I’ve been doing the 5:2 diet since just before Christmas and I’ve lost something like 12lbs. There have been a couple of weeks where I fell off the wagon (I had a cold one week, and another week I went away for a messy drunken weekend with friends).

On fast days I don’t do long fasting periods, instead I try to spread the calories across the day.

So in the morning I weigh out 30g of bran flakes which I eat without milk (because I always eat cereal dry anyway) – that’s ~100 calories.

I then travel to work and will have a diet coke to drink in the morning, plus plenty of water.

For lunch I do more or less what you do, I have a plate of salad from the work cafeteria but I don’t put any dressing on it. Just lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, olives etc today there was even a plate of seaweed so had some of that too. I guestimate this to be ~200 calories. I will also have another diet coke.

I then try to get through the rest of the afternoon with nothing to eat. I will drink water and possibly if feeling desperate have yet another diet coke.

When I get home I will usually eat some biltong (a kind of chewy dried meat a bit like jerky but with no sugar). Tesco sell this in packs that have approximately 100 calories and they’re very high in protein. Which is good because I won’t have had really any protein during the rest of the day.

That leaves me with 200 calories to eat over the rest of the evening. I like to leave these until just before bed when I have some more cereal in an effort to avoid waking up with hunger pangs in the middle of the night.