Hi there from Germany,

in the search for recepies for a fast day I found the hint to this site et voila, now I am here :-).

I changed my eating habits to the 5:2 pattern a bit more than 2 weeks ago (I am currently on my 6 fast day in total and doing just fine) after two family members recommended it. They are on this diet since first of april, mainly to lose weight fast, so they also limit their caloric uptake on the non-fast-days. So far they are both very successful (11 and 9 kg).

I got interested, because I did not have any problems to imagin being able to incorporate this eating habits in my lifestyle. It actually sounds very much like a eating style I used to have when I was single, were calorie uptake would differ very much from day to day, with some days were I was just to busy to eat and others were I enjoyed eating a lot. When I found a partner I gained a lot of weight, as it suddenly became nearly impossible to just listen to the needs of my body. For example now have a fixed eating pattern with a meal in the evening, that I would have maybe skipped on some days being alone.

I never actually made a big fuss about my weight and it quite normally varied in a range of about 15kg each year since I am a teenager, but always dropped basically by itself again according to my activity patterns in different seasons. But since 3 years its just going up, now being as high as it never had been before ending at a BMI of 35. Thats enough! I would like to stop and reverse it, aiming less for a fast but more for a permanent change. I am not a fan of a temporary diet as I believe it does more harm than good. Also other dietary changes never convinced me enough to even start, because they usually seem to strict with lots of prohibitions that I would never be able to comply with for the rest of my life (e.g. low carb).
But the fast diet seems very reasonable and realizable for me, even if my partner would decide not to be in on it (but at the moment he tries as well, which is great). I am focussing on a weekly caloric balance in the end. We decided for monday and wednesday to be our fast days, which works out quite good so far. Tuesday is my “all goes” day on which I do not count calories at all. The other days of the week I try to limit my calories to be not higher then my total metabolic rate per day (so far it is usually at 80-90% those days).
I do some sports. Once a week I attent a HIIT sports class. I do some additional sport at home (trying to accomplish some sports challenges to keep me motivated) which adds up to maybe half an hour a day. I also love biking and try to fit it in whenever I can. So far I lost a bit more than 2kg already, which I did not expect so fast as I try to be more relaxed about it. But this success also pushes me quite a lot now 🙂

read you around
Aj