This is a way to do the fasting, if you cannot eat only 600 calories in a day.

On the standard way of 5:2 Intermittent Fasting, a day is defined to be when you get up until when you go to bed.

On your fasting day, eat only 600 calories during your waking hours.

On your non fasting day, each up to your TDEE during your waking hours.

What you may be confused with is that there is some evidence that going 24 hours without eating has some benefits. This is accomplished by stopping eating after dinner on the day before your fast until you eat the 600 calories on the day of your fast at dinner.

How you divide up the 600 calories on the day of your fast is up to you. Studies show that having one meal of 500 calories with a snack of 100 resulted in weight loss.

Sorry danepak, you shouldn’t be eating the big breakfast on fast days, just the 600 calories. Most people are looking for 36 hours total, with the overnight, between meals except for the 600 calories. The object is to completely deplete the glycogen stores in your body and start burning fat. This also improves insulin sensitivity, and puts your body into “repair mode”, as explained in the Horizon show, and results in other health benefits.

Your program might work (I did something similar for a couple of years and lost about 0-2 pounds a month), but it won’t work as well for sure. So if you like it, you could keep going with it and see how it’s working and then switch over to the “real” 5:2 after your first plateau, or when you get more comfortable with fasting. Health benefit wise, more fasting is probably better, at least thru 48 hours or so.

dane:

If you are going on a diet to lose weight, why would you want to eat a massive amount of food at any time?

The way 5:2 works is you go to bed, get up, eat 500 or fewer calories during your waking hours, go to bed, get up and eat to your TDEE or less – twice a week. On all 7 days of the week you can eat foods you want to eat – there are no forbidden foods, or foods you have to eat. For the first month or so focus on doing your diet days correctly (500 calories or less) and most everything else will fall into place.

Here is what TDEE means: http://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/tdee-for-the-curious-or-why-dont-i-lose-weight-faster/

And here are some tips for beginners: http://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/warnings-to-newbies/

Good Luck!

It is all a function of calories in vs calories out, even with fasting. This is no holy grail, just a potentially better lifestyle way to manage your food intake, taking into consideration some of the other potential small benefits to fat loss.

TDEE is never the same for two people, even if their stats are the same and they do the same activity levels. You always need to monitor progress and assess over time.

Eating a lot of carbs on the weekend will add some serious water weight to you, hence the scales being up, but you can definitely get fat eating a lot of carbs, the mechanism is simple to understand, but fat makes you fat too 🙂 as can protein.

Eat less than you expend over a weekly average, you should lose weight, eat more….gain weight.

Simple as that, not what people want to hear, but true nonetheless.

Hello everybody,
Thanks for the informative posts, but I just need to get something clear. Is it confirmed that the fast day is the interval you spend between waking up in the morning and going to bed at night? I am confused due to the 24 and 36-hour calculations. Today is my fast day, and the last thing I ate was a 130 calorie ice-cream at 11 pm last night, then slept right after and woke up today around 8:30 am. I won’t be eating anything until supper at 7 pm tonight. So, should the calories from the ice-cream I ate last night count into my daily intake of 500 calories? Or am I allowed to consume all 500 calories at supper? Thanks in advance for the much-needed help!