I am no expert, but my mother was Type 2 diabetic and so I have some familiarity with the matter. As I understand it the medications are designed to stimulate insulin production and it is insulin which converts sugar into fat. Perhaps your medication is too strong and that is why you are putting on weight. This is what happened to my mother until she had her medication adjusted. I think it is important not to disregard what a professional has told you nor to take any action based on the opinions of non-experts like me. If you feel less than wholly confident in your GP then perhaps you should diplomatically ask to be referred to a specialist.

Hi Madmanc,
“both over the morbidly obese scale who both have less than 4% body fat and look like the toned fit athletes they are”

Exactly. Muscle weighs more than fat – your boys are the proof. 5:2 has an added habit of helping the fat-muscle conversion along, so if you didn’t have a lot of visceral fat to begin with and have vastly increased your exercise at the same time you took up 5:2 then the fat-muscle conversion is a strong contender for explaining what’s going on with you. It will reach a ‘tipping point’ and you will see a weight reduction once it gets there I think.

Depending when your doc took your BP (before or after you were weighed) could explain the increased BP on its own. Stress afects your BP and it’s been proved that people tend to have a higher BP when tested by a doc vs the practice nurse for exactly that reason. So unless your BP was ‘over the line’ dangerously high, I wouldn’t worry too much about a little rise. I was ‘high end of normal’ BP my entire life until 5:2, I was tested 2 months after starting and it was ‘perfectly normal’ and last time it was checked I’d been in a rush and as it was a tad higher than last time, we did it again after the rest of my tests/consultation and it was apparently ‘perfect’.

Try not to stress too much – just keep doing what you’re doing and maybe knock off weighing yourself so often if it gets you down. If you leave it 1 month and weigh again it’ll be a nice surprise I think. Also, don’t forget to measure in other ways. If you’re converting fat to muscle you may notice your shape changing and your vital stats shrinking before you notice it on the scales.

Dear Madmanc
Are you injecting insulin? Doing at least daily BS tests? You need to monitor your blood sugars at least once, if not 3-4 times a day while losing large amounts of weight. You will have to adjust your medication to allow for your varied eating. As our doctor said to my husband “It is not rocket science.”
You are responsible for your body. Insist on your medical team supporting you. Tell them what you are doing and insist they work with you. Watch Dr Fung’s Insulin Toxicity on Youtube and you will understand how fasting works with diabetes.
All the best
PVE

Do you have edema (water retention)? Using the adage “a pint’s a pound the world around,” your 9 pound weight gain *might* be 9 pints (1.125 gallon) of “water weight.” One simple test for edema is to press the soft part – NOT the nail – of a finger or thumb into your shin bone. Press hard for 15 to 30 second, then look and/or feel the spot where you were pressing. If there is a depression in the skin of the shinbone, you probably have edema. A couple of years ago I had edema, and the divot in the skin of my shinbone was easily 1/8 inch (3mm) deep. You may want to review the side effects of the meds you are taking to see which of them could cause water retention. To help myself get rid of the excess water, I made a change to drinking mostly plain cold water during the day instead of diet sodas and diet iced tea. If you don’t like the taste of your local water, get a water filter pitcher and keep it in the refrigerator. Drinking cold liquids is claimed by some to slightly increase your metabolism.

Madmanc:

The reduction in blood sugar because of 5:2 is to be expected and enjoyed. The increase in weight is something you have to find out about.

If you have been doing 5:2 as you say, you have lost fat weight. You did not gain muscle weight. A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat, so at most your exercise would convert fat to muscle, lose inches, but your weight would not change. The only way you could gain 9 pounds of either muscle or fat would be to over eat by over 31000 calories, which you clearly did not.

Your weight gain has to be water weight. I would check with my doctor to see if either of the drugs (especially the ‘new’ one) could be responsible. Second, I would look at my diet and see if you are eating a lot of salt, and also carbs as a % of calories. Both carbs and salt can cause water retention. Finally, your exercise will also cause water retention because the body needs water to repair and build the muscles you are ‘damaging’ with your exercise (this is a good thing).

I suspect it may be a combination of some or all of these things, but I would confirm that your new drug(s) do not have a history of causing water retention or weight gain.

Here is a link to Dr. Fung’s video (I did not see it above): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oZ4UqtbB_g

Good Luck!

Madmanc:

You say your diet consists mainly of protein. If over 25 – 30% or so of your calories come from protein on a consistent basis, you should be concerned that you are eating too much and placing stress on your kidneys. The most healthy diet is 60%+ calories from fat, 15%- from carbs and the rest from protein. However, protein does not appear to cause water weight gain.

Madmanc:

Sounds like you are getting good advice from your son. Hope you can find the solution to the water weight issue!

Good Luck!

Madmanc, are you logging all your food, fast days and non-fast days? Although you should be able to do fasting without logging foods on non-fast days it might be a good idea for a while to find out what you are eating.

The medication you are on is indeed not associated with weight gain or an increase in insulin levels (which could cause weight gain).
If neither food intake nor medication are to blame, you need to look for other possible causes; salt intake has already been mentioned, thyroid, kidney and heart function should be assessed as well. Not that there is something lurking in the shadows.

And last, but by no means least: even if your weight stays put or goes up somewhat, if other measurements like waist and hip circumference go in the right direction and you seem otherwise healthy, I would not stress too much about it.

Madmanc, if blood pressure and blood sugar are improving I would say that you are achieving the most important things.

You said in June that you have upped your exercises and lost inches from the waist. That is a sign that you are losing body fat. The scales are not the bee’s knees because they cannot tell you what your body composition is. Weight in itself is neither good nor bad, the fat around the internal organs is the problem. And if your waist is shrinking, the fat is shrinking.

I lost a lot of weight in the beginning, then it stopped for a while but my waist got thinner and the triple chin became a double chin. Suddenly weight loss started again. No idea why but I thought if I am losing inches and a chin, something is still going the right direction.

Well there you go – it is ABSOLUTELY working for you then isn’t it. You are shrinking, whether your scales reflect that or not.

Scales are obviously useless as a motivator for you, so toss ’em. Just keep doing what you’re doing with your 5:2 pattern (as it’s obviously working for you) and rely on your check ups with the doc for keeping track of weight and let it be a nice surprise next time you go. 😉

I’m having a similar struggle with reality vs scales at the moment myself Madmanc. I lost 4 stone in the first 18 months or so on 5:2 and then joined a gym and upped my exercise by 400%. I expected that to bring my losses to a screatching halt for a little while but it has been pretty demoralising the last few months being ‘lucky’ to lose 1lb per month. I KNOW it’s the fat-muscle conversion but it’s still hard. It’s so weird though that I’ve had more “you’ve lost more weight haven’t you?” comments in the past few weeks & months than I did during the entire first 6 months on 5:2 (during which time I lost 2 – apparently invisible to the naked eye – stone). 😉