Hi Helen, yes the snack counts as part of the 500 calories if you are doing a 36 hour fast. I weigh the food before I cook it (never thought of it weighing differently after) but mainly I buy stuff that has calories on the packet so I don’t have to bother. For example, if I have chicken salad I buy cooked chicken which is 200 calories and actually don’t bother weighing the salad as it can’t be another 300 calories! I am just careful with whatever dressing I put on it. You could also have things such as beans or eggs on toast or soup or ready meals that are already calorie counted. To be honest, it’s only a rough estimate of calories for me otherwise I would drive myself insane and if you do go over by a few calories it won’t make much difference.

You could save some of your calories for a snack before bed as you don’t have to have them all in one go. I tried splitting my calories over the day but now just have my evening meal (or try to as I find it hard in the evening not to snack – which is my problem!) as it did drive me mad thinking all the time about how many calories I had left to eat once I had eaten something.

Have a read of some of the posts on here, there are lots of great ones for encouragement and ideas. Good Luck, Linda

Helen, when I want to count calories I use this link:
http://www.acaloriecounter.com/
which gives calorie counts for foods raw and cooked in different ways, and in ounces or grams or serving sizes.

The way a fasting day works is this: the day before, eat however you normally do, bedtime snack or whatever. Go to bed. No getting up to eat in the middle of the night. Even if you normally do. Awake fasting starts when you get up in the morning — you have 500 calories to eat before you go to bed that night. No more calories until you get up the next morning (no eating in the middle of the night if awake). People who don’t usually have bedtime snacks therefore have an approximately 36-hour stretch with only 500 calories. But if part of your usual eating pattern is to have a bedtime snack, you do not have to omit it, you’ll just have something like a 32-hour period of fasting instead, it’s not going to make a big difference. Just don’t eat *more* than you usually would before a fast day — what you want to do is have your body start using its own fat for fuel while you’re fasting — thereby causing weight loss. So if you don’t usually eat a bedtime snack, don’t add one before a fasting day, you’ll just end up eating more, and lose less weight.