Hi Sandra
Congrats of your weight loss so far 😀 in fact, CONGRATULATIONS!! – I just checked your other posts and see you have lost 6 stone. That is amazing. I agree with what the others have said in replies to those posts, cut yourself some slack and don’t let yourself worry about a few pounds gained.

Have you recalculated your TDEE based on your current weight – you need to update that regularly.
And how much more weight are you hoping to lose?

Given you are just starting on 5:2, my recommendation is to do 5:2 as intended, ie 2 days where you eat 1/4 your current TDEE up to 500 cal, and the remaining days eat close to your TDEE. Give that a few weeks and see how that is working for you. If you don’t lose weight with that, then perhaps you can look at alternatives.

To have lost so much weight I am assuming that you have been able to cut out a lot of the less healthy foods, so try to stick with the right amount of protein each day and lots of veggies, supplemented with good fats, some fruit and also allowing yourself a little,of what you fancy from time to time 🙂 Cutting white carbs has helped lots of us, but the premise of 5:2 is that you can still have what you want (provided you don’t exceed your TDEE) on non-fast days.

Very best wishes for this stage in your journey 🙂
Sassy

Sandra, I am not sure you fully get the principles of IF. The whole point of fasting is that on fast days you should end up burning fat, but on the other days you eat normally, ie roughly your TDEE. Have you worked out your current TDEE? You should be eating roughly a quarter of that on fast days, and the full amount on the eating days, although a little variation won’t hurt.

Long term calorie restriction (on a daily basis) tends to lead to muscle and bone loss as well as fat loss, and the metabolism slows down to try and stabilise your weight. Whereas fasting leads to fat burning, but no downregulating of the metabolism, in fact for many it tends to ramp up metabolism on fast days. Y