Interesting. I would consider doing 4:3 if I could have 800 calories per day as some weeks Monday, Wednesday and Friday would work really well. I suppose it’s still a larger calorie deficit for the week than 5:2 with 500 calories.

@fastdieter2 – this is HUGE! Thanks for catching it and sharing the article. I am surprised there isn’t an article about this on the homepage of this website.

@michael – could you provide us with any insight?

Personally, it really confuses me. People in the forums seem to be religious about not going over 500 calories on FDs and seem to try to eat in the high 400s on FDs – so the fact that women can now eat up to 700 is massive! I also thought that the weeks I eat over 500 calories (e.g. 580 cal) on my FDs, I either don’t lose weight / lose very little weight. Was this all in my head? A placebo of sorts?!

The article mentions the extra 200 cals for the crankiness factor – so is the additional 200 only for people who are very irritable on their FDs? Personally (female, 5’3″) on my FDs I skip breakfast and eat lunch and dinner (I know Michael skips lunch and eats breakfast and dinner) and had crankiness for the first few months which has now disappeared.

Any update on this?

I think it is a slippery slope. If you eat more on “fast days” then you need to eat less on non-fasting days. If you eat more on all days you’ll probably lose less weight.

The problem I see with eating on fasting days is that it isn’t really fasting. By reducing the calories people actually probably end up with longer periods of fasting, but it still wouldn’t be as good as just really fasting. Then other benefits really help with fat consumption and it isn’t just calorie reduction.

All that being said, most diets would consider 800 calories a day very low. In that context I can believe there wouldn’t be much difference caused by just adding 200 calories. People that do eat on the fast days probably not overeat as much on the first non-fast day.

Thats the blood sugar diet- completely different. This topic is about the fact that Michael Mosley has said that an extra 200 cals on fast days doesnt make a lot of of difference to weight loss on the normal 5:2 diet. I wish he would come on here and let everyone know the details though!

Let’s not forget that the fast diet is relatively new. Michael put a lot of research into developing it but it’s not perfect, there is still research going on not to mention the fact that as more people try it, new things are discovered and it can get tweaked a bit.
I actually think that it is more interesting that he is now saying that you can have lunch, when the diet was originally created he was pretty adamant that best results could be gotten from having that 12 hour window between breakfast and dinner. But as time has gone on it seems many people have as much success by spreading their calories out during the day, or having lunch + dinner. So it would seem that a lot of the benefits come more from the calorie restriction side of things, rather than the actual “fasting” thing.
Personally I try to get the best of both worlds a bit, and have a very delayed small breakfast on my fasting days, so that I have a 15-16 hour window of fasting (since dinner previous night) and then have 3 small meals. I’ve been losing about 1kg (2lb) a week so far with this method. I am willing to try adding another 200 cals and seeing what happens. I do get really quite hungry at night before bed in particular so I would love to even add another 100 cal to my evening meal to combat this so the diet is more sustainable in the longer term.