Good morning everyone,

Gday, that is sobering news. It is good that now they know exactly what is happening and can work out the best was to manage it, and that you and OH can also figure out how to work around it.

I hope you have both have a good easy day and find something really special to eat. I hope you can treat yourself to Adelaide’s best paleo.

I’m up fairly early, with the cat on my knee (her training is still going well) and thinking about breakfast. I’ve been busy but both my close friends who were having difficulties are finding their way through, and I have finally worked out that I need to practice diaphragm breathing to deal with my breathing problems. I really think it is that simple, Fingers crossed.

I went to the panel that talked about issues around sugar last night and it was really good and interesting. There was a dentist, a mum who has works at Sugar By Half http://www.sugarbyhalf.com/ and a woman who is studying Australian Native Foods and working with young people on food issues.
Even though most of the time was spent talking about innovative ways to make changes, the main takeaway is just how strong and rich are the big multinationals who are invested in putting cheap tasty sugar in everything.
Also, our fruits and veggies have been bred to be sweeter and sweeter. Melbourne Zoo no longer feeds their animals fruit because it is now too sweet to be part of their diet!

Off to make breakfast and see if I can respond to your interesting posts.

Good morning all.

I was up early to get a few things done before the nurse arrives at 9am – it’s infusion day. Overdue, because I had to delay it for my surgery last week. I’ve noticed over the last 3-4 days a few joints being a bit more painful – some of my fingers are swollen and aren’t bending properly so I’ll be glad for this treatment to kick in.

One of the biggest things I notice doing CDs not FDs is that I never feel that light empty feeling the day after a FD. I don’t get that on an 800cal CD.

Thin, I’m always hopeful but not for anything in particular, I think it just fits with my “glass half full” mindset. There’s an old saying “when all else is lost there is still hope” and it’s always resonated with me.

Cali, the plaster project looks good from a distance! Up close my brush strokes are a bit messy – an artist I’ll never be.
Our weather in Adelaide sounds similar – very dry summers with a dead garden if you don’t water it daily.
How is your husband dealing with the new plant based diet – is he missing things yet?

GDSA, I hope the medication keeps your OH healthy. Much less traumatic than surgery, if it works.

Cinque, sounds like an interesting discussion. Did they have any good ideas on how to get information to the public in effective ways?

I was quite pleased with myself last night. I actually managed to eat a spoonful of chilli con carne – served with a dollop of yoghurt and 2 poached eggs. I’ll try a larger portion tonight. It was ok – probably because even though it has a strong flavour, it doesn’t have a strong smell – and it seems to be strong food smells that are still upsetting my stomach.

I have more baking to do this weekend – two different desserts for a wedding buffet on Sunday. Dozens of tiny individual ones. I’m beginning to wish I’d just volunteered to do one.

Have a good day everyone.

Well that didn’t go well. The nurse tried twice and the drip kept tissuing so we’ve had to store the drip bags in my fridge and he’ll come back and try again on Monday, once my vein has had time to heal. Unfortunately I only have one really good vein for infusions and if they can’t get there drip line in there I don’t really have any other options. It’s a very rare medico that can get a line into any other vein.

At least I don’t have to worry about side effect this weekend.

Hello and happy Friday everyone

I was so sorry to read your awful time with the infusion LJ. I hope Monday is more successful.

Quacka – I too had a bad FD yesterday. It was going so well but then when I leave work I have to walk past a German bakery when going to the train station and the smell….well I bought a multigrain bread roll and wolfed it down. Had the dinner I had planned but hubby opened a bottle of wine and I had a glass….two actually if I’m being honest. But I will just look ahead to better FD’s.

Cinque, sorry to hear about your breathing problems, I hope everything improves.

GDSA, I hope the medication works well for your OH. I agree, it is much less traumatic than surgery.

Califd – I hope you get as much rain as you need to finally get some green grass. We had 70mm yesterday and lots more today so I’m hoping for the greenery to reappear in our garden soon. Hubby has prepared the soil for our spring planting (herbs and some veges..yum) and the rain couldn’t have come at a better time.

Thanks for the mantras thinatlast – I especially love ‘nothing tastes as good as being slim feels’.. I’ll keep that one close

Everyone, have a great rest of Friday and a superb weekend.

Glad the infusion is out of the way, LJ. After reading your first post, I was going to comment that, hopefully, when a patient is known to have ‘tricky’ veins, they routinely send out the most experienced nurses. Then I read that you do get a ‘regular’. I like your expanded mantra, ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much’.

The problem with ‘moderation’ is that it’s far too vague – who defines moderation and what exactly is it? I agree CalifD, it’s usually claimed to be practiced by people in the process of consuming quantities of food and alcohol that definitely are not! Essentially ‘moderation’ means nothing.

CalifD, I saw your name elsewhere today and briefly followed you to another thread. There I found something else I liked, “Have results or have excuses”.

Good news for wine drinkers released today depending on how you like to interpret statistics (perhaps the glass half full people will like it while the glass half empty people may not?!). Consuming wine a couple of times a week can be helpful in preventing cardiovascular disease. Consuming two alcoholic drinks per day, however, definitely contributes to cancer. This, according to a massive Washington study of 400,000 people in the USA – and conducted over some decades I believe the paper said. Of course, now I need to quote the study, I can’t find it – instead finding alarming studies concluding that there is ‘no safe level of alcohol consumption’.

CalifD, OT – have you come across, “Hold The Dark” on Netflix? Keen to hear your opinion if you’ve seen it.

Found it. Not really good news for alcohol drinkers after all perhaps?
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/even-light-drinking-increases-risk-of-death/

Hi Cinque, thanks for the shout out. It is six days since my eye surgery. Today I have been up and around the longest time yet, and it is dinner time here. But after writing this I am going to bed and just rest for the night. The surgery was more intense than I expected, so I am thankful to be improving every day. Limited mobility has slowed my exercise routine for now, but I will get back at it soon. I am still doing the 5:2 fast routine. In fact I definitely want my body in what Dr. Mosley calls in the documentary “repair” mode and not in “go-go” mode.

Today was weigh-in day. Fortunately, I have continued my steady, slow-ish progress. I am now about halfway to goal. Today I did start tracking weight here.

I don’t know if this information is of any use to but here goes: I had not been tracking my weight on this site because I use a website called SparkPeople to track a bunch of stuff, and for their exercise videos and other resources. It is free so some medical people here in the USA are referring patients there. Unfortunately, they do not have a strong presence for the 5:2 diet, and they still have articles based on other diet systems that runs counter to the 5:2 plan. But their automated food tracker works for me because you can use the camera on your phone to scan the barcode on a package, and it automatically enters the nutrition information for you. I honestly do not like to spend time recording what I eat. However, I do routinely record what I eat on fast days. And just to check myself, I have taken to recording what I eat on some of my non-fast days.

Actually, I just don’t like to stop and record health stuff at all. Fortunately, that site also works with my watch to track most of my active and passive exercises automatically. That makes it easier for me to keep track of what I am doing on their reports page. For active exercises I found another app called RunKeeper that I like. It also automatically transfers my data to SparkPeople.

Growing weary of tracking everything I eat every day has been part of my failure at losing weight in the past. The thing I really like about the 5:2 Fast Diet is I only really need to do that twice a week.

I am sleeping so much that I have lost track of everything on this forum. As I scanned the entries, it sounds like I am not the only one working on some health issues right now. I am sure our efforts toward health will benefit us and can rub off on those around us as well.

Arel, I’ve always loved that quote. And it’s so true.

Rainbow, I’m glad you’re seeing daily improvement after your surgery. Just the effects of the anesthetics can take a big toll on the way you feel. I only keep track of what I eat on FD. I use MyFitnessPal. It doesn’t cater to 5:2 users but it counts calories and some nutrition and that’s all I really care about. It also has a barcode scanner, like yours, which is very handy. I never track what I eat on NFD. And tracking on FD is pretty easy because there aren’t a lot of things you can eat to come in under 500 calories. I record my steps on my Garmon fitness app, where I can upload my steps for the day. I could transfer that info over to MyFitnessPal if I wanted, but when I did that before it would deduct energy burned in calories from my total. I didn’t really want that so I unlinked them. I’m not sure that exercise really helps much with weight loss although it certainly helps in other ways. I can see a big difference in blood pressure when I walk regularly.
Congrats on reaching your halfway point! That’s a big accomplishment. You got the first half so you know you can do the rest. Be patient. The closer you get to goal, the slower it seems to be. But it does come off.

LJ, glad you got your infusion after all. Strange that he didn’t get the needle inserted the first time since he’s your regular nurse.

8:15am, Saturday, Adelaide
Good morning all, happy weekend.
(Using a date stamp is going to highlight just how long it takes me to write a post!)

I’m siting here with a cup a tea and hair colour on my grey roots – waiting for the timer to tell me to wash it off.

Arel, congratulations on the weight loss.
I really like that saying too. It’s exactly what you need to hear when struggling to stick to a weight loss plan.

Rainbow, congratulations on being half-way to goal. There’s a saying over here “It’s all downhill from here on”. Not sure if you use that in the states. I hope the last half of the wight loss journey is an easy downhill run. The weight loss does often get slower, but reminding yourself how much you’ve lost can be very motivating. I hope you continue to improve after the surgery.

Cali, I will have a different nurse from now on. The chap that had been doing it since I moved here would only every try my best vein and the people that provide the nursing service weren’t happy as they are meant to use alternate arms each time. So t will be a different nurse next time who is more confident about trying to get the jelco iv into the more difficult veins.

My gut bugs are going to be unhappy as I woke with definite symptoms of a lung infection so I started more anti-biotics. I’m out of kefir at the moment and I think I need to go and get some to reduce the damage.

After debating about the baking schedule I decided to do all of the tarts last night. I knew that if I didn’t I’d probably lay awake all night worrying about whether I had time to do everything today.
4 dozen choc-pecan tarts packed tightly into a box for transport: https://imgur.com/Bs8YWuD

My timer is ringing, so Time to wash this colour off.
Have a nice Saturday everyone.

Saturday 10.30am Perth, WA

I’m thinking a time stamp from me will only serve to confuse everyone further! LJ, you add the time stamp when you finish your epistle, not when you start it, ha ha.

Is that on Netflix, CalifD? I haven’t seen it, but will look out for it. “Hold The Dark” does contain a lot of violence and I always look away when the music tells me it’s imminent. It’s hard to find shows these days without violence and the quota of predictable foul language. The photography of Alaska is spectacular and I thought the acting was good although I’d not heard of any of them before. But it left me having no clue what happened and reading reviews afterwards didn’t help uncover the plot! I thought maybe you could help.

Beautiful cakes LJ. Can I come over and scrape out the bin please?

7:25pm, Sat, Adelaide

Almost managed to get through my first FD in a while without too many problem. Although my calorie estimate is 550-600. I needed 4 rice crackers to deal with a bit of afternoon nausea and I also had a handful of raspberries. Happy with this though as it’s better than managed in the lat fortnight. I also needed it in preparation for the wedding tomorrow – I’m expecting some lovely food, especially the dessert buffet, which has been mostly home made by family.

Thin, If I’d known you wanted it I could have posted it. 😀

Cali, goodnight, hope you wake to some lovely Saturday weather.

Time for an early night. I have a headache I can’t shake.

Remember daylight saving, for those states where it applies.

7pm Saturday, Perth WA

CalifD, thank you SO MUCH for that link! It explains a lot. I hadn’t even realised that I’d been watching a movie potentially involving the supernatural, let alone bordering on horror! Otherwise I never would have started it. I was so confused when I went to bed last night but now some of my questions have been answered. And it’s clear that I wasn’t alone in my confusion. I think this will make a great pizza night movie for you and your OFMs!

Hello Cinque! How nice that you and LJ have completed your FDs today. As you know, we have no daylight savings in WA so now the time stamps will be even more confusing. I’ll love it if Quacka, Lindsay, Stay, Arel and some of the others put their locations on a time stamp as I get mixed up who’s located where – especially when several new people join our thread at the same time.

Today I wasted time charting my weight loss on a graph. It’s something I’d regretted not doing all along but, due to the way I initially set up the daily spreadsheet, I hadn’t been able to convert it. So, I took the entries from the 1st of every month since starting 5:2 and entered those numbers on a new spreadsheet. From there I could make a simple line graph. It didn’t reveal anything that I hadn’t been aware of – a steady half kilo loss every week for a year followed by a flatline for the next 3 years. The flatline varies one kilo +-60kgs. It’s the first time in my adult life that my weight has remained so steady for so long. I wondered if I’d dare transition to taking only a monthly reading from now on now that it’s set up to accommodate that. Something to think about.

Cinque, the thing that calorie counting revealed was how completely inflated my sense of portion control had become. Completely agree on the sugar problem. Representative teaspoons of sugar on the packages would be great. And a warning that sugar is addictive and can damage your health.

Have fun at the wedding LJ; have fun with the grandies Cinque. I’ll hold the fasting fort – probably all by myself!

8.12 am Sunday, Gloucester NSW

Hi everyone. Welcome to Sunday.

Been wide awake for a while now. I think the back neighbours must have gone away for the night – their dog has been barking since lunch time yesterday, also half the night, and restarted as 5am daylight saving time! Sounds like it’s totally ‘bored’ with nothing else to do!

Rainbow, LJ and Cinque – hope you are all starting to feel better and can enjoy whatever you’d like to be doing real soon.

LJ – enjoyed looking at your tarts and cheesecake, felt like I could just pick one up and have a taste test! Enjoy the wedding today

Thin – thank you for sharing your experience with 5:2. It’s always interested me in how people approach this WOL. I’m hoping when I get to maintenance that it won’t be too difficult – I’ve never liked counting calories on a daily basis either!

Calif – MFP works for me on FD – though I have a chuckle to myself when it lets me know I haven’t met the calorie quota for the day and so then won’t convert what weight I’ll lose in the next few weeks if I continue on said path!

Cinque – have a lovely time with your grandchildren today. Totally agree on the sugar issue. I feel the different yoga breathing methods may help you and it’s relaxing as well!

I thought ‘Outlander’ on Netflix ended with Series 2 – what a lovely surprise to find out Series 3 is now available: just have to find time to watch it 😉 though I’m now 4 episodes in!

Attending a luncheon today for a wonderful Doctor retiring from our GP practice and relocating to her daughter’s practice in Mudgee. Will be very much missed!!!

Have a wonderful day everyone! Enjoy whatever you are getting up to and bye for now xx

Arel, so pleased that you reminded me where you live. I’ve looked it up. Wow, that’s quite far inland. Commiserations on the barking dog. Sad that people would leave their pets to their own devices for lengthy periods.

CalifD, it’s good that those labels will have to be changed. Obesity and its related health issues cost us all. I read yesterday that Britain’s NHS spends £20m per year just in translation services.

Anyone joining me for a FD today? I found a portion of Hairy Bikers’ Healthy Cottage Pie in the freezer. Not really the wx for it but I shall enjoy every teaspoonful immensely nonetheless.

Great Cate, we’ll do it together. What’s for dinner? What are your plans for the day? I think I will be staying busy with physical work. OH rented a high pressure hose and spent the day cleaning all our brick pavers yesterday. They look great but it splashed up a lot of mess all over our (white) house and walls. I wanted to get it off right away but a neighbour came round to get the red dirt off her 4WD wheels while we had the hose and we ended up chatting for a couple of hours and then it was dinner time. So now it will require a more serious scrubbing. Then we have to get some trailer loads of white sand to fill the paving cracks and rake that in.

Also, we bought a lawn mower last week and I’m keen to try it out. Our LM man never comes on schedule, does a lousy job, invariably runs over the sprinklers, damages the pavers with his whacker thingy and still can’t spell my name correctly on the invoice. Looking forward to telling him that he’s no longer required.

But first, I’m off for my walk. The FD should pass quickly.

As usual there are posts that pop up while I’m writing.
Good morning Cate. I hope you have a fabulous FD. Sunday is my favourite day for fasting I hope it works for you too.

12:42pm, Sun, Adelaide

I’m back from shopping, my shoe rack has acquired 2 new pairs of shoes and my wallet is $240 poorer! I just about need reviving after spending that in one go. But I found an amazingly comfortable shoe so I bought it in 2 colours – should see me through several summers. https://imgur.com/li1lSXD
I was thinking I could wear the raspberry ones tonight, but the blue ones almost match the blue on my skirt, so I’ll make a decision once I’m dressed. Neither are evening sandals, but I don’t care, I will get lots of wear out of them.
I had no luck with the jacket. There was very little that was suitable and all too expensive. I’m thinking I’ll use a heavy oblong scarf, but wear it like a shawl over my arms if it gets cold. I have one with the right shades of pink and purple in it.

Hi Lindsay, hope you are having a good day too.
Very best of luck for your OH’s surgery this Thursday.

Time to make a light lunch so that I don’t descend on tonight’s food with a raging appetite.

Lindsay, I agree, Cinque maintains a very positive manner in the face of all her challenges. I’d be irritated too if I had to pay those non-cleaning cleaners. OH thoroughly dislikes paying anyone for anything – especially when they don’t display a high standard of work pride – and we originally hired a LM service because we had extensive verge lawn and OH is allergic to mown grass. It’s changed hands several times and we should have given this one the flick when I won the verge makeover garden but then it seemed silly to buy a lawnmower for the small amount of remaining lawn.

So many Outlander fans! I must get back into it. When it came to Netflix, I found it hard to work out where I was up to when they keep time travelling.

LJ, you must be very slim if you’re wearing those clothes. Good luck with the shopping. I must get back to work.

P.S. Nice shoes LJ, they look like Diana Ferrari’s super soft. Good luck with tomorrow’s FD Anzac.

Good job Cate, that’s a good feeling I’m sure. Hopefully you know what went wrong on the other days and can prevent it from happening again. Have you gone without meat for health reasons? I’ve just finished my microscopic portion of Hairy Bikers’ HCP and could have eaten about 8 times that amount. Thank heavens for fast days to help put the brakes on. The day passed quickly, I can’t say I was hungry at all but I certainly would have eaten a whole lot more had I not had the constraint of the FD. Later, I’ll have a small frozen banana so I don’t go to bed hungry.

& I woke up a kilo lighter 😀

Thanks, Anzac. I’m waiting for my OH to get back home to have that bacon & eggs. I wish he would hurry! All the best with your day.

LJoyce – I meant to mention that I am the same as you in being an ‘all or nothing’ person. I can’t stop at 1 biscuit and greatly admire people who have yummy food on their desks here in the office for days at a time and they don’t touch it. Restraint? What is that? But having discovered 5:2 I’m finding (slowly) that this is really working for me.

Good Morning everyone

Monday FD for me. Just thought I would check in and say hi. I have still been reading your posts 🙂

Hope you all have a lovely day x

9:31am Mon, on a warm, muggy drizzly Adelaide day.

Good morning SHs, I hope you are all feeling a bit brighter than I am – a very sluggish start to the day here. I had planned to be grocery shopping at 8:30 – I was only just dragging myself out of bed at that time. I’ve decided it can wait until tomorrow. I do have to find the energy to clean today though, as my sister and brother-in-law arrive tomorrow afternoon for a couple of days.

The wedding went without a hitch and the rain held off. I have some wedding photos to share. I didn’t get any good shots at the ceremony venue, which was out neat Mt Barker summit. It was a lovely garden with a some amphithetre arrangement where they had the ceremony. The drive there included gravel roads past paddocks full of cows – very apt as the groom is a farmer.
The reception was help in the restaurant on Mount Lofty summit, which has some amazing views.
This is inside the venue: https://imgur.com/a/0cLnzxS I was mostly trying to take photos of the flowers as my cousin arranged them all. The last photo is off the table setting (and yes that’s my knees in that purple skirt, wearing the shawl I took with me as the air-con was a bit cold). In one of the photos you can see the wall of glass behind the bridal table. This is a bit of the view through that window: https://imgur.com/a/zwSW3BV you can see the hills, the city and the ocean from here. The sunsets can be amazing and as a country kid I always wanted to go there at night when we came to Adelaide so I could see the city lights, which seemed to go on forever. That white tower is the original lookout for spotting bush fires.

And finally, photos of the dessert bar: https://imgur.com/a/G1KPgp8
It will be no surprise to any of you that I am feeling the effects of sugar overload this morning! I didn’t try everything – given that there were about 20 different desserts I don’t think that would be possible for anyone. But I certainly ate much more than was good for me. In addition to the 1/4 glass of champagne, my liver is telling me just how unhappy it is with its workload this morning.

Needless to say, today is a FD. By the way, no blisters or sore spots wearing new shoes all afternoon and evening, so they were definitely a good choice.

Cate, I bet that bacon & egg breakfast tasted great with another kilo of weight loss behind you.

Thin, I’ve had good, average and terrible gardeners over the years. I got rid of the worst two, but I found that the good ones only lasted a couple of years and their client list got too big so they sold part of it off, then I had to hope that the next one would be ok. Thankfully it’s just a tiny patch of lawn at this house which requires some very simple mowing – hard to mess that up and a third of the cost of mowing at the previous house. (Although as it’s about a tenth of the amount of lawn, I guess that’s not so cheap.)
Enjoy your bridge session, I hope you do well.

Cinque, nothing wrong with making housework a lower priority. Your health is much more important than a few dust bunnies!

Lindsay, I find it hard to keep up when I miss a a day or two of reading posts. Sometimes you just have to some important things will get repeated.

Anzac, there are a few of us here with a similar history with food. I’m a lot better than I used to be. Somehow over the last 18 months using 5:2 for maintenance, I’ve gradually reducing my tendency to eat things in great volume. It still happens, but much less often than it did, and the blow-outs are usually less dramatic.
Something that I found really helpful was a mindfulness exercise that my dietitian suggested. I would take one small piece of food (I did everything from a square of chocolate to a kiwifruit) and go through a process of using all senses – sight, touch, smell. Once I had experienced that it would taste. A tiny bit and let it dissolve on my tongue and experience the different textures and flavours. Then gradually do that with rest of the item. Last year I did this as a daily exercise and posted my ravings about the textures, and flavours on this forum.
It’s not a way of eating that comes naturally – I have usually scoffed several sweet treats before I’m in any mood to consider slowing down and actually savouring them. However, the more time I can take to slowly enjoy something the less of it I usually eat. If I savour each mouthful slowly I find that I get quickly past the point of immense pleasure and it starts to feel like just another spoonful and I lose interest.

Much as I don’t feel like it, it’s time for me to dig out the vacuum cleaner and deal with these floors.

Havel a great day everyone.