hi and welcome Iwillbeskinny ( love this)

you made the right choice and am sure you will reach that goal in time for the holiday and wedding 🙂

re the calories on normal days, have you calculated your TDEE yet? these are the amount you should consume on your normal days and top of the page there is a tool which will calculate this for you, I know how you feel though, my TDEE is something like 1700 cals, and to be honest I don’t think I eat those all the time… just see how it goes for you, and what works..

good luck!

I hope this helps! x

@iwillbeskinny Hi there

Tracy and Angie are SO right!! You need to eat more.

My weight loss has been slowing down recently and, while I expect it to go slower as I get nearer my goal, I’m not that close yet.

I use My Fitness Pal to track calories – not absolutely necessary but it helps some people – and I’m glad I do. I went back to check because when I started this way of eating, I was losing steadily.

I have found that, as my weight loss has slowed so my calorie intake has been reducing gradually over the weeks and I think overall I am just not eating nearly enough. Some non fast days barely reaching my BMR. Silly me – no excuses, I should know better!!

This week I am making a concentrated effort to eat more in the hope I go back to losing regularly.

I know it seems unbelievable that you have to eat more to lose weight but it’s true.

Good luck

xx

@iwillbeskinny Hi

The AVERAGE weight loss (and I stress it is an average as everyone is different) is around 1 lb (.5kg) per week. Some people lose weight immediately, with others it can take a week or two before they see any difference. The idea of measuring before you start is a good one as sometimes you see inch loss but no weight loss.

The good thing about this way of eating is that you can eat WHATEVER you like but try to keep at or under your TDEE on non fast days. I’m not sure where you are getting the 1200 calorie figure from – that sounds as if it is just around your BMR. You can use the calculator in the ‘how?’ tab above to work out your BMR and TDEE and you should aim for BETWEEN these amounts on a non fast day. But make sure it is ABOVE your BMR.

As I said in my earlier post – I have found from experience that if you do not eat enough you will not lose weight.

xx

Glad you brought this topic up @iwillbeskinny, and thanks to TracyJ as I have over the years wondered if I was eating not enough calories but according to this BMR and TDEE calculator I am OK. BMR is 1029 and TDEE 1415 I don’t think I could stick to a 1/4 of my TDEE infact feel deprived on 500 however I am doing this for IGF 1 benifits and find the 2pm to 2pm or 24 hours is the best for me or at least waiting for 20 hrs before eating. I am only in my 3rd week so will see how I get on.

All the best.

fast52 – if you find 25% of your TDEE difficult to manage on your fastday then just up it to the 500cal. The numbers were arbitrary really, chosen by Michael for HIS version of a study detailed in his documentary about fasting. The numbers 500 and 2000 would result in an ‘average’ loss of 1lb per week for Ms. ‘Average’.

They work for a lot of people but all that will happen if you up your intake on a fastday to 500 calories is that it might slightly slow down your loss. If it’s more comfortable & sustainable for you though, then that’s worth a slower loss isn’t it.

iwillbeskinny, if you feel it’s going to be make or break then go ahead and have an extra few calories. It won’t make much difference and if it helps you ‘bed in’ to the lifestyle the first couple of weeks then do it.

Try not to eat until you absolutely have to on fastdays – once you start the ‘hunger’ pangs will be worse. It’s not REALLY hunger, it’s just thirst and it WILL pass but it’s difficult to deal with the first few times and it’s like pringles – once you pop (eat) you just can’t stop (thinking about food).

Hi tlafonta, a lot of people don’t ‘believe in’ starvation mode but I am of the opinion that if you consistantly undereat then your body will do all sorts of unhealthy things to your body composition to try to keep you alive for as long as possible during this aparent ‘famine’.

Whether you believe in it or not the idea of the 5:2 lifestyle is to have a healthy, sustainable relationship to food and promote the health benefits of the fasting period while being comfortable with it as a long-term thing, rather than a ‘quick fix’ diet.

That all being said, you will be eating WAY less calories than you need to survive (longterm) during a fastday but that is OK because you are not doing it every day. It’s like a cavewoman having access to meat from the hunt and other forraged goodies most days but also having the occasional (twice weekly) lean day, where there’s just nothing to be had but a few berries.

The odd day of ‘starvation’ wont kill you or mess up your body, as it’s built to deal with short-term shortages, it’s long-term and consistant undereating which will mess you up. The main thing is to ensure that you are eating between your BMR and your TDEE on your non-fastdays, not just in order not to go into ‘starvation mode’ but really just to not feel like you’re on this awful restrictive ‘diet’ and you continue to feel comfortable with the lifestyle as a long-term thing.

Oh and in answer to “just think how long all that weight has beem around !” Yeah, I started 5:2 at the age of 34 and had been overweight since puberty, so yeah it’s been pretty much an adult-life-long thing for me to be at least 3-4 stone overweight. I think over those 20 years I had ‘put on’ maybe a stone (14lb) in total, so I started out pretty big as a pubescant girl and didn’t really add that much in 20 years but maintained that high bodymass very consistantly, just finding it impossible to move it with exercise and failing miserably at every ‘diet’ I tried during that time. That weight was going NOWHERE until 5:2 came along. I wish I had figured this out in my teens – it would have saved a lot of unhappiness.