Thanks Michael, I saw the promos and definitely plan to watch the programme (probably on catch-up). I’m definitely in the ‘struggles whenever there’s sweet stuff on offer’ camp myself but I do try to restrict my sugar intake to genuinely & obviously naughty stuff (sugar in my 1 cup of tea per day, chocolate/cake/whatever, fruit & occasional fruit juice or soda or alcoholic drink) for the rest of my diet I try to be really careful and read packets etc. to ensure that I’m using the low sugar/low calorie option wherever possible. Often this equates to being the higher fat option but I’m of the opinion that fat is less of an issue than sugary calories these days.

Thanks again for the lifestyle – I fully intend to 5:2 for life and I can’t thank you enough for getting me started with the 2012 programme.
Cheers – Tracy J

I’ve just watched the first programme and it was fascinating.

Vet272, yeah I definitely think that the programme was interesting and the regimen certainly looks like it would be useful for those ‘constant cravers’ as a starting point but unless you’re already morbidly/clinically obese (I was the latter) when you start out then JUST concentrating on dieting 2 days (especially at the higher calorie level of 800kcal) is only going to get them so far. I guess they’ll go into more detail tonight but I would hope that they were given more support and information, than we saw last night, about dealing with non-fastdays.

Fastdays are a breeze once you get used to them, it’s how you deal with the non-fastdays that will determine your success if your aim is to lose weight.

Femme anglaise. If you’d like to offer mutual support, let me know x

Sugar is a huge problem for lots of us I think and I too am hugely addicted to the wretched stuff. A couple of years ago I did a diet (strategy?) where I cut out almost all sugars and I have to say that it was one of the most successful I have attempted, in that you never crave food at all. Really, your appetite is totally in control all the time. The only problem is when you have that first sweet thing again you simply rocket out of control once more and it is very hard to get back on the no-sugar horse again. Hence I am now fasting and it helps a lot in the that direction especially if taken in tandem with high protein/lowGI carb diet and absolutely no junk food in the house (which doesn’t happen often unfortunately but is the way to go).

Hi, I am a 64 year old constant dieter, having been a grossly overweight child. I managed to take control of my life when aged 21, and got down to a size 12. It was just amazing to feel normal and wear normal clothes! (My school uniform had to be specially made etc.) My weight has fluctuated over the years, and seems to go on very easily. I have tried Weight Watchers and Slimming World a number of times, with some success, but weight has always crept back on. I was losing the battle again, trying to stick to the slimming world healthy eatting regime, when I tried the 5:2 last August. I am amazed and delighted to have lost 9 very stubborn pounds and am determined to keep to the 5:2 programme. I find the fast days hard, I eat along slimming world guidelines the other days, but the joy of not feeling guilty when having occasional cake, puddings CHEESE, BUTTER, toast etc. knows no bounds! I am fascinated by the science, especially the increased fat intake on non fast days. (I have chosen low fat everything for years). I am eager to learn more. THANK YOU!

Hi Ann:

In the late 50s and 60s scientists noticed that people had started gaining weight like they had never done before. There was a debate between those that thought sugar and other processed carbs were the problem and those that thought fat was the problem. In the U.S., politicians decided that fat was the problem and the low fat diet was created.

It has taken them 40 years to start to realize they were wrong. Even the American Diabetes Association guidelines (2013) actually recommend that a Mediterranean type diet be followed, even though it contains 300% or more in fat calories over the previously recommended low fat diet. The guidelines also, for the first time, recommend that sugar sweetened drinks be shunned. Until then, eating sugar was fine. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/07/dc13-2042.full.pdf+html

All of this is nice, but a little too late for those of us that were brought up being told that to be light and healthy we needed to shun fat but could eat all of the carbs, of whatever kinds, we wanted to eat! And it is very hard for people to change their minds when they have been taught all of their lives by their governments and doctors that low fat eating is healthy.

Luckily, 5:2 works with both eating styles, and tempers the low fat style by cutting down on the carbs consumed!

Milk contains lactose as its sugar. Skimmed milk contains the most so is that the healthiest? Personally I drink normal fat milk. Milk obviously gives calcium, and some iodine as well.

As for sugar it seems to be added to products that don’t need it. Does soup need sugar? No! It’s also added to some processed meat and fish. So why do manufacturers put it in? Well, it’s cheap and bulks food out. Sugar can also act as a preservative.

Is there a conspiracy to add extra sugar to food? Maybe. They know it is addictive. Also what would the gov do if we all lived to 110? How would they afford it? You don’t think they would do such a thing? Think again…

Kzee,I couldn’t agree more, your post spoke for me.
I believe sugar and inactivity are the root of the problem of obesity in our world

Trying Harder…..
Good point about calcium requirements,milk and sugars. Coconut milk has 2.7/100ml and Almond milk has 3.0/100ml which is less than half of full fat milk it contains more calcium and less calories too…. All round winner.

Just on the sugar topic again,

Fruits and other sweet things like dates, dried fuits are all right aren’t they? The difference is when you eat an apple say, you are also eating all of that fiber. I’ve always thought, the italians eat quite alot of fresh fruit at the end of a meal and they are less cakes and cookies people than we up north. And very healthy people the italians.

Elsewhere on this forum someone mentioned that they had an even stronger craving for sugar when they had eaten alot of carbs. I feel the same way. If I were to eat a bowl of pasta tonite, I can just hear tomorrows cry for sugar in me coffee!

When I stopped OD’ing on pasta and bread, my interest in everything being sweeter went down too. Why that is, is a mystery !

-Trying Harder!

Very much appreciate your information Mike (Stinger) !

Loved the idea that the dessert aisle becomes the desert !

Something to that ! I don’t have iodine deficiency as we have lots of delicious fish, shellfish here in France. ha! iodized salt is not welcome in me house tho so I’m glad you reminded me that this was something to keep watching and be thoughtful about the various nutrients needed to keep a healthy body.

-Trying Harder !

charlie1968,

I have Dr Lustig’s book and his lecture is very interesting. Fructose is IMO bad for you and now I seem to be reading every packet in the supermarket to make sure I don’t eat it. It is frightening what they are bulking food out with these days and this myth about low fat has to be stopped here and now. Low fat diet = high fructose/sugar/carb.

Fontwell,

If it tastes like cardboard then it’s probably ok on the low sugar front. At 22 calories you are not going to harm anything so keep on with it if you like them. Similar biscuit is the Fox’s wholemeal biscuit and I will eat these occasaionally on a fast day.

Now then rice. Hmm not sure about that. It has quite a lot of available carb in it. Look at the amount of carb in 100g and if more than 5g is sugar (will say “of which sugars or glucides” etc.) then avoid them. Why is sugar added to things that don’t need it? What are they trying to do to us? Could they afford the pensions if we all lived to 100?

As a general tip, you can reduce the available amount of carb in foods like potatoes by cooking them, cooling them overnight in the fridge then cooking them again. They taste better as well. Not quite sure what it does (maybe it polymerises some of the carbohydrate chains – sticks them together and they dont’ get metabolised – I don’t know any chemists out there who can explain?)

Personally, my diet is now 2 to 3 days at 600 cals or less and then in the days off I do low sugar/carb but I make sure I get plenty of fibre by eating low carb veg like cauliflower and broccoli with melted cheese on top. For low sugar fruit try berries. I don’t believe all this cr@p about fat – never have done – my dad who is nearly 91 has eaten loads of cheese all his life. All LDL is not the same. When you eat fat you get the large particle version not the small one and it’s the small one that does the damage. As in all things moderation is they key though.

Keep up the good work folks.

I can’t say that I enjoyed the Horizon programme all that much, I felt it was just the same old stuff slightly repackaged. Sadly I seem to tick all three boxes! Emotional – I tend to eat when stressed or depressed, Constant Craver – I seem to think and obsess about food most of the time and a Feaster – i.e I can’t/don’t know when to stop. Having said all of that the 5.2 Diet has worked well for me on the whole. I seem to be able to stick to the fast day restrictions pretty well but have to be careful that I don’t over eat on the ‘normal’ days. I think that the amount of sugar consumed these days is a very real problem and the food manufacturers must shoulder a large part of the blame for making products sweeter and sweeter and so educating us to like only well sweetened food. Sugar isn’t a problem for me, I haven’t taken sugar in tea or coffee for fifty years and find most deserts and confectionery far too sweet. When my wife bakes she always reduces the amount of sugar in the recipe and sometimes changes sugar for Canderell.

I am amazed at how sweet many of my friends want their tea and coffee, two or three tea spoons of sugar is not unusual and many of them have type 2 diabetes! If I mention anything they just say that they can’t possibly drink tea/coffee without sugar.

I’ve managed to eliminate most starches and grains from my diet, however sugar is just too hard to give up. I need chocolate every day (what woman doesn’t?!).

If you like chocolate try Holland and Barratt as they have sugar free chocolate bars. Ok they are sweetened with xylitol but are quite nice. They are made by Plamil and come in three flavours plain, mint and coffee.

Take care,
Mike

Hi Sapphire

I went all Lent without sugar, and loved the freedom from thinking about any kind of sweets. I only had fruit twice a week. No juice, no dried fruit and nothing that had grains and fruit in it.

I note what you write about grains. I have mostly given them up. However, another thread began a chat about sourdough and fermented foods and the ease of digesting them compared with normal grains.

Will now continue with low grain and low sugar intake. I eat chia seeds, raw almonds, raw Brazil nuts. I have rice only when we go out to dinner in a Chinese restaurant, and only a small amount. I never have wheat as it gives me bloat. Pasta is a once in a blue moon food now.

I have decided to only eat fruit when it is in season, and preferably from the orchard.

It is interesting watching the word spread about how bad sugar is for us all.

Cheers, Bay 🙂

Carolannfud check out the app “SBS on Demand”. They were aired a while back on SBS so they may still be available to watch on demand.

Dear Everyone,

I am still on course with losing one pound per week. I love, love Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. However, they are loaded with sugar (fructose). One half cup plain vanilla flavor is 20 grams sugar. This means that one carton has 84 grams sugar (17 tsp). When the added flavors are included the sugar content will jump to 8-9 tsp of sugar per one half cup. Way, way too much fructose considering the current recommended guidelines are 25 grams per day. 1 Tsp = 4.2 grams

“The World Health Organization is dropping its sugar intake recommendations from 10 percent of your daily calorie intake to 5 percent. For an adult of a normal body mass index (BMI), that works out to about 6 teaspoons — or 25 grams — of sugar per day,” (Mar 5, 2014).

I suggest to dramatically reduce sugar when you find weight increasing rather than decreasing. The whole purpose of the fasting eating lifestyle is to reduce the body’s dependency on fructose and to eliminate insulin resistance.

So if on my NFD, I load sugar back into my body to the extreme, with pastries, ice cream, processed foods, beverages and snacks, then I am not creating a healthy body.

I recently read the e-book, the 5:2 Fast Diet Magic Book: The Cheat’s Guide to Easy Weight Loss with Intermittent Fasting, author Caitlin Collins. I didn’t give the book a good review, because the author recommended using prepacked meals on fast days in order to eat a precise number of calories.

However, I am trying one of her recommendations of the eating window. This week, I started an eating window; eating all meals between the hours of 8am to 8pm every day. I may adjust the window to 9am to 9pm or 10am to 10pm because my family and I eat later in the evening on most days. Also, when I eat later it is easier to have restaurant dinner meals.

One more tip, green tea and liquid vitamin B12 are fasting life savers, because if taken the first thing in the morning they not only increase fat metabolism but reduce the food cravings. I don’t like the taste of plain green tea without honey or a sweetener, so I take the capsules with one or two glasses of water, first thing after waking up on an empty stomach. Then later on I will try my best to drink hot green tea with Stevia and lemon, 2 or 3 times after meals.

My husband and I plan to try drinking coconut milk for the fat concentration. We already eat a lot of good fats, like olives, extra virgin olive oil, grape seed oil, fish oil, avocados, eggs, nuts, whole milk, grass fed cow butter and cream. Lately, I’ve viewed several YouTube stories about the benefits of a high fat in the diet as opposed to low fat. Take notice and beware that most You Tube stories Do Not show weight loss for our age group. Most YouTube videos are weight stories are from young women, who have periods every month, as such many of their suggestions don’t always apply to menopausal women.

Based on self-experience, increasing my fats in meals reduces my food cravings and eating carbohydrates (sugar) causes me to want food every two hours. So this week, I am trying on fast days eating 3 to 6 grams max sugar per day, while increasing the fat foods. This is going to be very hard considering 6g is less than 2 tsp and almost everything has some sugar in it. I am doing this to starve my body of fructose on fast days because I believe eating sugary foods is the cause of my extreme hunger.

One last piece of advice, highly suggest a non-sugar or very low sugar fiber supplement. I shot out my digestive system taking over the counter, (OTC) and prescription, (Rx) pain medications, and steroids for back pain, cramps, asthma, and migraines for 30 years. It was normal for me to go days without having any bowel movements and I thought this was okay because my doctors recommended these drugs. So wrong and so stupid of me. The Fast 5:2 will not repair damages to the stomach, intestines and colon. Therefore, I have to, have to take every day a huge amount of healthy fiber and consume lots of liquids. A leaky gut and depressed bowels are as dangerous to overall health as insulin resistance and inflammation.

This was very interesting

As a type 1 diabetic I fully endorse avoiding refined carbs, the NHS seem to be blind to the fact that type 1 diabetics on a ‘normal’diet have sugar spikes which can cause long term damage so eating a low carb diet is essential for good health, they seem to think we need a minimum of 80-100g of carb a day so put all newly diagnosed type 1 diabetics onto a ‘Dose adjustment for normal eating’ course – which advocates eating a normal carb laden diet and taking the correct insulin dosage. This is old information, we can survive on low carbs whilst still getting the energy from consuming protein which we convert to sugar. Knowledgeable type 1 diabetics follow the ‘low carb’ diet and are perfectly healthy, taking less insulin means less room for error with hypos or hypers, stable blood glucose levels, no weight gain. My consultant fully agrees with this approach however most GP’s will advise again this. I believe everyone should be following these principles as refined carbs are causing high incidence of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Hi QD,

Short answer yes. In moderation nothing wrong with fruit and honey. Personally Id go for berries (lower Fructose levels) and limit the honey (mostly Glucose and Fructose). Definitely stay away from fruit juices and high sugar foods. High sugar foods basically means anything that comes in a box is off bounds. Read the nutritional content of most “healthy” cereals and muesli and be amazed at the sugar content. Typically they contain 25-30% sugar.

Hi Willowkathy,

That’s what I have for my breakfast. I have lost 19kgs (42 lbs) and have stabilised at my self imposed weight. Sometimes I also throw in some almonds. As long as you limit the sugar intake I think youre going about it the right way. Avoid any carb rich foods like toast, muffins, cereal, dried fruits etc.

I don’t eat many sugars all the time but once a week I eat entire chocolate bar. Is it better to eat it a piece at a time?