Hello,
Ditch the shakes and eat real food. Reduce the amount of refined carbs-bread/rice/pasta/potatoes and sugar, avoid anything low fat or diet(stuffed full of sugar) and have 2 days when you eat 500 calories of real food, nothing fake.

I have just had a look at exante shakes but cannot find what is in them. What do they contain?

Im with Annette on ditching the shakes and protein bars. Eat real food!! My wife was having protein bars from a very well known brand of diet supplements starting with O and ending in fast. Their protein bars were 32.2% sugar!! Absolute crap. Read the label. Have many carbs and how much sugar content? Just ditch them.

@hh. If its working for you stay with the bars but Im still of the opinion that real food HAS to be better for you. May be try and transition slowly and see how you cope. The 20g of carbs will be highly processed and will be turned into glucose very shortly after entering your stomach. In reality its 20g + 11 g = 31g glucose. Whats the total grams in a serve? 50grams? If that’s the case youre actually having 62% glucose in that serve.

I usually just have a raw veggie salad with some low sugar dressing and a splash of apple cider vinegar (make sure the vinegar is zero sugar. The worst one I came across was a vinegar with 55% sugar content!!!!!!! Insane!!!!). You get lots of micro nutrients and fibre. Cant beat it. Pick what you like and throw it into the salad. I have mushrooms, lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, some tofu or chopped up cheese. Sometimes some tuna. Whatever takes your fancy. Your gut bacteria need real food with fibre in it to survive. Feed them processed crap and they slowly die. A good gut flora will have over 6000 different species. Eat processed crap and that number drops to below 3000.

Hi @hippyhayles 🙂 have you calculated your daily calorie allowance (TDEE) using the BMI calculator under resources on this site?

It looks as though you’re getting around 1100 cals on a normal day and 600 on a fast day which may not be enough to sustain you properly over the week. Fast days are meant to be 25% of your TDEE, while normal days are meant to be closer to 100% of your TDEE. For example, my TDEE is 1600 so I eat 400 cals on a fast day and 1600 on a normal day, roughly.

With your food choices I would echo what most others have said, however I completely understand the desire to know exactly the number of calories you’re eating. I personally make portions of my fast day meals in advance (I have lentil soup and vegetable curry), measure them out into exact portions so they’re ready like freezer meals. Take it slowly, maybe work on losing one of the shakes and replacing with a real foods meal. A big part of any diet is how long term you can make it, will you really want to be drinking shakes this often for the rest of your life? If not, it’s not sustainable and unfortunately probably wont lead to long term success. Transition into something you can do forever.

Myself and a group of friends from this forum are taking part in a January challenge if you’d like to join us, we’ve still got a few spaces and would love to support you through your journey :), you can find us here:
https://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/januarys-small-group-accountability-challenge/

If anything I’ve said doesn’t make sense or you want to have a chat just let me know 🙂

@hippyhayles no problem 🙂 I feel as though I’m about to write an essay so I apologise in advance!

Yep that’s exactly right, so actually your 3 shakes at 600 calories for your fast day is about right. (Which activity level did you put? I saw someone on the forums posting that you should go for the one under the one you think you are – just to be sure. I have to go for sedentary)

Again you’re right that if you reduce your calories the weight will come off but in the interest of sustainability it’s important to not reduce them too much – this will eventually lead to binges, generally feeling rubbish or your body refusing to let go of weight because it thinks you’re in a famine.

Portion control is a tricky one for me too – I don’t know what your cooking situation is like but I only have to cook for myself at the moment and I’ve put together 7 or 8 recipes that I love and I just rotate them. I’ve estimated calories for each of them so I know I’ll never go over my TDEE and I don’t have to obsessively weigh everything. For example, say chicken and rice would be 1 chicken breast (300), 1 spoon mayo (100), 1 portion veg (50) and 3/4 cup rice (150) (I love my set of American cup measures (I’m in the UK) I hardly weigh anything anymore!) which totals to 600, so I’ll have 2 meals at a similar calorie count and a breakfast of around 200 cals which allows me one or two treats to make up the other 200, I love a biscuit or two 🙂

Okay, considering there are 3500 calories in one pound of fat, if you were to do 5:2 with 5 days of 2340 cals and 2 days of 585 cals you would produce a weekly deficit of 3510 cals and expect to lose around 1 pound per week (standard for 5:2) – I’m unsure how much weight you have to lose, you’ve probably heard that it’s not recommended to lose more than 2 pounds per week however it is okay if you have a fair bit to lose but it will slow up eventually.

If you were to do an alternate day fasting regime, fasting 7 days out of 14 you would create a two-weekly calorie deficit of 12285 and expect to lose 3.51 pounds every two-weeks (nearly 2 pounds per week).

To make up your calories on a non-fast day you could eat 3 x 700 calorie slimming world meals and still have 240 calories for treats!

Personally, I would recommend an Alternate Day Fasting approach with nearly 100% of your TDEE 7 days out of 14 and 25% the other 7. I will be returning to ADF on the 7th January after a break for the holidays and I would be more than happy to pair up and speak regularly if you wanted to? We can be fasting buddies 🙂

I think that there are a number of issues here. Robert Lustig would suggest that you ate real food, so that is eggs, cheese, full fat milk, full fat yoghurt, whole fruit and vegetables and unprocessed meat/fish, nuts, seeds and beans, wholegrain pasta and wholegrain bread and brown rice. The issue is not the calories but rather the quality of the food and what that is doing to your body.

Jason Fung ‘The Obesity Code’ argues that refined carbohydrates were always know to be fattening but that in 1977 due to poor science it was declared that dietary fat was responsible for causing heart disease simply because fat is calorifically dense. So without any discovery or scientific debate a politician changed what we are all recommended to eat!The foods that had been avoided in order to stay slim-pasta, rice, potatoes..were now the ones that we were urged to eat.

As a carbohydrate couldn’t be both good-low fat and bad-fattening, it was calories that become the problem and the fattening carbohydrate became a healthy wholegrain. Therefore we were at fault for consuming too many calories.

It’s a really interesting book(downloaded mine onto a kindle)but his premise is that obesity is due to a hormonal imbalance of too much Insulin. By reducing sugar and refined carbohydrates in the diet he suggests that is half the solution, the other half is to fast to reduce the Insulin.

What I would suggest is that you do some meal planning and come up with 3 meals a day, that are only real food. No snacking at all between meals.Are you hungry in the morning or could you do without breakfast? I am happy to help with ideas if you are stuck.

My very dear friend who has been very obese all of her life despite several mad diets(she always put the weight back on and more) has lost 4.5 stone over last year simply by avoiding bread/pasta/potatoes/rice. She eats real food, whatever she likes but in avoiding those 4 items eats tasty food that she enjoys. Give it a try for a week and see how you feel.

It’s not about calories, it’s about ditching sugar and refined carbs. Change your focus and aim to eat meals that are either meat or fish with salad or vegetables for a week and see how your clothes fit/how you feel etc.