It took me 18 months but I’ve just bought my first pair of 30″ jeans since I was, probably, in my teens. I’m going to be 47 in November.

WHY?

My main motivator was getting older, fatter (I was in tight fitting size 38″ jeans despite exercising 3x a week back in April 2013) and wanting to give my kids a better example. Well there was that AND the fact that the doctor said I could do with losing some weight, that my cholesterol was borderline and an optician said the white line she could see inside my eyeball at my last eye test was telling her that I also had high cholesterol!

HOW?

What helped was swimming (almost) every morning and then taking up Michael Mosley’s 5:2 fasting programme at Xmas time last year (2013). I still have the original Horizon TV programme that eventually convinced me to give the 5:2 programme a go. I have as often as not been on a 4:3 rota, taking a Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday as my fasting days. I kind of look on the Sunday as my optional day, which I can choose to drop if I feel my progress has been good enough on the weekdays.

EFFECTS

I think that the term ‘Fast Diet’ is really a bit of a misnomer. Frankly, I eat like a horse most days and then cut down to a meagre but manageable 600 calories those two (sometimes three) days out of seven. Calling it a diet would suggest I’m reigning in my eating and controlling what I eat all the time, but I genuinely do not feel that I am… most of the time anyway.

I thought that the not eating bit would be really hard. In reality you get used to it quite quickly as you know you can return to eating what you like the next day. But, and this is the clincher, you do start to consider more what it is you put inside yourself as a result of thinking what you can eat on those fasting days.

I still eat a lot but it’s moved to be much more the big bowls of salad with a smaller quantity of meat, usually chicken, than in the past (when it was big helpings of potatoes, rice and the like…) but still lots and lots of it.

The other part of the occasional self-denial is that when you’re done you can go treat yourself, which I probably do too often anyway.

So, eventually, you CAN have your cake and eat it. All it takes is patience, some moderation, a willingness to exercise (an hour in my case) every day, garnished with a smattering of fasting. It’s also about thinking this is for the long term.

It’s slow and steady and absolutely not a quick fix. It’s really about changing your lifestyle permanently rather than chasing the next fad ‘diet’ that promises amazing results yet delivers nothing but disappointment to the vast majority.

The next question I need to answer is how little exercise and/or fasting can I get away with doing in order to keep the 30″ waistline? I’m six feet tall and hovering between 84 and 85 kgs at the moment. I’d like to get my body fat down too (around 20 to 21% right now) but don’t want to go very much thinner on the waistline.

So I will be eating salad today… but I’ll also be having ice cream afterwards…

🙂

So thanks Michael Mosley. Your BBC Horizon programme was the turning point for me as, no matter how much exercise I was, and still, do, I think the 5:2 consolidated the effort by helping me shift and, most importantly, keep off the body fat.

Ralph

Well I suppose where I differ from some is that I do regular exercise & often do 4:3 rather than 5:2.

Cheers

Ralph