ser00007, you have come to the right place. Intermittent fasting is very easy. The whole secret/key is that your weight will follow your insulin, not Calories In, Calories Out. CICO follows insulin. In fact, CO follows CI. So trying to calorie restrict has a 99% chance of failure. The background level of insulin determines what your weight is going to be. IF and a ketogenic diet will lower your background insulin level.

When you wake up in the morning, just ask yourself, honestly, “Am I really hungry?”. I’ll bet pounds to donuts that you will find that you are not hungry. So, just skip breakfast. Keep doing that. By increasing the fasting time vs. the feeding time, you give your body a chance to feed off of your body fat. And try to stay away from the refined carbs. And keep studying and keep asking.

Hi ser and welcome:

None of this is rocket science. The way 5:2 works is to reduce the calories you are eating. The key is to do your diet days correctly – make sure you eat 600 cal. or less twice a week. The rest will fall into place.

Starting 5:2 is hard enough in itself. If you want to start the Atkins diet, too, feel free but it is unnecessary to be successful. Many migrate to Atkins after doing 5:2 for a couple of months, but many don’t and still lose weight successfully.

Here are most of the tips you need to be successful with 5:2: https://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/the-basics-for-newbies-your-questions-answered/

Good Luck!

Hi bach and welcome:

You quote Dr. Fung, I assume. I am more than aware of how insulin works in the body and am pretty sure I am not missing anything. Are you aware that the latest research (along with research that took place decades ago) shows that the body’s BMR does not decline after even two years of calorie restriction? http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/07/19/cutting-calories-can-lower-inflammation.html. And if you ever watched Dr. M’s Eat, Fast and Live Longer program, you undoubtedly noticed the first section was on a man that had been eating a calorie restricted diet for years – and was so healthy (and not overweight) he was called a ‘new species’. Historically, what you are talking about is the ‘starvation mode’, a popular but never proven (to this day) theory, repeated so often that it is taken as fact without question (just like the eat fat get fat mantra). Dr. M has addressed this mode twice on this site – in the FAQs and in a separate post. There is no research I am aware of that overturns this research and result. The starvation mode does not exist for fat people.

Although not scientifically accurate as a theory, all the starvation mode people are saying is that the body becomes more efficient after eating fewer calories (calorie restriction), so eating fewer calories than you were eating before causes weight gain. To some people, that seems awful because they can’t eat as much as they used to without gaining weight! But they wouldn’t need a diet if eating as much as they used to eat did not cause weight gain in the first place.

Dr. Fung also seems to believe in the body ‘set point’ theory. This theory says that the body has a weight set point that it wants to get to. So if you lose weight, the body will do everything it can to force you to eat enough to get back to your former high weight (usually plus some). This theory takes over if you do not lower your metabolism rate by dieting.

The result of combining the theories is that no one can lose weight and keep it off. While Dr. Fung is a proponent of intermittent fasting, it does not seem to overcome these two theories because many, many people have lost weight with 5:2 and other IF patterns and subsequently regained their lost weight. If you think about it, the two theories pretty much insure that no weight loss can be permanent.

It is all so confusing.

Oh, well, I did lose 40 pounds on 5:2 and kept it off for almost two years. But I had to eat less than I used to eat to keep it off. Now I am back on 5:2 losing weight again. It seems to be working just like it did initially. And I still eat potato chips, drink beer and enjoy pasta and ice cream (just not a lot of each).

Seems calories in, calories out still works. At least for me. And it is much less confusing to understand!

The less you eat, the more you lose. If you don’t believe it, stop eating altogether and see what happens!

There are studies with the same caloric intake, but different weight loss rates, depending on insulin release.

2 studies here:
https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/circadian-rhytms-fasting-17/

Quote: “So what this study did was to randomly assign two groups of overweight women to eating a large breakfast (BF group) or a large dinner (D group). Both ate 1400 calories/day, and the macronutrient composition of each diet was matched – only the timing of the largest meal was changed. While both groups lost weight, the BF group was clearly superior for both weight loss and waist size (important measure of visceral fat) by almost 2.5 times (-8.7 kg vs -3.6 kg).”

So I’m thinking if this experiment would be done with more calories (maybe around 2.000) eating half of them at breakfast would lead to some weigh loss, but eating half of them at dinner would lead to weight gain. So this proves in my opinion that insulin response is more important than total caloric intake.

Quote: “The BF group had more insulin in the morning while the D group had more at night, as expected. However, by totalling the Area Under the Curve (AUC – graph to the far right) you can see that overall, the dinner group had a much larger rise in insulin. This is fascinating. The same total calories led to more insulin secretion simply based on meal timing.

An earlier, smaller 1992 study had shown much the same thing. In response to the same meal given either early or late in the day, the insulin response was 25-50% greater in the evening.”

Another 2 studies here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-eating-late-at-night-may-be-particularly-bad-for-you-and-your-diet/2015/08/24/ad8b85ac-2583-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html

Here is Dr. Fung’s article about this “CICO vs insulin”: https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/obesity-solving-the-two-compartment-problem/

So I guess if a person has no problems with insulin resistance, CICO may work really well. But for the rest 80% of us (statistics for insulin resistance in overweight / obese people), CICO does not work long term, and the solution is IF or LCHF or both.

Hi bach:

Actually, if you eat your brownie for breakfast, you can lose a lot of weight faster: http://www.timesofisrael.com/want-to-lose-weight-make-breakfast-your-big-meal-and-have-dessert-with-it/

@simcoeluv.
Very interesting the second study. Thanks for posting.

Quote: “In a 2012 study published in the journal Steroids, Jakubowicz and her team found that people trying to lose weight were better off not only eating a big breakfast, but also indulging in some “forbidden foods” they were probably trying to avoid, like sweets. Over the course of a 32-week study, participants who added dessert to their breakfast — cookies, cake, or chocolate — lost an average of 40 pounds more than a group that avoided such foods. They also kept off the pounds longer.

In that study, 193 clinically obese, non-diabetic adults were randomly assigned to one of two diet groups with identical caloric intake — with the men consuming 1,600 calories per day and the women 1,400. The first group was given a low carbohydrate diet including a small 300-calorie breakfast, and the second was given a 600-calorie breakfast high in protein and carbohydrates, always including a dessert item (e.g., chocolate).

Halfway through the study, participants in both groups had lost an average of 33 pounds per person, again consistent with the far lower calorie intake the diet provided. But in the second half of the study, results differed drastically. The participants in the low-carbohydrate group, unable to withstand temptation any longer, began cheating on their diet and regained an average of 22 pounds. Participants in the group with a larger breakfast, however, lost another 15 pounds apiece. At the end of the 32 weeks, those who had consumed a 600-calorie breakfast had lost an average of 40 pounds more per person than their peers.

Thirty-two weeks is a long time to go without goodies, it seems, and according to Jakubowicz, the results of the the 2012 study show that denying oneself won’t work in the long run.

“The participants in the low carbohydrate diet group had less satisfaction, and felt that they were not full,” she said, noting that their cravings for sugars and carbohydrates were more intense and eventually caused them to cheat on the diet plan. “But the group that consumed a bigger breakfast, including dessert, experienced few if any cravings for these foods later in the day.””

I forgot: Ser, you also need to think really clearly and find the reason WHY you “put on an enormous amount of weight”. Maybe it is a medical problem, or you are a stress / emotional eater, or maybe just bad habits, etc. You need to find the real cause of your weight gain and address that too.

Good luck!

@simcoeluv
You misunderstood my message. I’ve said: “You can start by trying to eat less than your TDEE, like simcoeluv suggested. And if after 2-3 months, you still are always tired, hungry, not losing weight, you can try to lower your insulin, like bigbooty and bachcole suggested.”

In other words: there is a transition period to any form of intermittent fasting (5:2 included), and until the body adapts, he may feel “tired, hungry” in the fast days. And if he has also a insulin resistance problem (like some other members of 5:2 community), he may also feel “tired, hungry and not lose weight”, if he eats 5:2 style, with a lot of junk and having high insulin.

This is my informed opinion (which I’m allowed to say it, even if you do not like / agree with it) and you can not say “I’m wrong”, simply because you are not Ser’s personal doctor to say here and now “He is not insulin resistant.”.

I’ve only mentioned 2 possibilities, to help Ser: first: 5:2 to work without insulin control (like in your case); if not, try 5:2 with insulin control, like many members here are doing. So please do not put in my mouth words like “suggest, on a 5:2 site, no less, that it will make people tired, hungry and that they will not lose weight following it”. Insulin resistance makes people tired, hungry and gain weight. The context, please. Thanks.