Monkeyslim, Auriga is right. To really lose weight you need to hang in there. If you stop too long, your weightloss will stop and that will kill the last glimmer of motivation!

Unfortunately, there is now way of sugar coating 5:2… At the end of the day it is calorie restriction 7 days a week, 5 of which meaning eating under your TDEE and 2 as you know under 500/600 calories.

Either you want to lose weight or you don’t? I have been on it for now 7 months and frankly, the weightloss plateaud regularly and so did my motivation.

On the other hand, yesterday I had a picture taken of myself with my graduating daughter and it was the first time without a double chin…(I am very close to goal weight). That made me happy.

5:2 is a diet but also a new way of life, where you should learn to incorporate a new attitude towards food. If you don’t do this, I can not see the result long lasting.

So while my post might sound depressing, what I am really trying to say, we need to face reality and understand that 5:2 is neither a fast way to lose weight nor is it a short term cure.

Ask yourself why you are doing it and try to remember those arguments next time you want to skip.

Personally, my biggest issue were not the fast days, but the boredom that set in after a couple of months. I helped myself with changing things around, by going on 4:3; ADF; plain calorie counting and much more importantly by really changing my dietary habits and starting to exercise.

Fitness and nutrition have become my new hobbies with the side effect of losing weight while doing this. Another nice add on is the fact that when you exercise, you can consume some of those exercise calories back and this allows me to feel a bit more like a “normal” human being on my non fast days.

I log all of my food in myfitnesspal and all of my exercises in the fitbit application that came with my pedometer. Taking the focus of just doing 5:2 and now trying to get my exercises in made the 5:2 much more tolerable.

Anyhow, long blurb…apologies, hope you get back on the wagon rather sooner than later.

Best of luck
Stef.

monkeyslim, I started 5:2 last August and have lost over 40 pounds. I certainly hit periods of time when fasting became difficult or I just got bored with it. A couple of times I only fasted one day in a week either because I was sick or just too disorganized because of a severe psychosocial stressor to pull off a proper fast day. However I didn’t go nuts and overeat, and fasted again as soon as I reasonably could. Whenever I got bored I would treat myself to a new cookbook or some new pot or pan or kitchen gadget so that I could try some new dish. Keeping up with the forum can help me stay motivated, too. I guess I would have felt weird trying to explain to my son and my doctor why I was quitting before I’d accomplished what I set out to do. Not to mention been seriously demoralized about that myself. Because 5:2 really is do-able for me (although still hard work), unlike daily calorie restriction, which just left me hungry all the time. I can deal with being hungry two days a week (and occasionally for a little while on the other days). Just not all the time. How about you? How far are you from your goal? How much do you want to reach it?

If the trouble is fitting fast days in, does that mean it’s hard for you to fast on certain kinds of days? Some days that I want to fast I would end up being too tired at the end of the day to cook a proper fasting day dinner, and I do like to eat something tasty at the end of a fasting day. When I cook for fast days I like to make extra, and have enough for a future fast day in the freezer. Barring that, there are frozen ready meals that could fit the bill, even some take-out that could be made to work by leaving out the bun or the rice or whatever. Or maybe a family member who could be persuaded to cook a fasting-day favorite.

I find that I can do a lot more physical activity on a fast day now than I could a few months ago. Is just having to do too much that day the reason? Or maybe business lunches or travel or other obligations that makes it hard to fit fasting in?

I’ve been having the same sort of problems. I seem to have reached a plateau. I lose 2lbs and then put 2lbs back on. I’m hovering around 10stone 9ish. After a fast day it falls to 10ston 7ish and then goes back up again.

Should I take some time off or up it to 4:3 days? It’s not that I find it hard to do the fast days, but it’s just a bit dispiriting when I can’t get lower than 10st 7lbs.

I shouldn’t complain as I have dropped a dress size and lost about three quarters of a stone in a year. I would love to lose that last 7bls.