Hi Stef

Welcome to the fast diet forum.

Good luck with the eating regime – tea and all

Hi, Stef
The great thing about 5:2 is that you can have anything you want – just don’t exceed 500 cals (or a quarter of your TDEE but working with that first off is probably a bit too keen for a new starter!) on a fasting day. Have a look at this thread :
http://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/a-bit-of-confusion/
If you have a look at my postings (disregard my original posting!) you’ll see that I’ve included links to an Excel spreadsheet which makes it easy to track actual – or planned – calories. The later postings deal with how to proceed if you haven’t got Office 2010.
If you look on the ‘Reference’ worksheet, you’ll see an entry for ‘Tea with S/Sk milk”. That’s for tea with one tablespoon of semi skimmed milk because my wife and I can’t get used to black tea/coffee. So we have tea with (a measured amount of) milk and just take it out of our allowance. Don’t forget to read the manual before using the spreadsheet!
Starting out on a way of life which involves ‘not eating’ for the best part of a day (not actually true if you don’t want to make that long a break in eating) can be scary, because we’ve been conditioned to eat and expect to eat three meals a day. As many many postings on this forum will show, people find that, actually, a lot of it is habit, and for my wife and me, we find it’s not a problem to go without lunch. I also believe that it’s good to get some protein in the fast day food because it helps to keep that ‘full’ feeling so beans play a big part in our diet; pity they are quite high in calories!
5:2 has just become a way of life for us and not a bother.
So do remain excited and try to quell those nerves. All the best to the new you.
Silverback