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Day 1 – São Paulo Brasil – FD – Drinking tons of water and a lot of coffee. In the past I had a constant headache in my FD days, until I´ve started to drink a lot of water.
Thanks @okeydokey for organizing this post! Starting again 5:2 My objective is health related, although some weight loss will be more than welcomed!
For me measuring my weight is too stressful, so I´ll use my pants size as a sign of weight loss.
As is my first week, I´ll probably stick to 2x24h. Next week I´ll go for 2x36h
Evening all,
Hope the FD people got on well today. It was my NFD today.
Lovely day in Newcastle so 2 walks with dogs, plus house work = 16.9miles plus as just over 10 miles on the bike.
Will feel that tomorrow!
However, only indulged in a chocolate caramel wafer which like the ginger biscuit the other day, was very sweet. Another insentive not to eat them.
Tomorrow is a FD & I am at work so the lemon/lime/ginger water all ready along with tea & a small pot of cottage cheese to keep me going.
Should be able to keep below the 800 as not planning to do any exercise apart from running to & from theatre with patients & a bit of a walk to & from work.
If I am not losing much by the end of next week I think I will have to reduce to < 800 even tho I am being very careful on the NFD.
Anyone on a FD tomorrow?
One thing that I have become accutely aware of, it how many calories food has now that I am looking at them.
I have just discovered that little cup cakes we get from a very popular shop in the UK, have over 400 cals per cake. I thought they would be better as they were much less (I thought!) & I know that at times I have had 3 at one time thinking it was better than a large slice of cake. How wrong was I?
Thanks @strawberriesandcream
U.K. Evesham Day 4 second B2B FD
Strange day,fast went OK as such but ddnt eat till later,last one I ate about 1600 but due to work 2000 tonight ……but from 1700 on I felt hunger….not in that I want something to eat way,but in that IM BLOODY RAVENOUS WAY….that’s the first time in Forever I’ve felt that. Strangely it was quite refreshing to have my 500cals because my body wanted them as opposed to my mind thinking Feed me Feed me.
That’s me done till next FD’s 10/11th ,those with FD still to come good luck and those with NFD don’t be too big a 🐽 X
Day 5 / UK / FD (64.8kg)
First of all, thank you for the support, especially @Strawberriesandcream and @and… exhale. I really appreciate that this is a space where we can celebrate the highs and moan the lows. So many things that my head knows so well and the heart just can’t hear often enough. Instead it keeps saying “yeahhh, buuut…” and then I go again. 😉
Well, today wasn’t a non-fasting day, it really was a feasting day. The scales had given me an inch, and I took a mile. I was a bit bored with my main task today, or rather I am not quite feeling up to it, and snacked the hell out of it. And then I limited myself to a 100cal lunch–but followed it by mocha and muffin. That’s the kind of day it was. After two rather tough FDs though I let it happen hoping I’d get it out of my system. So I am really intrigued how tomorrow’s FD will go.
@at Thanks for the advice, MFP went out of the window today (yeah, quick I know), but I have been thinking to actually take a step back with the FDs. Instead of 3:4, two or three FDs a week, but proper ones and work on controlling the NFDs and then slowly build myself up again.
@annemarilyn True! lol
I started up along with the people on the other side of the globe. So just rolled along with it. 😀
Day 4 Florida, USA FD
I’m at the end of a successful fast day. It always works best for me if I eat nothing between breakfast and dinner. I pre-entered my food in my Lose It app. last night and stuck to it today. That included bringing a vegetable sandwich to the back to back films we went to in the evening (Film festival). I was also able to have some Trader Joe’s popcorn and a diet soda (I know not healthy as a way of life). Thanks to being accountable to you all, even thought hubby is eating pizza right now, I’m going to be able to go to bed without breaking my fast. It’ll be hard to pick a 2nd day this week as we start 11 days of travel tomorrow. Maybe the flight day, which is Thursday? There won’t be any worthwhile food available anyway!
@merryme, I can certainly relate to health issues making the 5/2 imperative, in my 34th year with MS. I send encouragement to all. I saw one post quickly where someone quit because they weren’t making the fast days happen – too bad. This is workable once you get used to it, and always successful if you work it. Best to all. I guess I was a pocketeer today without getting on the list.
@nabaht do hang around I’ve enjoyed having you here. I definitely don’t consider myself strong. I simply found something that works for me. I couldn’t do long term fasting, water fasts, alternate day fasting or even back to back fasts. Consider taking small steps. There are benefits in beginning with 12 hour fasts allowing 12 hours between your evening meal and breaking your fast at breakfast. Work towards a 16:8 pattern of eating. You’ll still have the benefits of a fast and eating in a smaller window reduces overall calories consumed. We are all different. The key is to find what works for you. Don’t compare yourself to any of us. We all have our strength and weaknesses.
I don’t have all the answers, I’ve failed many times before I found a way of eating that works for me. I wish you all the best in finding something that works for you. You are strong.
Day 5 – Tokyo, Japan – NFD 79.2kg (Average for April 78.46kg)
I over-salted myself yesterday. I’m not really worried about salt anymore I don’t even believe sodium is much of a health hazard, except that it promotes more eating and drinking. Processed food is salted a lot probably because it promotes more consumption than anything else. Almost a decade ago I had high blood pressure around the 140/95 range … my doctor asked me if I wanted to try medication, I said no I’ll try diet and exercise. He put me on a low sodium diet and that did help a little. More towards the 130/90 range. However what really helped me was bananas. I started eating a banana a day (now sometimes I eat three) and my blood pressured went down to almost normal. After a few years I dropped low sodium and my blood pressure is even lower now, even low sometimes. By then I was living in Japan and low sodium is difficult. Low sugar is easy, but not low sodium.
While I no longer believe sodium is a major risk for blood pressure, it does cause liquid retention and that does increase blood pressure. While the impact is modest it can be measured. The impact on weight is less modest though, at least temporarily. Now I have better diet, fasting and exercising helping the high blood pressure so that is why I don’t worry about sodium a lot.
Still I think it pays to know where your sodium comes from. Mind came from salty plum strips which I like and tsukemono (pickles from many different kinds of vegetables). However if you are getting your sodium from canned food, chips or things like that … that could be a risk factor. Not just from the sodium but all the other things that go with processed foods. I know what I was eating was processed too, but sodium from pickles isn’t the same a sodium from a bags of chips, if that makes sense. Lots of times the salting of food is to keep you eating more of it. It is like a game but they are taking your money and your health with the processed food, so one has to be careful.
Did my first April fast on Monday which turned into a water fast which lasted 39 hours. I broke this at 1.00pm Tuesday and had porridge and fruit then at 6.00pm a M&S 400 cal Ready Meal and met my 600 cal target. So I had back to back fast days which I found quite easy to do. Made sure I had loads of water so no headaches.
The problem is that it is now 3.29 am and I cannot sleep. I am off to Rockcliffe Hall, a 5 star Hotel just 12 miles away for a days golf at 9.00am. I know a Bacon Buttie waits for me at 10.00am and dinner following golf so the problem will be not to overdo things. I certainly feel lighter and better mentally. I may get a third FD in on Thursday.
Good luck out there.
Well said @onahealthyhigh
@nabaht plenty of us miss or fail fast days – very few of us achieve being successful or perfect all the time and those things are not a comdition of the challenge. Stick with us to see if we can help you find what works for you.
@debster, that sounds right, regarding the difference in our targets. I have read every extra inch is about 5lbs worth (bit obsessed with the right height/weight). Good luck on the last remaining bit around the waist. Mine is half of height but unfortunately plenty of fat unpleasantly visible around tum, bum and especially hips. Still it is less unpleasant than it was in September! Hope your anniversary went well.
2nd post – I really pushed the fiber at lunch time. I’ll see if that slows down my NFD eating. However eating a meal high in fiber takes time. High fiber food tends to be bulky and with lower calorie content.
@coda – I hope your fast day is working out for you.
Day 5 UK FD
2nd FD of the week and hoping for a better sleep tonight. Thank you @jarbia for your advice. I do not drink enough water so will make an extra effort today to drink more and see if that helps.
Day 5 UK NFD 🌈
Feeling tired but not hungry. Did a B2B the last 2 days. Not going to break my Fast until lunchtime today. Scale isn’t being my friend today, no movement, even after 2 FDs, but there you go, science says it must eventually cave in and say nice things if I keep at it. Maybe not today but I will win. 🏆
Be strong my fellow 30 day challengers! 🌷
DAY 5 – UK – NFD
On hols for a week, so not sure how I can keep to ADF – but will do my best not to overeat for the week and hope I can keep to my tdee.
So much for giving advice Jamba61 – I spoke too soon and for the first time in ages had a sleepless night!!!!
Am taking my laptop, so hope to log in every morning as usual. It will help keep me on track.
Day 5 UK FD800
I had a difficult day yesterday due to a bit of a row with my mum. She is having a walk in shower put in for her but she has decided it ought to go in the bathroom my son and I use instead of hers because hers is nicer and already has a shower over the bath. This seems wrong to me in several ways which I explained to the peson approving the funding. Maybe I am being too literal about the situation but I don’t think so. But I do need to stop getting so exasperated with mum. She is certainly not going to change now and gets stressed when I try to explain what I think. She can’t see the holes in her logic. She seems to have convinced herself that she isn’t going to live much longer and won’t need the shower. I think that since her mother lived to 95 she probably will be around to get good use out of it and that it needs to be as convenient as possible not down a long narrow corridor with a step. It was so nice to come away from that uncomfortable situation and read the supportive comments on here. It really helped to keep my mood from crashing.
@Bert1302 We started having animals here because my mother was into self-sufficiency in the seventies. We had chickens and goats and grew lots of veg. That is actually why I am vegetarian. She lied about the meat we were eating and told me it wasn’t my friends so I had to stop eating any as I couldn’t trust her and it made me think about what it really meant to be eating meat. I wish we had that big an area but ours is a very large garden for the UK, land is more at a premium here which is one reason why I have mainly rabbits as they can have a really good life in the space we can offer while larger ones would be cramped. I would like to get chickens again but with the current guidelines on keeping them covered due to bird flu it could make too much extra work. The trees in the garden have grown so much that growing veg is not really possible any more. I tried to get a forest garden going a few years ago and so there are quite a few edible plants dotted around but I am a bit too particular about food to want to eat them except for the currants and berries which grow quite well under trees. There is loads of wild garlic at the moment which my sister eats lots of but I am not keen.
@and exhale Guinea pigs can find ramps very intimidating. I have often tried that method of putting food at intervals to tempt them down. Sometimes starting them at the bottom helps as going up is easier for them than going down and then they might be more willing to go down again as they have recently been there. Adults never learn to use a ramp if they didn’t learn as babies but if they did last year they ought to still be able to unless they are old enough to be developing cataracts which are quite common in ones over four and in younger Abyssinians. We don’t use hutches with ramps anymore, or hutches at all for that matter. Our piggies live in a couple of villages with lots of little houses, but I regret not being able to put them outside in the summer. But they are used to too much space now to go into hutches and they are too vulnerable to cats and birds to use an uncovered run. I would like to give them sheds and add roofs to the runs but we need the sheds for older rabbits at the moment. Maybe we will be able to later in the year.
@biddiev I am glad to hear that Sprouts are getting some much deserved appreciation:)) It is all in how you cook them. Boiled sprouts are dire but that is not their fault.
@fayefaye I wish I could play instruments but my sister got all the musical talent. She used to have a banjo. But as she is going deaf her ability to pick up new instruments has deteriorated. Her attempts to play the violin are excruciatingly. I am certain she has the arm movements perfect but she can’t tune the blasted thing and even after six years it still sounds awful. When contrasted with the beautiful way she plays the guitar and sings this is very hard to stand. She doesn’t have a diagnosis of Aspergers but I am sure she has it too. My youngest son does too and my eldest is severely autistic so it is very much in our genes. Only ms is relatively unscathed. It would explain a lot about my mother as well.
Day 5 UK NFD
Had a massive clear out of my wardrobe last night. All of my ‘slim’ clothes, unworn for years, now fit perfectly. There is a huge pile of bigger stuff to go the charity shop and a couple of things to be altered. I won’t have that done until I lose the last 12 pounds. Weirdly despite my wardrobe being so much lighter, I still seem to have plenty to wear. When I have lost weight before (never to this extent) I have hung on to the bigger things, so yesterday felt like a hugely symbolic statement to myself.
To any newbies out there, it takes time and it remains hard work but it is so worth it and so are we!
Day 5, Newcastle UK, FD 800cals
3rd week of 5 x 800 cals B2B FDs. All going well.
@saffy420 – no need for any apologies – ramblings are why this particular forum works so well 🙂
@coda – hugs to you. Hang on in, every situation is temporary.
@exdolly – regarding disappearing posts – this happened to a number of people last month and it happened to me yesterday. I emailed the tech guy and he reinstated my post and explained that their spam filter can be overly aggressive at times (not that there was anything remotely offensive in my post).
@okeydokey & @bert1802 – hope your family celebrations went well yesterday and everyone had lots of fun.
@debster251 – congratulations on 37 years of marriage – and a controlled FD yesterday. Hope you had a good day.
Happy and successful Wednesday friends.
This is such a good forum! I thought I’d share my first week. ( I did start a couple of days early but just needed to get into the swing)
I am am from Lancashire UK.
I have lost 3lbs
2 cm off hips
5cm off waist
1cm ON chest!!!! Husband is happy but says I’ll look like Jessica Rabbit if I carry on!
2cm off upper arm
1cm off thighs
I am well an truly stunned! The weight loss isn’t that impressive but the centimetres are.
Day 5 – FIN – NFD
Still down with the flu, but hoping that more of the mucus stuck in my throat and making me cough will remove itself today. I skipped yesterday’s dance class and should probably compensate for all this sitting and lounging around with a walk at some point during the week.
@okeydokey What an impressive loss in such a short time period! I’m also impressed by your determination and ability to go on such long fasts – as a relatively new person trying out this WOL, I’ve only stuck to a maximum of maybe 40 hr fasts so far. But you’re correct, fasting can be done in many ways – when 5:2 was first brought up in the local newspapers some years ago, there was a lot of conflicting information, and the first time I gave 5:2 a go I also only did 24 hrs (it was a disaster, but more so probably due to the lack of fluid intake).
@mogaman I’ve been fasting on my travel days the past few weeks, and I certainly would recommend it – you often end up being pretty busy, so eating might not be the first thing on your mind. I would recommend packing a book into your hand luggage and keeping that water bottle filled. Besides, the food on the airport is often overpriced, so not eating there will also save money. During the flight, there might be nutritional information on the packaging of the food you’re being served, so in case you decide to eat that, you can also keep up with how much your energy intake is. And if not, you can always pack your own food along.
@dykask Coincidence perhaps, but I just read an article about salt and its effects on the body in this morning’s newspaper. It might be a bit much to translate the entire thing, but there were some interesting points about the complicated balance between salt and our bodies (the connection between the sodium levels in our bodies and increased blood pressure has been difficult to prove as both vary constantly throughout the day; there’s also individual differences in how our bodies react to salt – some people are more sensitive to changes than others), about how the proof of a connection between too much salt and heart diseases is contradictory (the connection between salt and strokes, kidney problems and stomach cancer has been proven), and about how the sodium that accumulates under the skin, in the medium between connective tissues, despite being a risk factor for high blood pressure, seems to also be used by the body to fight infections (the salt levels and blood pressure tend to increase as we get older, so it’s possible that it’s also be an ancient method for the body to replace the weaknesses in the immune system (that also increase with age)). The article also talks about how there might be a connection between too much salt and autoimmune diseases.
Here are a few graphs (in Finnish) about the salt consumption Finland (women are in red, men in blue). The first graph is the average consumption of salt in grams per day and how it’s changed over the past few years (and the expected numbers in the future). The pie chart is a breakdown of where the salt usually comes from (I suppose it’s for a longer period of time or an overall average). One third is made up of grain products (bread 15/16% (m/f), salty pastries and hamburgers 6/5%, other grain products 11/13%) another third of meat products (foods with meat 24/20%, fish 6%, meat and sausage cold cuts 9/6%), and the remaining part is made up of milk products (6/7%), cheeses (4/6%), vegetable and potato dishes (8/11%), oils, sauces and spreads (5%) and various content (6%).
Day 5 Kent UK, FD
Back into routine this week and going well. Weighing weekly now so Sunday will be my chosen day. I think this will help me control no fast weekends better.
Still doing lots of activity especially as my extra challenge this month is no TV. I will fill this time with reading, colouring, radio and exercise. Of course I will still use my hula hoop. I have a mini trampet, skipping rope and cross trainer which I plan to dust off too.
I am running a six week Nordic Walking Course starting tomorrow. Only 90 minutes per week, but it all helps. It’s free to participants of the U 3 A retirement group, I like to help get people moving. Our bodies will only look after us if we do the same for it, healthy eating a priority too. Making and drinking Kefir an essential daily requirement in my life and recently added yogurt making, it’s so easy too. Try it!
Day 5, NFD Sydney Australia.
Today was s’pose to be a FD, but I did a hard workout at boot camp at 6am this morning and really wanted some breakfast, so had a NFD – with muesli for breakfast, a low cal salad at lunch and some fruit, and a regular dinner with a lentil lasagna.
Will do a FD tomorrow.
One benefit of doing the 31 Day March challenge and staying with it through April is I have totally stopped eating chocolate, muffins and other sugary food. Two reasons – it seems a waste to push through a FD and then blow it on a NFD , and also I am not getting any sugar urges any more. The 5:2 seems to have reduced any interest in high sugar filled foods.
(except wine 🙂
Day 4 UK FD
Just another FD in Paradise…. as Phil Collins once sang (?)… 🙂
Hello Happy Fasters. I hope you’re all well.
My 48 hour fast was much easier and better than I thought. Stuck to the 600kcal limit last night when breaking it. Now on to the next FD. So far so good 12 hours in. Might try another 48 hour one across Thurs/Fri, but not sure it’s good to do that, I’m doing enough with B2B2B2B2B mid-weeking.
Also, I’m doing a Swimmathon this Friday with some swimming friends for charity. Would anyone object to me posting a link to my JustGiving page? And would anyone be interested in sponsoring me? I don’t like to presume 🙂
@lynzm I will pray to the God of Scales for you. He/she/it gets angry with all of us now and again. Either that or you have a wobbly floor tile 🙂
Day 5 London – NFD
I noticed yesterday that Pret have a new spring menu with a few new vegetarian salads, coming in at 200-300 calories. I had a cauliflower, courgette and turmeric one yesterday which was lovely.
Saw my best friend for dinner last night which included creme caramel & a few little chocolate eggs for desert. Didn’t feel the need to over do it at all and scales looked good this morning. (despite the naughty croissant I snaffled for breakfast!)
So feeling very confident in this way of eating and interested to see how the maintenance really pans out… or whether I end up switching from 6.1 back to 5.2…
Has anyone been doing any Fast Exercise / HIT at home and got any recommendations for DVDs or workouts to try? I’ve been looking at Joe Wicks and also the Jillian Michaels 10 Minute Body but couldn’t decide between those.
Good luck to all fasters today!
Day 5 NFD NZ
Pretty well controlled today
Had a great run this morning
Starting my fast tonight, will go through tomorrow with approx 350cals at dinner time then I carry on the next day through until dinner again and have about 800cals or a bit less. I don’t consider it a BTB as I go over the 500 on the second day but it works for me as they are both my work days and I stay so busy it’s pretty easy and saves me time on the busy mornings not eating and getting the housework done in my lunch break instead of making lunch
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Michael Mosley gives an update for 2019, current research in the field and announces a tour starting in February.
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