It does do marvelous things to your dodgy hormones I find.

I always had horrible heavy, painful periods accompanied by mood swings and cravings etc. etc. at their worst I would bite the head off family members and slam doors etc. and quite often felt like Count Dracula had visited in the night and drained the life out of me too.

Not any more. I never really bothered keeping track on a calendar before because it would be so obvious that I was coming up to my ‘time’ so the past year or so I have been caught out more than a few times by ‘stealth’ periods that have snuck up on me (although they were actually perfectly regular). They are nice light, almost pain-free, short lived, pretty civilised affairs these days and I would happily do 5:2 for the rest of my days (even if weight loss never happened again) JUST for that unbelievable benefit on its own.