Hi marie:

If you did 5:2 and lost weight, you know it works.

If you are now gaining weight, you are not doing 5:2. That is because if you eat 500 cal. or less two days a week, and your TDEE or less five days a week, you cannot gain weight.

Your ‘problem’ is quite common. People lose weight but then start eating more than they were eating and start gaining. By definition you are eating more than your TDEE on average – that is the only way you could be gaining weight. Count calories for a few diet and non diet days and you will get an idea of how many calories you are eating. As that number of calories is causing you to gain weight, if you eat less then you should stop your weight gain. Your exercise won’t help you lose weight.

The less you eat, the more you lose.

Good Luck!

If your gain happened only since you quit smoking you are dealing with another issue as well as normal consumption issues. Nicotine, by smoking, vaping, nasal or oral spray, nicotine gum or transdermal patch can increase the metabolic rate. Nicotine use also acts as an active appetite suppressant.

Also when you quit smoking you replace smoking with eating. So 3 times the charm and it’s easy to gain 40 pounds in the first 6 months after smoking cessation. I did that and then some plus ##. (I won’t embarrass myself with the number it’s BIG)

The solution is simple eat less, fast more, and make sure you recalculate your TDEE repeatedly or set your TDEE for your goal weight and stay within it.

The fact is that the only way to lose weight is to consume less energy than you expend. The reverse is also true to gain weight consume more energy than you expend. Gaining is easy we’re all good at that it seems. It’s consuming less that we’re not so good at.

Consume less lose more. Caloric restriction through fasting is probably the easiest to achieve. 5:2 isn’t fast, it isn’t expensive, it does work; as long as you eat less than your actual current TDEE on NFDs and consume less than 25% of your TDEE on FDs you will lose weight. I highly recommend that your fast days be zero caloric intake days. Water only. 5:2 has to be individualized if it isn’t you will fall back into habits that aren’t conducive to weight loss or good health.

Marielaem, all carbs are not created equal. White bread v. vegetables. Fruit juice v. fresh fruit. What kind of carbs have you increased?

Hi Marielaem
Sorry you are gaining weight despite all the hard work.
The current research is that if you reduce your calories your metabolism slows down however if you fast your body will speed up its metabolism again. So what may have happened to you is your metabolism has slowed down now you are eating less over the long term. If you google Dr Fung MD you can get all the science but in a nutshell I think he is advocating that you don’t eat anything but just drink water for 16 hours or more twice a week and this will improve your metabolism. Anyway have a look at his website. All the best

I am new to 5:2 and so cannot really speak much from experience with it. However, I am not new to dieting per-se and one area you might want to look at is how you had achieved your weight loss in the past.

While dieting, people very often focus on overall weight lost, and not so much as to whether the weight that was lost, was muscle, fat, or both. Ideally, we should be focusing on losing fat and not losing muscle. Certainly, having more muscle mass contributes to having both a higher TDEE and BMR – which then could potentially mean a higher margin for error of calories consumed on FDs.

This is why in addition to fasting, we still need to remember the value of exercise. Even if we don’t intend to ‘bulk-up’ on muscle mass, we should at least try to retain the amount of muscle we already have.

Therefore, it is highly recommended that one invest in a quality electronic scale, that not only measures fat %, but also muscle and bone % as well. This will enable you to have an objective means of determining what kind of weight loss one is experiencing.

In theory, if one is only losing fat, then one should see fat % go down, and bone and muscle % either go up or stay the same.

Any thoughts?

Yes, if you search him on Youtube you can find his instructional lectures, very informative. I also bought the book, but found his lectures better because of the easy to understand speaking format in addition to visuals. Someone told me he has another book coming out in October on Fasting…wish I could have an advance copy!