My hubby and I are almost permanent house sitters and when we arrived at our current sit on 1st March, the owners told us about the 5.2 Diet. We always do a thirty minute dog walk here so decided to have a go with the diet as well. We know from previous efforts that the best thing is to spend two or three days cutting down and cutting out all the naughty treats (and living in France the list is long) and we began in earnest on the 3rd March. Our first purchase was a little flat food scale and a load of fresh fruit and veg from the market. We keep to around 1500 cals on the five days and on Monday and Thursday we stick to 500 cals and I am tickled pink to have shed 3kgs in two weeks. Hubby who is about to turn 70 carries all his weight on his stomach and this is disappearing at a truly visible rate. We have extended the dog walk and now climb the 40 stairs outside and inside the house without any gripping of the bannister and gasping for oxygen. We take a container of carrot and celery sticks with us when we go exploring and can now walk straight past the bakeries. Age is no excuse to let the pounds pile on and we can both highly recommend getting started. You CAN teach an old dog new tricks – just ask the labrador!

Hi JoeeP. Great to hear from you. We have family just outside Melbourne and are flying over in mid April for four months. We are almost full time house sitters and we are combining the trip with five weeks in Adelaide and seven weeks in Tasmania so we make the airfare worth it.

I got onto the 5.2. diet when I realised that I was going to have to be pretty active with five grandchildren, and I didn’t want my very slim trim daughter and daughter in law sizing me up and thinking “Mum is running to fat”. I was very active in my earlier years but have tended to let the weight creep up and just got used to the way I looked as long as I avoided photos of myself taken twenty years ago!

Great to hear that you have overcome breast cancer and if what they say is true about the diet, it will definitely help you to remain healthy. My French husband Jean has been suffering from slightly elevated blood pressure and also has variable attacks of psoriasis and in the two weeks that we have been on the diet, his blood pressure has settled down and the big patch of psoriasis that he has on his tail bone has almost vanished. I shed 3 kgs over the two weeks and will be very happy if I can shift another five but I realise that the excess comes off quite easily but the ingrained stuff might need a bit more effort.

We didn’t go into the diet with all guns blazing, but spent two or three days making conscious decisions about things like not having an almond croissant with our mid morning coffee and not having two squares of chocolate after supper. We packed away the deep fat fryer and turned our back on any form of processed food and stocked up with fresh fruit and veg. I also did quite a bit of cooking and freezing and weighed ingredients carefully so as not to cheat.

We brought our calorie intake down to around 1500 for a couple of days and then when the time came for the first fast day, it really wasn’t a huge impact. I changed from a very sweet muesli and oats mix to a grapefruit for breakfast and we always took a plastic box of carrot and celery sticks with us if we went anywhere during the morning. Lunch is my crabstick and tuna salad served on leaves of coz lettuce and decorated with a few little tomatoes and lemon wedges. It looks very attractive and is extremely tasty and I’ll send you the recipe if you’d like. Four pm which can feel like a bit of a long haul is overcome with a small block (5g) of cheese or a couple of spoons of low fat yoghurt and then supper is a bowl of home made vegetable soup. This kept us under the 600 cal mark and we never felt deprived.

Do stay in touch and good luck with your dieting and your health. In fact I refuse to think of it as dieting and refer to it as “cleaning up my act”!
Best wishes. Mrs Dumpy