Hi Oldtirednurse, there are a lot of factors in weight and three weeks isn’t very long. Exercise can even increase your weight, but for good reasons. Muscle is heavier than fat and you can also retain more water. Also weight varies a lot throughout the day. I often see multiple pounds difference within a single day.

Sometimes the tape measure is more important than the scale. It is possible to trim down and be a little heavier. Over time many people lose around a pound a week.

Now you might have to look at what you eat. In my case I can eat a good amount of food if I avoid refined sugar. Some people fatten quickly off of bread and other process carbs. While it is good to eat less it is better to eat well and avoid as much processed food as possible.

There are lot of threads here with people concerned about the scale. You might want to read through some. I wish you well.

Oldtirenurse you might need to figure out what food drives your weight gain. For me it is refined sugar and foods containing it. Avoiding refined sugars forces me to avoid a lot of processed foods. For some people it seems to more limited to breads and pastas. Where I live I would really suffer if I didn’t eat rice and some noodles but I do try to limit those when I’m not too hungry. Many people believe it is only calories but for me that is no longer true. I think it was pretty true a couple decades ago … age.

Anyway I encourage you to exercise, while it can confuse the scale, over the long run it really helps. However it sounds like you have a job that requires you to at least move around a bit. If I didn’t do some exercise I would be just glued to a desk.

As @amazon says you can’t trust hunger, especially when you have too much weight. You body is goofed up and the hunger signals are often confused. For me that is why refined sugar is so bad, it causes me to feel hungry. When I started avoiding refined sugar much of my on-going hunger went away. Now I’m to the point that if I eat some desert I even feel a sugar rush. For me it isn’t a food it is a drug. Just one that is hard to completely avoid. Strangely fruit has a much lighter impact on me so I mostly sweeten things with fruit, but I find I need less sweetness than I used too.

Your schedule may drive a lot of craziness when it comes to weight. Also as a man I probably face somewhat different issues than you do.

When it comes to weight I don’t think it is the meat or even fat so much as the carbs that tend to drive the weight. Things like fries, chips, breads, pastas, salad dressings, sauces and deserts really drive fat storage. Strangely enough fat itself often seems less damaging to weight. I think if you can make the bulk of your diet fish, vegetables and fruit you will have a easier time losing body fat. The processed foods are really the killers, at least for me.

I’m not even sure I’m giving you anything useful. For me it was pretty much avoiding refined sugar. After I started that my diet changes a lot and I dropped 10kg. I used to tip the scales at over 106kg and now I’m typically around 83kg. My ideal weight is probably around 78kg, however even at 83kg I’m really trim compared to what I used to be. What works for you may be a little different. For the record, my diet isn’t low-carb but it somewhat low in refined carbs, that is my diet is low in highly processed foods. I do eat things like chips, deserts, etc but much less than I used to. The modern processed foods are very fattening to me. At this point if I have something like fries I know it is bad for my weight and I probably consume about 1/4 of what I did in the past. It is all about finding the tipping points and not going over them, if that makes sense.

For the record it took me many months to get over my sugar addiction. It took much longer before I reached a point where I didn’t long for a lot of processed foods. It has taken me almost six years to go from my high of 106kg to my current weights and at this point I’m actually building a lot of muscle mass which is slowing down my weight loss. That is okay but it took me years to get here.

You have to really figure out what works for you. For me it is avoiding refined sugar, fasting and exercise. Others find even better success with different formulas. I wish you well and good success.

I’m not convinced that grains are that bad, most of the world would be starving if it weren’t for grains. That being said, if the grains are highly processed and that makes up the bulk of the diet, that isn’t good. So I agree if the bulk of the diet is gains in the form of cakes, cookies, biscuits, etc … it isn’t good.

I like starting my day with oatmeal which is made from just rolled oats. I top it with a lot of sliced fruit and raisons. I don’t seem to have any negative impacts from that filling breakfast. Typically I have white rice with meals. Well some consider that horrible the nutritional difference between white rice and brown rice is small. It is much easier to get more nutritional benefits from more vegetables. In Japan I’m lucky since a wide variety of vegetables are used in typical Japanese dishes.

Many processed foods are typically poor for your health, most processed foods have a lot of sugar, even things like store bought bread are loaded with sugar. Many of these foods have the same ingredients, flour, sugar typically in the form of high fructose corn syrup, salt and little else. I agree that kind of food is horrible for losing weight and health in general. On the other hand, vegetables are packed with nutrition and hard to get fat on. So while I’m not afraid of grains, I try to eat my 10 servings a day of fruits and vegetables, at least when I’m not fasting.

Thank for the support CalifDreamer!

I don’t really disagree with bigbooty … it is just I live in Japan and frankly one would probably not be very comfortable without being to eat some rice, noodles or other grain products. Still those foods are just fillers or holder for the vegetables, eggs and some meat.

I think though some parts of the world are kind of upside down in how they eat, for many grains in the form of processed foods make up the bulk of the diet. Carbohydrates generally breakdown into glucose, although the rate that it happens can vary a lot. However processing tends to speed up the breakdown into glucose when consumed and then lots of fructose is also mixed in from the processing. It is kind of a double whammy. Fructose fattens up the liver and then the excess glucose gets shoved into our main fat reserves. We top it off by snacking and keeping our blood insulin high which limits the amount of fat we can burn. It is really a fattening cycle.

Fasting is very powerful but there is a point where it isn’t positive. Please don’t fast if you don’t feel well. While fasting one should have plenty of strength and vigor. It isn’t about starving, it is about using your fat and healing your body.

Oldtirednurse, congrats on the 4 pound weight loss! I think that sometimes our bodies just hold on to a lot of water, for whatever reason, and then give it up all at once. It seemed that my plateaus were like that, where one day most of that water weight would just go. There were times when I’d be up several times during the night, even though I didn’t have a lot to drink right before bed. Maybe it was salt intake or maybe it was something else. But I’m glad your weight finally gave you that nice whoosh effect! I bet your weight loss will be more even now. Keep drinking lots of calorie free liquids to keep things constant.

while exercise in and of itself does not do much for weight loss, the discipline and self esteem gained from it is priceless! The more we keep exerting our wills to do the right things for our bodies, the more our success will spread and then the weight will start to drop off, peace yall

So pleased for you! Especially that you stuck with it. It’s hard to stick with it when we don’t see the reward.

Great work!

great! I am in the position where you were lol! I have only myself to blame. I have lost so many lbs. over the past few years and did not maintain the loss! I cannot complain if I now cannot seem to lose any weight no matter what I do. I am trying hard not to focus on the scale but golly gee it’s so hard!!! peace to everyone

weigh in yesterday showed almost 3 lb loss for one week, I am so grateful, keep up the good fight yall

Oldtirednurse it is great to hear your progress!

oldtired, keep up the progress. Maybe you won’t be so tired eventually. [can’t do anything about your age, but you might feel younger as you lose weight!]

Heya. I read your reply to the tired nurse, (funny as I too am that!) I do what you say. I actually sent off for the original 5/2 book this wk to check if I am doing it wrong. I have a notepad and have checked cals and written down my regular diet. A friend checked online what amount I should eat daily on the non fast days she had done the 5/2 previously. She told me I could eat over 2000 cals a day!!!! I calculated my normal days initially in complete honesty to see what I tend to consume I wasn’t even reaching 1800 with snacks.i cannot manage 2000 cals a day. So I aimed for 1700 as it’s less than my norm. I did all of this without help just with min explanation of the 5/2 from a Dr. But apparently I am doing it all correctly? I like doing Tues and Thurs each week as the fast days. I fast all day til I am home and eat at 7.30pm, I rink 2 litres of plain water all day. Work colleagues are in horror, but I often find people say ‘you need to do something about your weight’ and then you do and they do not support. I have lost size slightly, but since Jan 10th 2018 I have lost just 6 lbs. I yoyo from tge 4 lb mark up to 6 lb to 8lb mark back down to 6lb then 4lb. (This is how many stones I am and so many pounds!). I cannot shift the weight. Thanks?

Reall this is a great motivational topic for every overweight person like as me.

Hi Port and welcome:

If you are not losing weight, then you are eating too much food. It is that simple.

I suggest that you first go to the top of this page to ‘How It Works’ and re-compute your TDEE. I suggest that after you determine your ‘activity level’ you use one level below because virtually everyone overestimates the amount of activity they do. Some also suggest you put in your goal weight instead of your current weight to insure that the TDEE given is a low, rather than high, estimate. This ‘new’ TDEE might explain why your weight loss is so slow – if it is lower than the 2000+ you have been using, that will mean the calorie deficit caused by the diet is currently less than you think it is.

Your general goal is to eat 500 or fewer calories on your diet days, and your TDEE or less on your non-diet days.

I’m sure, especially since you mentioned you like sugar (who doesn’t?), that some people will pop on here, explain that sugar is terrible for you (and that honey sugar is no better than any other sugar) and that you must immediately banish it (and other processed carbs like flour) from your diet or you won’t have a chance of success with 5:2.

My recommendation, however, is to ignore that advice for now. It is hard enough to incorporate 5:2 into your lifestyle without further having to radically change the foods you are currently eating, too. After you have successfully done four to eight weeks of 5:2 you can then reevaluate what you are doing, including what you are eating, and begin making choices that fit your eating patterns and food choices. 5:2 can accommodate any choices you make, because it is calorie based, not food based, and can therefore work with virtually any food diet.

Long experience has proven that the people that start by doing the basic 5:2 successfully eventually develop food diets that work for them and end up very happy with their results. People that try to make too many changes to their diets all at the start usually end by giving up and going away.

Here are most of the basic tips you will need to be successful on 5:2: https://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/the-basics-for-newbies-your-questions-answered/

Good Luck!

@portchie – Have you actually written down everything that you eat? You should try that for at least a few days.

Calorie counting is almost worthless it is so error prone it really only gives one a rough estimate. Even the calorie counts on packages are often off. http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/nutrition/article/can-you-trust-calorie-counts If companies with great equipment can’t do it any better, then you can be sure you can’t trust your own counts. Besides that the standard counts used for many foods were set up over 100 years ago and are often just estimates. Many times values have been rounded down. Don’t you think it is funny that carbs and proteins work out to 4 calories / gram or fats to 9 calories / gram. Mother nature and your body don’t count calories. I assure you the actual values don’t workout to nice round numbers.

TDEE is another estimate and while it has value for large populations it can be way off for an individual. In fact TDEE can vary a lot for just one person day to day. If you overeat your body can increase things like heartrate to burn more food. So keep that in mind. I actually use an activity tracker and it mostly works off of heartrate. My daily calories burned range anywhere from 2300 to 3200 calories / day. That is quite a range.

Finally our bodies don’t count calories and not all food is used for energy. Forcing everything to be in terms of energy is just another rough estimate. All these estimates taken together can leave someone like yourself on the fat end of the stick.

simcoeluv advised you to ignore any advice but his. That is pretty lame considering you are doing exactly what he says you should and it isn’t working. Calorie counting does work well enough for some people, others it just drives them crazy. TDEE does work well for some people and calorie restriction typically works well short term. Calorie restriction typically fails in the long term. I’ve seen estimates as many as 97% of people using just calorie restriction end up being just as heavy as they started two years down the road. That is pretty grim.

In my own case I used calorie restriction only (no fasting) for 4 years. The first two years I went from 106kg to about 94kg. Then I was stuck. I worked out harder cut calories more and actually was losing lean body mass and gaining fat. (Sound familiar?) Finally I gave up the last treat I had a daily ice-cream bar that was around 300 calories. I was eating well under 2000 calories a day at that point. Two things happened, I started feeling a lot better as my constant driving hunger went away and I stopped putting on fat. From there I did cut almost all added refined sugar from my diet and I ended up replacing it mostly with nuts at the time. I actually started eating more food in terms of calories and my weight started dropping. I went down to around 87kg pretty quickly and I had to buy smaller pants. After that I started fasting and I’ve gone further but I eat more on a weekly basis than I used to. That is mostly because I’m activity working on building muscle and it has slowed my weight loss. (This morning I was 79.3kg)

Okay the point is what we eat really matters. I don’t know if refined sugar or honey is your problem, but something is. You need to figure it out and only you can do that. There are some good starting points:

1) Avoid processed foods as much as possible. I do eat some processed foods but I know I have to keep it very limited. The more whole foods you eat the better off you will be. Processed foods are packed with refined sugars, salt, low quality fats and refined grains.

2) Push vegetables as much as possible, they are filling and won’t make you fat.

3) If you do cut out sugar you can try replacing it with whole fruit. For example ground up figs can be used if you don’t mind the taste. This provides some fiber at least. Anyway it is difficult to overeat on whole fruits.

From there user your food log and experiment. Calories are important but what you eat can even be more important, at least it was for me. I’m hyper sensitive to refined sugar and it quickly adds fat to my middle. However, I’m a man and men are more prone towards that. It could be your issue, or maybe something else is or perhaps some combination. Only you can figure it out, but a food log should help.

Something else I do is I just water fast, I find this easier and more effective for myself. However many people find it more difficult. My primary problem is keeping my blood glucose low. For that water fasting is great.

@simcoeluv do you even bother to read people’s posts? Portchie 3 posts belabored the fact that she was counting calories in all three posts.

Calories are important but they are far from the only factor that effects people’s weight. Many of us here are living proof that 5:2 doesn’t even require calorie counting. It is just a tool but it isn’t the only tool in the toolbox.

@Porchie – A few more thoughts.

Fasting deplete glycogen which tends to dehydrate us. A lot of the bouncing weight may just be water weight as the glycogen is depleted and restored. Glycogen is roughly 75% water.

I personally believe that nutrition is more important than calories. If you focus on having a nutritious diet is will force you to eat a lot of foods that are naturally low on calorie density. It can take time for the body to adjust too. For example even though I was losing weight I used to have excessive gas from eating some foods. That isn’t so much an issue anymore. Anyway it is easy to cut back on calories but also end up with poor nutrition.

Finally you are walking and biking some now. That can really mess up your weight sometimes. You should also be paying attention to measurements. If your muscles were weak and now you are using them they will quickly be heavier. You might want to consider an activity tracker too to help you get a better idea of what you are really doing and even how many calories you consume a day.

Hi Big:

“The concept of CICO (calories in calories out) that is followed religiously by some has a fatal flaw in its logic. It assumes that WHAT you eat does not influence the calories that are expended (i.e. the CO part of CICO). This assumption is incorrect.”

Could you please cite some clinical studies that confirm WHAT you eat influences calories expended?

Thanks!

Hi dy:

As for calorie restriction, I refer you to the first segment of a BBC program hosted by Michael Mosley entitled ‘Eat, Fast an Live Longer’. In that segment, it reports that calorie restriction causes people that follow it become a ‘different species’.

No diet will work if you don’t follow it. Including yours. But that does not mean that ‘it doesn’t work’ – if you follow it. If people want to lose weight on 5:2, they will if they eat 5/600 cal. per day twice a week and to or less than their TDEE on the other five days. Your belief that it will not work is simply wrong.

Why try to make people change their total diets just to lose weight when they don’t have to?

Hi dy:

If you actually watched the Eat, Fast and Live Longer video you would know it had nothing to do with weight loss. It was a video about calorie restriction and longevity.

As for ‘overeating’, I have recommended on this site and others (for years) that you watch this one: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/why-are-thin-people-not-fat/

Sorry, but literally every clinical study done, and those that confirm the clinical studies done, confirm that cutting calories causes weight loss. Its only when people go off the ‘diet’ and start ‘overeating’ calories that they regain (or gain) weight.

The constant turmoil between those that focus on good nutrition and those that focus on weight loss causes many problems for those that simply want to lose unwanted weight. 5:2 causes people to lose weight.

It is a shame that some try to complicate or ignore that fact.

Hi dy:

Thanks for letting me express my views.

Please give me your clinical studies that confirm that calorie restriction does not result in weight loss and that other approaches result in equal or more weight loss.

Thanks!

Hi dy:

I, again, point you to the ‘Eat, Fast and Live Longer’ video. The first segment was on people that followed calorie restricted diets – not for a few months, but for decades.

As a follower of Dr. Fung, I understand you believe that calorie restricted diets don’t work. You believe that if you go on a calorie restricted diet your body will go into a starvation mode that slows down its metabolism and causes the body to regain any weight it may have initially lost.

For that to be proven, there must be studies that show that when people go on a calorie restricted diet over a period of years (or decades) they will, according to Dr. Fung, initially lose weight (he concedes the initial weight loss), then plateaus and then reverses, causing the person to not only regain all weight originally lost, but even more.

There are no studies supporting that belief. But there are decades’ long studies showing that if a person goes on a calorie restricted diet and remains on that diet they will not only lose weight, but also remain in or regain excellent physical health (again, see the Eat, Fast and Live Longer video). They do not regain any weight. In fact, all studies (and there are thousands) show that calorie restricted diets cause weight loss. It is only when people stop their diets, go back to eating how they used to eat, that they regain any weight lost on their calorie restricted diet.

You rail against calorie restriction – the absolute basis of 5:2. Please let us all know what works better for weight loss. Please! How can we continue eating however much we have been eating (from a calorie perspective) and lose weight? Give us a diet that allows us to eat our TDEE or more and lose weight!

Please let us know!!