Yesterday I stopped my fast day in the evening because I felt a migraine coming on – may have been caused by not doing enough exercises for the back/spine, but also form not eating. I rarely have migraines, but when I do, I get the really bad version where the light hurts your eyes and you end up vomiting and going to bed.

I decided not to beat myself up over it, and didn’t.
Knowing myself, I am aware that I need to find a right balance between a relaxed attitude and strictness with myself.
I know and accept that to lose weight and, more importantly, keep it off, I can’t do a diet for a limited duration. I need to build habits that can be kept for decades. If I am super strict and turn every aborted FD into a dramatic interior monologue about being a worthless loser, I am going to fail. But if I am too lenient and shrug my shoulders, saying “Oh it doesn’t matter, there are other fast days to come…” I might fail, too.
So I’m a bit baffled about how to handle this problem.

Hi Lolly, and thanks for your encouraging words.
You’re right, take care of yourself should be the watchword. What I (and I suspect many 5:2ers) must rethink is HOW to take care of ourselves. When depressed – long walks, not chocolate truffles; when breakfasting – small portion of fruit with flaxseed and curds, not nutella on toast. And so on.

[RANT TO FOLLOW, do not read if you don’t want to waste time, it’s just for me to get it off my chest.]
I just read an article about the “obesity epidemic” (please, don’t get me started) and most of the readers’ comments left me livid. Some readers of this quality newspaper felt the need to tell the world how disgusted they are with greedy fat people, but most piped up with sensible advice à la “fat people need to eat less and do more sports”.
Really, people. Why don’t you go and market your guaranteed-to-win formula on how to overcome alcoholism (“You need to stop drinking.”) and drug addiction (“You need to stop using drugs and solve your problems in more constructive way.”).

Yes, I agree, I need to eat less and do more sports.
But this is such an oversimplified statement as opposed to the multifaceted, complex problem of obesity.
There is a cultural dimension (we haven’T had time to adjust to a consumer society with its endless supply of cheap calories); a social dimension; poverty/wealth divide (food deserts in poorer areas come to mind); insuline and cortisol; gut bacteria; satiety (carbs vs. proteins); endoctrine responses and so on and so forth.
And readers are convinced that such an issue can be tackled by telling overweight people to eat less and do more sports. Now listen up, moron readers of said quality newspaper: if it were THAT simple, WOULD there be many overweight people? What do you think?
– – – – – – – – –
EXACTLY.

Thank you.
[END OF RANT.]

Lolly, SO glad I could point you in the right direction…and now we can all close down this forum and be any size we want, isn’t it great?

*sarcasm and bitter laughs off

Today is my first fast day of the week – for some reason I am extremely insecure, doubting that I will be able to pull it off. I don’t quite know why as I did all the fast days before the last two weeks perfectly. In the week leading up to Easter I did one fast day and just failed abysmally on the other (hello, clever idea of making salted caramel candy and not eating any myself), last week I did one perfectly and then stopped the other in the evening as I had a migraine coming on – so, justifiably. So I need to remind myself (and am doing it here) that I actually CAN do fast days and there is no need to be so, I don’t know, nervous about it. And even IF I should fail, it’s not the end of the world, there’s another opportunity just around the corner.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the reason for all this dithering is that it is so important for me to lose weight, and to maintain weightloss, that I can’t bear the idea of failing, and that the chance of failing makes me nervous. I’m sure an attitude of quiet confidence and dignified calm (lol. SO not me.) would be more helpful.
So.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Be quietly confident and calm in a dignified way.
There. Done.

Let’s see how many seconds it will last.

Oh, for an absolutely obscure reason I weighed 95.6 kilos this morning.
Why?
I visited lovely relations yesterday and ate cake in big quantities.
How come I weigh 1 kilo LESS than the day before? After all that cake?
Maybe I should add “weigh ONCE a week only” to my to do list
(other item: Quiet confidence, dignified calm”)? Just to spare myself the roller-coaster upheaval of stepping on the scales every day?

Okay, hear the baby babbling in the other room – after a monster nap of 20 minutes. Yay. I forsee fussing in the near future, let me run and check on her.

Good luck to all of you, keep on keeping on!

Isn’t the problem that in the media we are told again and again how easily we can override our body’s impulses and makeup – for instance: “do sports, and you will lose lots of weight”; turns out that the body uses most of the energy to maintain its normal functions (body heat etc.) and that only a small part of the energy is used for more or less vigorous movement. Or “8 weeks after giving birth to little Appleblossom Yoga Kendra, supermodel Lizzie de Laure has her pre-baby-body back. How does she do it? ‘Oh, I just eat a little less,’ she said while biting into a double whammy burger.” In the media, many weightloss plans look immensely doable – and people fail and fail and fail and just end up blaming themselves – while what really happened is that they were given crap information and crap programs to do.

But this, somehow, really looks doable…and the science makes sense.

Do you think we self-sabotage because we are afraid of succeeding? I’m not quite sure…although I did realize that I was a little spooked by that 95 kg on the scale because getting there was too easy…

Anyway, I had a ridiculously, embarrassingly relaxed and easy fast day yesterday, after all that useless bellyaching on Tuesday. I cruised through the day, had fat-free shakushka for lunch and green asparagus soup for dinner and ended at 501 calories.
The scales gave me a thumbs up: 95.0 kilos. NIIICE!

So, tomorrow I’ve got to do the second fast day and guess what? A little voice in my head mutters: “But what if you fail? What if you can’t do it? What will that do to your self-confidence and feeling ofself-worth?”
Oh DO shut up, little voice! It’s like being harrassed by Waldorf and Stetler in my own brain. Meh.

Sounds like an incredibly interesting meeting… 😉

Hi and welcome cold pizza, don’t worry, I just went offline for a week. 🙂

So…I am back from visiting my parents. I was planning on staying until Wednesday, but the whole thing was so enjoyable that I stayed the whole week. I don’t know about you, but I manage to enjoy my parents’ company and to love and respect them the more the older I get. I didn’t get on well with them in my early twenties – but now I realize that they are actually amazing people (warts and all).
Anway.

My mother is amazingly inconsistent (and I am saying this in a very loving and slightly amused way) – is SO concerned about the obesity epidemic, but trieds to feed her overweight daughter (me) as if I had just escaped the Leningrad blockade.
But finally, FINALLY, my strategy of friendly firmness seems to “take”. We did not have to do the “Have some cake!” – “Thanks, but no.” – Oh, do!” – “Thanks, but no!” – “Just a tiny bit!”-… charade ONCE. I even managed to do two improvised fast days without having them questioned (“Overweight people are SO undisciplined…you want to do a FAST DAY? BUT you can’t! It’s unhealthy!” Amazingly inconsistent. As I said.).

She (thin, BTW)is also the Queen of Carbs, while my (normal weight) father went to a lecture on the benefits of low carbs and then made up his own low carb diet which runs along the lines of “don’t eat beans, legumes, potatoes, rice, pasta – but hey, bread, cake, candy, wine and beer are okay”. It drives my mother nuts. But maybe that’s the whole point. They’ve been married for 45 years, they know each other’s triggers by now.

Anyway.
I bought amazing breads and pastries at a local bakery and we had a carb-fest for breakfast/brunch. No lunch, then something salad-y for dinner. They have whole drawers of candy (thanks, dad) but for the first time ever I managed to eat a little and then walk away slowly with my hands up. I even managed to sneak a box of posh Ferrero Rocher my friend gave me into their candy drawer and left it there.

The reward for my overall smart and responsible behaviour was: 94.4 kilos when I came back home YAY YES WELL DONE APPLAUSE FIREWORKS and so on. Below the magic number of 95.0. HA.

Mr. Austrian is also back from his set of business trips, and as business trips seem to consist of long flights where they feed you, long meetings where they feed you, and long lunches where they feed you HE’s above the magic number of 95.0.
This makes him nervous, which is a good thing, because if there is one male Austrian who definitely needs to lose weight, it’s him.
a) because I love him and we are in the growing-old-together business
b) because he has a similar build to his father, and his father had a heart attack a couple of years ago
So I need to stick to 5:2 to encourage him to try out 5:2.

Okay, baby crying, need to run and check on her.

Enjoy your evenings, nights and days everyone.

Lolly, good idea to give it to the food bank – I read about this man who did not want to buy a new kitchen before he’d eaten all the food in the cupboards he had – he ate all kinds of crappy and crazy stuff for THREE MONTHS until the last can was gone. Your way is much better and more respectful to the body (“My body is not a waste disposal unit.”)

Cold pizza, thank you! 🙂

Today I cruised through a fast day; Monday makes a lot of sense, the week feels fresh and I have more of a can-do attitude than on Friday. The key to success is to keep myself busy, so I took the baby to the children’s library, which was lovely for us – lots of interesting things for her to watch, and a lot of fun for ME watching her. It’s like being out and about with someone who is high, she minutely examined a brick wall for five minutes and kept laughing loudly at such hilarious stuff as the sliding elevator doors and the rows of library shelves. 🙂

Mr. Austrian is getting interested despite himself, and actually wanted to eat some of my 5:2 asparagus soup instead of the usual midnight feast of bread and butter and cold cuts. I think reading the labels of the bread and sausage he bought came as something of a shock to him – both contained sugar.
HA.

I’m signing off now, going to read a detective novel I got at the library and hoping I will stay strong and not add another calorie to my intake until breakfast.

Have a lovely evening, everyone.

One woman’s poison is another person’s pleasure, right?
HOpefully your sugary treats will go to someone who is as insensitive to carbs as a rhinoceros! One of those obnoxious people like my best friend, who eats and eats whole platters of the fattiest, sugariest, most deep-fried food you care to imagine – and who has still the figure of a half-starved waif from oneof the grimmer Grimms’ fairy tales. At age forty. *sigh

Anyway, 94.0 kilos. HA.

I thought a lot about my late grandmother, who was a marvellous cook, and my mother, who is a marvellous cook. The things they cook(ed) – I rarely make them any more. The thought that this culinary heritage will be lost makes me very sad – but then that’s life: you have to let go of so many things, let go, let go, let go. It’s the way life works, even if I will not fry potato dumpling dough cakes on my stove for my daughter.
Actually, it may be a big problem (maybe not only for me) that good memories and food are so entwined – I can tell my daughter lots of wonderful things about her great-grandmother without mentioning on food at all. But when I think of her, so many of her old recipes come to mind, so many images of her in the kitchen, talking and brandishing a big knife to emphasize whatever she was talking about.
…

Anyway, be happy, all of you. And good luck with your plans for tomorrow.

So…the result of this week’s fast days is 94.0 kilos.
Am very pleased, although I wrecked yesterday’s fast day (blameless eating behavior until I learned that Prince had died, after which I felt strangely compelled to eat two cups of granola? What kind of weirdness is THIS? I am not even much of a fan.) and so didn’t push my weight below 94.0.
It’s okay, though. I realize that there is not a specific deadline involved – I’ve got to keep IF up anyway, so if I mess up once in a while it’s not the end of the world.

Okay, baby’s woken up, bye bye everyone, have a great weekend.

Asparagus soup – I sort of made it up and it’s a very basic non-gourmet version, but I’ll do my best.

I had 500 grams of green asparagus.
Wash the asparagus and cut off the dried bits at the end of the spear and any hard or brown bits. If it’s green asparagus, you don’t have to peel it.
Cut off the tips and steam them in very little water until they are tender.
Cut the rest of the asparagus in relatively small bits. Cook about 250 ml of water. When soft, put in blender and blend until you have a purree without any coarse bits.
Add 1-2 glasses of water, depending on how thick/thin you want your soup.
Add stock cube to taste, bring soup to the boil, add 30 grams of cream.
Taste, add salt, pepper, any other seasonings (I don’t add anything).
When you’re satisfied with the taste, add asparagus tips and cooking liquid of tips.

Enjoy and look forward to asparagus-smelling pee later that night.

5:2 really seems to reset appetite – I ate some walnuts today (okay, a handful), and after that just was full and couldn’t eat anything at all for several hours. The walnuts waved their little arms about and shouted “Here I am! Eat MEEEEE!”, but I just. Couldn’t.
As I’ve always found it impossible to stop eating nuts, I’m pleasantly surprised. Something has definitely changed for the better.

I need to decompress for a second, otherwise I’ll start eating something unhealthy. I think today is the first time in The Baby’s life when I’m actually stressed out – she has been sleeping badly for at least ten days, I’m very tired, and she loves bedtime as much as Saudi Arabia loves and applauds women drivers. Lots of thrashing and gnashing of teeth and grumpiness. I could feel my back muscles seizing up and my jaw muscles clenching, and unless I go and do a bit of yoga and meditation, I will go and try to relax by eating things…NOT a good idea.

While trying to relax, I came across a review of “Dietland” in the Guardian, which seems to be a novel with a fat heroine; fat acceptance seems to play an important role. Most of the readers’ comments are so dismal and disheartening, guaranteed to make you want to join a militant group, no matter which one.
God, people are idiots. (“Stop drinking soda. That right there will eliminate 50% of the fat people.” – Stopping drinking soda is a good idea, but keeping away from oversimplfying matters is an even better idea. And “eliminate 50% of the fat people”? REALLY?)

Okay, NOW I feel up to tackling the rest of my evening – far from the maddening fridge, certainly. 🙂

You can always a life of sourdough adventures by living vicariously through mine – I’ll keep you up to date if there are any dramatic developments! 🙂

Actually John-Boy is an interesting example of the importance of nutrition.You feed him the correct amount at the correct time and he thrives – but WHAT is the correct amount and what is the correct time varies a bit from individual to individual. It takes experience, but also knowledge to get it right. You have to have a routine in place, but also be alert to unexpected changes.
And sourdough is a simple organism – yeasts don’t have a difficult childhood and bacteria don’t turn to emotional binge eating because their husband left them for their best friend.
After getting to know the intricacies of feeding John Boy, I have sworn to take good care of my gut bacteria – I wouldn’t want them to stop bubbling merrily and starting to smell like nail polish remover.

Back from visiting the in-laws!

It was quite nice but oh boy am I glad to be back!
For one thing, the in-laws live in a part of the country that has the most atrocious dialect imaginable. Other Austrians call their accent “barking”. Really, they do, and it’s entirely justified. At some times the in-laws remember that I am there and marginally tone down the accent, but when they forget (what with me being unobtrusive and keeping in the background), they start “barking” (i.e. they turn some of the vowels into diphtong sounds, hard to describe, hard to listen to) and use all sorts of quaint local words and I am like “WHAT? WHAT??? SAY AGAIN???? WHO killed himself and WHY? WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”. But I keep quiet because experience has taught me that their explanations, earnest and well-meaning, are given in the same barking tone with the same quaint local words no one has ever heard before and I just. Don’t. Get. It.
Oh, and after three days Mr. Austrian returns to his roots and starts barking, too, which is very strange since he usually speaks with a northern German accent as a token of his success to escape from his village and, presumably, the barking and quaint local words.

But the barking can be avoided by sitting in a corner and being unobtrusive. The cooking can’t be avoided. My mother-in-law, though a lovely woman, hates cooking and has been forced to cook once a day for the last 50 years. She takes out her wrath on the innocent ingredients. Meat is fried within an inch of its life, potatoes are boiled into a gluey sludge that holds on to the bottom of the pot, vegetables are straw-colored and mushy. Dish 1 is oversalted. Dish 2 contains no salt whatsoever. Dish 3 is a trifle that tastes of sausage because it was kept in the fridge without a cover. Nobody except me seems to notice. My own grandmother was an even worse cook (renowned for a whitish, glistening cucumber sauce with camouflage coloured cucumber shreds in it. Cucumber sauce? I ask YOU!), but mother in law comes a close second.
And the WORST, absolutely the WORST is that she belongs to the generation when housewives decided who had to eat what and you get whatever she deems appropriate for you. Now take a second and guess who might get the largest portion. Yes, indeed, it’s the GUESTS. Oh, how lucky lucky lucky we are!

So, getting home was a bit of a relief, and here I am, all 94.0 kilograms of me, and am planning to do a fast day on Wednesday and Friday. Please hold me accountable!

I hope you are all doing well – now I’m going to browse the forums to see what’s new! Keep on keeping on, everyone.

Coldpizza,

I had to laugh when I read about the sausage with pasta disaster and that you fed your dog with it – when it’s gone, it’s no longer a temptation!
Yesterday, I actually threw away an ice cream after peeling off and eating the chocolate layer, how bad is that?
Oh well, one day at a time, right?

How did your emergency fasting go?

My fast day went well, I didn’t eat anything until 6 pm, then had vegetables and salmon. I just felt hungry twice, but then I managed to keep myself occupied and get out of the house – doing a fast day while sitting at home, I don’t know if that would work so well. Too close to the fridge!
What I like about the no-food-all-day approach is that somehow it feels good, as if I was giving my body a break.
But I didn’t experience the surge of energy some fasters talk about, I felt rather tired and slow as if my body was winding down a bit.

I just read a book about Papua New Guinea and the hunter-gatherer cultures there. There was a passage describing how the women built a dam and then dug up a steep river bank 1.5 metres deep – several women and children worked for several hours, found four shrimps (I don’t know if that’s what you call them while they are still alive), a frog and a small mammal- and everybody cheered and was glad that they’s found so much food…which then had to be cooked and shared with everybody.
Which proves: we are NOT constructed to live in the world of supermarkets and easy access to calorie-dense food. We are constructed to keep going on extremely little food while working hard to find more food (makes you question the meaning of it all, really).

fuvvie, how did your fast day go? I guess well, with so much to do and so many kids around you must be too busy to eat a lot?