I have just joined this forum and today is my first fast day. I made my first mistake and had breakfast (or my first meal) too early because it is now 12.24pm and I am starving and only have a water bottle to keep me company until I get home. I made the beetroot soup yesterday for tonight’s dinner – lucky I love beetroot.

For the past 15 months I have been following the Dukan program of eating and reached the 4th phase and still following that, but in the past month or two I have fallen into a bad pattern of eating with the family from Friday night through Sunday night, correcting on Monday with my protein day, but just starting to get a bit bored with that at the same time as gaining about 2kg of the precious 10kg that I lost.

So I am hoping to shed the few extra kg and give 2 fast days per week a go rather than one Dukan protein day per week, to mix it up a bit. On the other 5 days I will eat normally according to the Dukan principles so as not to be totally disloyal to the program that changed my life. I think the calorie counting will be my biggest challenge but happy to do that for 2 days per week. I’ll clock in again tomorrow with the report on how I went today.

Thank you for all your replies. Steph I’m glad I’m not the only one who has shifted a bit from Dukan. I just felt I was in danger of losing something very precious and just had to change the scenery a bit to prolong (or extinguish completely) something that in the past was inevitable – putting the weight back on.

I survived my first fast day but had awful hunger pains going to bed, but I will do things a little bit differently on Thursday and stagger the first meal of the day. I did have a 600 gram loss this morning, but that’s nothing unusual, given that would happen after doing a protein day on Dukan.

Yesterday I had a cup of tea when I got up, about 50gm smoked salmon and a boiled egg (a big protein hit) when I got to work, lots of coffee, tea and water during the day, and two cups of beetroot and apple soup in the evening – my total calorie intake was 502.

I’ll be back on Thursday or Friday with an update.

I have just completed my second fast day and finding it a real struggle. I managed to stagger the first meal to after 2pm having had just a beef broth; a cup of tea and a cup of coffee before then. I also went for a run before 2pm and figured I wouldn’t have had the energy if I didn’t have at least the broth. By 5pm the hunger pains were almost crippling until I had some beetroot soup at about 6.30pm. It’s now only 8.25 in the evening and I will be off to bed soon so that sleep can numb the hunger pains.

The other thing I have found is that on fast days I just can’t warm up – I am presently sitting here with a hot water bottle shoved down my front.

The consolation is that I have lost 0.8kg so far and should be able to add to that in the morning when I weigh in.

I am now in my second week of the fast diet and seemingly combining successfully with Dukan. I am still finding the fast days quite tough but probably haven’t quite tweaked it to suit me yet. I am a real breakfast person so I wake up hungry and find it hard to put off that first meal until 1pm. But I can see the benefits already so am willing to keep going with it until I reach my goal. So far I have lost 1.5kg, although when I got on the scales on Monday morning before doing my 3rd fast day I had put on 1.1kg of the weight I had lost in my first week, so was feeling quite deflated about that until I weighed again yesterday morning and 900g came back off. It must have been water.

Anyhow, onwards and downwards.

Yes, definitely not oat bran Steph but just as beneficial I am sure. It is getting me through on the fast days.

Enjoy your holiday, and no way can you fast in that mode, nor should you. Good luck on the scales on your return. You’ll be fine between Dukan and the Fast Diet ridding any little excesses. Maria