Hi Helen1854 – have your checked your TDEE – you cannot assume it is 2000 calories. As you have 5 non-fast days each week, if you get the calorie intake wrong on those days you can easily undo any benefit from your 2 fast days.

I found that when I conservatively calculated my TDEE it was just 1400 calories per day, a long way from the 2000 calorie example on the website. If I ate 2000 calories on my non-fast days I’d be gaining weight not losing it. The calculator on this site advises you to be conservative when estimating your activity level and I have found this to be true – otherwise I don’t lose any weight.
https://thefastdiet.co.uk/how-many-calories-on-a-non-fast-day/

Every year older our TDEE goes down, every kilogram lost our TDEE goes down, so you either need to keep reviewing it or just calculate it for the weight you want to be then you can train yourself to eat the right amount of calories for your goal weight while you are dieting. This doesn’t mean you have to count calories every non-fast day. Just do it for 2-3 weeks until you are confident about food choices and portion sizes.

Just to be clear … I’m not saying calories don’t matter, how much you eat is often an important factor. However for some people at least, refined sugars matter a lot more than the calories.

Right now I’m having trouble keeping my weight below 80kg, but I’m also exercising to build muscle. I expect to have trouble with the weight. I have to turn to other measurements to see progress.

@helen1854 it is very impressive to be able to just cut the sweets cold! Good for you!! Over time you’ll probably be able to enjoy some sweets. I do but I find I don’t eat them nearly as much as I used too. However I have to be very careful not to backslide and let my sweet consumption take control of me.

I actually use a refined sugar budget and try to stay under 3 teaspoons of refined sugars a day. If I absolutely can’t control a sweet craving I eat something like an apple, and often that is enough to get back in control. Currently I don’t count whole fruit against my budget.

On the plus side after a few months I found that I tasted a lot more natural sweetness than I did before. Often sugar sweeten things lost their appeal. However my big weakness is ice cream based deserts, I just have to be careful there.

Hi, Everyone, I was attracted to the title of this thread: Gaining not losing. I have been on this IF WOE for more than three years. It worked well for me for the first year and I lost 23 pounds without much effort. Then I leveled out and stopped losing and then for a few years my weight has been going back up. I’ve re-gained half of what I lost. It has, to say the least, been disheartening.

So, i started to gather information about weight loss and recently read a serious book about fat and what we now know from studies that have been done. It was informative and enlightening but not exactly encouraging. It went into fairly technical detail about the hormones that affect our weight and made the point that it’s not only our TDEE that changes as we lose weight. For instance, two people at the same weight, one of whom has never had to diet and one who gained and lost have very different caloric needs. The weigh gainer-loser actually has changed his metabolism such that he now needs 25% fewer calories to maintain the new weight than the person who never dieted. THAT is very discouraging. It tells me that there are lots of ways to successfully lose weight but keeping it off and staying at the new weight is very hard. Your body is fighting to go back to your higher weight and you now will have a harder time maintaining a lower weight than you’d have if you’d never gained and lost.

The book pretty much explained why my weight loss with IF was successful for a time and why it has been less effective. I have not given up because I think that IF is good for me and I hope it has made me more healthy. And I am kind of stuck with having to stay with it and keep on struggling or all will be lost and I’ll be heavier again and my weight may reach new heights.

I am now trying hard to move more and to eat more carefully on my eat days. I am committed to doing that but am not happy about it because I had thought, way back three years ago, that I’d found the perfect WOE and that I would never again be on a perpetual diet. I am now on an endless diet.

All of this is by way of background, what has happened to me, and I’d like to know what others have found after a long time on IF. I am an older woman and the book confirmed that that is a double whammy because age makes this harder as does being a woman. Thanks for your interest.

MaybelleW – I lost 52 kg (114 lbs) on a VLCD from 2013-2015. Then came the hard task of trying to maintain the weight loss. I tracked absolutely everything – kilojoules, what I ate, when I ate, macro-nutrient grams, exercise and I weighed myself daily. Over months of collecting this data it showed me that my TDEE is roughly 1400 calories. The BMR/TDEE calculators overestimate my TDEE by 200-300 calories, depending on which equation I use.

I have also read articles that looked at the way dieting can effect your BMR and TDEE. While I’m sure this can happen, I also believe that there is also natural variation in BMR between people. Some people are inefficient at processing the calorie energy from what they eat and some are efficient. In this case, efficiency is not helpful as it means you need fewer calories. I know from records that I kept when I weighted 127kg that my calorie intake was roughly 1900-2000 per day – this is also a lower than normal BMR/TDEE, so it is possible that part of the issue is that I simply have one of those bodies that is efficient at utilising calories – might be useful if I was living through a famine but in the modern western world it’s no advantage.

Lethally is right, life is not always fair and although I railed against the unfairness of my BMR/TDEE I can’t change it, so in the end I had to accept it for what it is and find a way to live with it unless I was prepared to be obese again. I’m currently using 5:2 to lose 10kg that I regained late last year and I’m also thinking that long term it can help me with maintenance. I think that for anyone who’s gaining weight while sticking to their TDEE, they have to assume that their personal BMR & TDEE are lower than the BMR models specify (or they are overestimating activity level). All you can do is to adjust it down until you find the level that maintains your weight. Intermittent fasting should allow a bit more flexibility – I’m hoping that if I continue with 2 FDs when I reach my goal weight it should allow me an additional 1800 calories to use as I like on the other 5 days – I’m hoping it works this way.

Hi, Thank you Lethally and LJoyce for your responses. You are so right, controlling weight is very hard. It is a battle that never ends and one I will keep fighting. I think I feel some disappointment, though, that this WOE, this IF that I have been doing for so long, is not what it appeared at the beginning, i.e. the magic bullet. It may be very, very good at making us healthier, at changing some of our cholesterol readings, etc. and that is no small thing. So, I remind myself that I am doing something good for my health.

But I do feel a bit let down by the science community that it has taken so long to understand the workings of our bodies when it comes to weight loss. That it is, in fact, a very complicated process and all the weight loss schemes that make it sound like a solution is at hand are missing the point. The point being that it’s not terribly hard to lose weight; it’s very, very hard to keep it off. And dieting can make it even harder.

The New York Times had a long piece within the last year about the participants in the Biggest Loser TV program. It dealt with the contestants long after they’d lost and the program had ended. Most of them had regained their weight and were now in worse shape because their TDEEs had changed and now it was harder than ever NOT to gain weight. I feel that I am now in that situation, a real conundrum because I know I had to lose some weight and yet by doing so I’ve made my situation worse because I’m having to fight harder now and deny myself more and that goes out endlessly into the future. I thought with IF that I wouldn’t feel like I was on a perpetual diet ALL THE TIME.

So, I guess this is just a bit of a rant on my part, letting off some steam, but also maybe a little bit of a heads up to everyone starting this WOE. It is worth doing and it may make you healthier but it isn’t a magic bullet. There is not such thing!!!