

On the other hand if you eat 500kcals 2x a week and than 2,000 kcals 5x a week you'll end up eating 11,000 calories and have almost lost a lb of fat.

Intermittent fasting isn't magic.

So john what would happen if you ate 500 calories every day..then how much would you lose? Because i find that eating a lot in a 5 hour window is quite impossible..also...how many days does water weight take off before you start losing actual fat?