Can you work out what triggers your binge eating? If it’s emotional eating, could you get some professional help to work through that or find something else to distract you?

Well tbh the ‘other five days intake’ you can’t manage is what brought you (and the rest of us)here!
I think the longer you continue to fast for two days per week the easier the other five days become to manage. I know I reached a stage where what was once a ‘normal’ days eating for me became far too much, and I was able to leave food on my plate when my body told me I was not hungry anymore. It was as if something had turned on a switch.
Make your home a safe zone until this switches in for you, ban biscuits and chocolate so you can only binge on carrots and cherry tomatoes 😀
Have you taken your measurements and noticed any change in them or in the fit of your clothes? That sometimes happens when there is apparently no weight loss.
Have you sorted your TDEE and then try to eat accordingly.
Don’t let mindless eating rule your life anymore – no one can change that but yourself.
Keep busy on your fast days – this makes them pass quicker and eventually you will come to look forward to them.
Keep it up and good luck.
🙂

liznua, good job on the 2 lbs down. Emotional issues around food are very tough – have you considered getting some counseling around this? Just a thought, as you are very self-aware and insightful about your food issues, counseling might really help. It becomes easier when we can put food into perspective – when it is just food, not invested with all this shame and moral significance we often put onto it. Good luck and be kind to yourself!

Good luck liznua. maybe you’ll find it amusing that as I was reading your reply I was eating a left-over Freddo bar, LOL

…and *headdesk*

Hi liznua,
completely my experience after doing the 5:2-thing for 3 weeks now. My main problems are the 5 days, not the 2.
BUT: I thought about what would have happened, if I did not do the 2 days of fasting – I would have risen my weight even more… !?!?!

I’m hoping to share Lindyw’s experience – that my eating on “normal” days will become more “normal” if I continue.

good luck for all of us!

Hi ladies, I don’t want to ‘push’ my coping strategy on you or anything but I’ve been at this for 18 months now and I’ve found that you do have to experiment and evolve your eating habits on non-FD as well as Fast Days.

The way I approach it is that I treat non-fastdays like fastdays too. I know that sounds mad but it is aproximately 1 trillion times harder to resist food once you’ve actually broken the ‘seal’, as you know from your fastdays.

I combine 5:2 and the 16:8 philosophy of an ‘eating window’. This means that every day I fast (totally) for at least 16 hours before I eat (on actual fastdays that can increase to 24 hours, as I only eat 1, 500 calorie meal quite late in the evening) and then I am ‘allowed’ to eat only within my 8 hour ‘window’.

You can still be a bit flexible with this approach and fit it around your lifestyle. Maybe for you a 14:10 approach would be better, or maybe you’d have to move your ‘window’ around a bit during the week but it provides some ‘rules’ and structure to your non-fastdays and I have found that it helps.

I have found myself over indulging (within my window) a bit in the past few weeks to be honest but I think that’s down to a 400% increase in my exercise regime, rather than ‘wild abandon’ 😉

My way may not be for everyone but I’d recommend you try to introduce some structure to your eating habits on non-FD, if over indulgence on those days is becoming a regular problem for you.

hi liznua – you might want to check out this blog about body issues and weight – I found it very moving and inspiring. The author is very funny and articulate and talks about the pressures society puts on women about our bodies, and about learning to love herself as she is. Might help a bit with that self-loathing. 🙂

http://www.nobodyshamecampaign.com

I think anyone who can manage to fast with a young family is doing really well. I know I couldn’t have fasted if I had to prepare food for others. I have enough problems watching a cookery show on fast days! If I don’t go in the kitchen then I’m usually fine, last night I went in to make a hot chocolate (my treat at the end of a fasting day) and I saw a bag of peanuts which I had by the handful. Not good.
I absolutely don’t want to count calories on non-fast days. I feel that is wrong for my head. Also, if you restrict all week then your body will go into starvation mode and slow down your metabolism. My weight loss has been sustainable, I think, because my body doesn’t know what’s going on! And, doing the maths, I am consuming about two fifths less than before I started.

This is what you eat to maintain your weight. Eat between your BMR and TDEE.

i find fruit is the best snacking outlet- on my fast day yesterday for my breakfast-i was hungry because the day before was a non fast day-i had bananas and a pack of dried fruit and nuts!

Sorry: forgot to mention, I also have two young children. I cope with cooking for them by having 250 cals for breakfast, skipping lunch, then eating my other 250 cals while I’m cooking their dinner.

If I do that, I’m not tempted to pick at theirs, or finish their leftovers.

I’m so glad it’s not just me who ‘fail’ on my non fast days. I’ve been doing the Fast Diet for 7 weeks now and I do think it gets easier the longer you go on. I am totally amazed that I keep losing weight but found that I had 2 weeks of no weight loss around week 3-5. So frustrating but realised I had to up the exercise to get going again. I also found that using a calorie counter app has made it much easier to track the ‘bad’ days. Keep going liznua – you are doing yourself a great favour keeping the diet going!

Hey im glad people are finding the same. I too seem to have the “eat nothing or eat everything” approach. The fast days are easy and i like the sense of control. But on non-fast days as soon as i allow myself a treat, it’s like i throw the whole day out the window and cant stop eating. However a couple of weeks in this is decreasing (hurrah!)and has only happened a couple of times, so with the fast days the overall result is still a slow weight loss.
Things i have found to help as others have said is getting rid of all the chocolate and biscuits and stocking up on good foods, fruit and veg etc. If you eat so much healthy stuff you have no room for the rubbish haha!
I am seeing the whole process a life changing experience and changing the habits i’ve had for years, i appreciate is going to take time and not to get dissapointed at early set backs. Im hoping as i continue on, binge days will become a thing of the past!

I have stopped weighing every day because of the the ups and downs that occur during the week.

I am so tired of losing and gaining weight, that I am truly taking the advice of others to heart and changing my habits that cause discouragement. Weighing every day and getting discouraged when the normal ups and downs happen is one activity I have curbed. I weigh twice a week, each after the fast day. In a few months, I will drop it to once a week.

Try, try, try to not weigh yourself every day.

liznua, this morning my scale told me I’d gained 2 pounds in the last 3 days. Well, I know I didn’t eat 7200 extra calories in the past 3 days, and I suspect that you didn’t eat 18,000 extra calories in two or three days, either. I can’t explain why weight fluctuates like it does, it just does. Many decades ago, when I was at my baseline adult weight, I averaged about 105-107 pounds, but I would go as low as 97 and as high as 112 from time to time. Probably mostly because I lost weight when I was depressed and gained a bit when I was happiest (the opposite of most people with a weight problem, I know. Well, I didn’t gain 80 pounds from being overly happy, I can assure you). A couple of pounds one way or the other could be water weight or weighing error. Now that I am losing weight, I find I can get ridiculously upset when the scale tells me I’ve gained a pound or two and I know I didn’t eat those extra calories. Looking at the big, long-term, picture, weight loss is scientific in terms of calories in and calories burned, but on a day-to-day and even week-to-week basis, it often seems to defy logic. It might be medical conditions, metabolism, medications, fluid retention, scale error, who knows what, but persistence has paid off for me, I kept going through the weeks the weight wasn’t going anywhere and now I have lost almost 30 pounds in 30 weeks. Do I wish it was faster? Yes. But I’ll keep on going until I get at least close to my baseline weight. Maybe I’ll tweak it and try 4:3 or every other day fasting if I get bored or impatient, but I might be worried that I’d get upset and give up altogether if that didn’t pay off right away. Weight loss is hard work. I know some people say it’s easy, but it isn’t, for me, and I still get plenty hungry some days. But at least with intermittent fasting it’s possible. I know you think you haven’t lost any weight, but I think the last weight measurement was an error, and, if you keep going, you will eventually see numbers you like better. If you don’t, get thee to the doctor for a thyroid test, because something is not working right.

Good for you! You should totally be able to have a slice of cake and glass of wine on a normal-eating day once in a while and still lose weight on this plan. Bread and potatoes should also be eatable on normal-eating days, although I find it useful to pay attention to portion size on these kinds of things and actually weigh or measure my portions from time to time — if I just eyeball it, my portion sizes *do* gradually escalate. I just bought 4 more 4- to 6-ounce size bowls for my kitchen because, guess what? The number of calories I’ll need to eat to maintain 105-110 lbs. will be a lot fewer than those needed to maintain 150-157 lbs. and a scoop of ice cream looks really lonely in a big 10- or 12-ounce bowl, but quite nice in a small bowl 🙂

I really hope you see numbers you like soon. I know I get ridiculously upset when I see the numbers on the scale go up. I think it’s because this really is hard work and you need to give yourself credit for keeping on keeping on. And I mean it when I say that you should see a doctor if you do this plan and it doesn’t work, because something is wrong. I do find that my weight loss is ridiculously slow if I don’t get any exercise, but I think you mentioned that you are exercising, so something really should happen, and, if it doesn’t, there has to be a reason.