Am I doing it the wrong way?

This topic contains 8 replies, has 8 voices, and was last updated by  Nouran 10 years ago.

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  • Hi,
    Just started on the diet.
    On fast days, I have a big breakfast and I often finish eating around 9am. Then until the next morning at 9am, I eat 600 calories in total (I’m male).
    I thought I was allowed 600 calories in 24 hours, so I assumed this was a correct way to do it.
    Please let me know, thanks.

    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.

    There is also the problem of the big breakfast. It is important not to compensate for the fasting by having extra large meals before or after.

    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.

    Thanks for all your replies.
    So does it mean that I can have a massive dinner the night before I’m fasting?
    I did find it very easy the other way and to be honest I did lose weight early in the week.
    I normally fast on Mondays and Wednesdays.
    On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go to the gym for a cycle (spin/RPM) class for 45 mins, before I go home for the breakfast.
    But as soon as I hit the weekend, I would gain weight again and by Monday I would pretty much be back to normal weight again 🙁

    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!

    Hiya Danepak, It’s actually a really bad idea to overcompensate for the fact that you’re fasting tomorrow by having ‘extra’ tonight. I find that the fuller I am the night before, the harder the fastday becomes. This is probably due to the fact that I’ve kicked my digestive system into overdrive to deal with what I’ve fed it and then when it suddenly runs out of food to process and asks for more I’m ignoring it (because I’m fasting) and it just makes the whole ‘self-denial’ side of fasting so much more extreme.

    Quite often, if I’m just eating normally the day before a fast I’ll last most of the day without even the slightest pang. I can even manage without much water most of the time (although I don’t recommend it – I SOULD definitely be drinking water) because I just don’t feel any ‘hunger’.

    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 there.
    OK, been doing it the correct way since 9th July.
    I found it surprisingly easy. OK, the first night, I did wake up at around 5am, as I felt hungry, but I fell asleep again.
    But the weird (and wonderful) thing is that when you wake up in the morning, I don’t even feel a need to eat.
    Just woke up 40 mins ago and this is my non-fast day. Still, not thinking of eating yet (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this post…).
    I actually find this diet so easy, so I do it 4/3.
    On a typical day, I eat the following:
    Lunch (which happens around 3pm-4pm: 1 slice of pumpernickel bread, 1/2 cucumber and 100 grams of cooked prawns.
    Dinner: Pumpkin soup, 2 slices of Light Rye toast and 2 low fat chicken sausages.
    That’s approximately 600 calories.
    When I started on the 9th July, I was somewhere between 118kg – 120kg.
    Now I’m down to 113 kg.
    I’ve also started going to the gym in the morning after a fast day (before breakfast).
    I still can’t get into my head how easy this diet is.
    I had to tell myself to have lunch at 4pm yesterday, although I was very very busy with work. Food was just not on my mind. You at times get small hunger pangs, but they disappear instantly.
    I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, as I enjoy this.

    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!

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