Hi Weezy

Good luck with your journey.

I like to eat quite a lot on fast days. I like sitting down to a proper plate of food, but you have to get creative and shop and cook from scratch so you can control what’s going in. For recipes, we’ve been using quite a lot of Mimi Spencer’s in the Fast Diet book. Ones that we like include the spaghetti bolognaise with courgette and carrot “pasta” and the chickpea curry which is dead quick and easy to knock up, which you have with a small amount of brown rice. Both give surprisingly generous portions. There’s also a really nice asparagus and prawn Thai style dish. It only 140 cals, so we added a few rice noodles to bulk it out. Oh, and baked white fish (again it’s amazing how much you can have) topped with a poached egg and something like spinach or broccoli is good.

If you need to improvise, a two egg omlette filled with pepper, spring onion, spinach, tomato, whatever you have at hand, and maybe sprinkled with tiniest amount of grated cheese, is very filling.

You might want to consider investing in a spiraliser. We also bought a spiraliser cookbook which has some really good options for fast days as most of the recipes replace carbs with veg and the recipes give the cals (there’s a lot in the 2-300 range). Last night we had herby meatballs with courgette spirals in tomato sauce. About 300 cals. And really nice. Will do it again.

It’s worth getting one of those oil sprayers so you limit your oil use if you’re frying.

My other tip is, any recipes that require a lot of prep and/or a long cooking time, do the day before you fast so you can just reheat when convenient.

As for convenience food, if you’re in the UK, M&S do a large range of ready meals up to 400 cals, and the big high street lunch outlets have a decent selection of options if you ignore the sandwiches and stick to soups, broths, salads and protein pots.