Hi all,

Thought you might like to know that we have created a sister website, fast-exercises.com, which you might find helpful and interesting. If you want to lose weight and improve your health then the evidence is clear that the best way to do this is through calorie restriction (whatever way works for you) and increased activity.

We are trying to close the gap between what the scientists who study exercise know and what most of us believe. I’ve spent a couple of years looking into the latest science of exercise and it has been a real revelation.

Fast Exercises are a mix of scientifically tested ways to get the maximum improvements in the minimum time. The ideas behind this approach are in many ways just as radical and surprising as those behind the Fast Diet. Rather than going for slow and steady the emphasis is on short but intense activity. It is called HIT, High Intensity Training, and it is an approach that can be incorporated into an existing exercise regime or be used by people who never seem to find the time to exercise.

Peta, who loves exercise, builds HIT into her runs. I don’t enjoy exercise and find it a struggle, so I’ve found ways to build it into my daily life. I almost never get into trainers or shorts but have found ways to get fit none-the-less.

This approach is for people who older and less fit, not just for the young and superfit.

You can start at almost any age and improve the quality of life.

There are dangers in starting any new exercise regime, so the exercises we recommend have been carefully graded to reduce the risk of injury or strain. As ever, I look forward to your thought and reactions –

All the best,

Michael

“The easy, no-gym fitness plan from the doctor behind the Fast Diet… Short exercise bursts get the most from a workout in the least possible time and dramatic changes can be achieved… If your body seems to be unresponsive to exercise, or your life is too busy for long workouts, Fast Exercise is for you” –The Times

“Informative, easy to understand… offers not only good health but a host of spillover benefits besides… Fast Exercise is the way of the future.” –Professor Stuart M. Phillips Ph.D., FACSM, FACN Department of Kinesiology, Exercise Metabolism Research Group McMaster University, CANADA and Visiting Professor, School of Exercise, Sport Science, and Health Loughborough University, UK

“Fast Exercise is a great practical introduction into the field of high intensity exercise. The personal perspective matched with references to the both old and new scientific literature provides compelling reading.” –Carl Johan Sundberg MD, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Physiology & Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

“A health revolution” –The New York Times

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I hope you all had a lovely Christmas though, sadly, there is always a price to pay for that enjoyable overindulgence. If you are anything like me you probably ate too much, stepped on the scales on New Year’s day, and sighed.

The average Brit puts on 2kgs (nearly 5 lbs) during December and I certainly put on almost that much over the month. I, however, have an unusual excuse. I’m making another self experimenting Horizon documentary, but this time I have had to gorge myself on meat for a month to see what effect that has on my microbiota (the bacteria in my gut).

That particular experiment has just finished so I’m back on 5:2 on Monday and expect to shed those extra pounds some time in January. I’m looking forward to my fast days as I actually miss the occasional hunger pangs and the mental sharpness that comes with it.

I’m glad to say enthusiasm for intermittent fasting shows no sign of waning. As an article in today’s Times put it,

“It’s the diet that launched the publishing phenomenon of 2013 and saw fortysomething men talking calories with the authority usually reserved for World Cup qualifiers..  A year ago it was a fad amongst fashionable West London mums wanting to lose a bit of baby weight. Now it’s revolutionised the diet industry”.

Our book, “The Fast Diet”, having topped the best seller list for much of 2013, shot right back up the charts to number one on New Year’s day. There are a whole slew of new or updated books connected to intermittent fasting coming out in the next few days. Along with the usual copy cat books there are a couple written by the scientists who inspired my interest in intermittent fasting and which I wrote about extensively in “The Fast Diet”.

Out soon is an updated version of “The Two Day Diet” by Dr Michelle Harvie and Professor Tony Howell, which first came out last February. This book advocates eating a Mediterranean diet 5 days a week and cutting out the carbs two days a week (the recipes add up to effectively 1000 calories a day on the carbs-free days).

Their studies show that on this diet you will lose an average of about 0.5kg (1 lb) a week, most of it fat. Their volunteers, women at increased risk of breast cancer, also saw improvements in their insulin levels (which is important for reducing cancer risk). They are planning further large scale trials, involving men.

A new book, out next week, is “The Every Other Day Diet” by Dr Krista Varady.  If you have read “The Fast Diet” or seen my Horizon documentary, “Eat, Fast, Live Longer”, then you will already know something about Krista and her work.  I have also written about it on this site under ADF (alternate day fasting).

The basic principle of this diet is you cut your calories to around 500 calories every other day (480 for women, 520 for men). Krista recommends that you eat 400 calories as a single meal (lunch or dinner) and 100 calories as a snack.

On what she calls “Feast Days” you are allowed to eat whatever you want. Her research suggests that on average people tend to eat only about 10% more than normal, perhaps because of a shrinking stomach. The rate at which you will lose fat depends on how fat you were to begin with and how much you eat on your Feast Days.

According to Krista’s latest paper , “Alternate day fasting for weight loss in normal weight and overweight subjects: a randomized controlled trial.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24215592) if you are not obese to start with then you can expect to lose about 5kgs over 12 weeks, which works out about 1 lb a week, as well as improvements in your bloods.  Krista recommends weighing yourself every day, skipping breakfast and avoiding eating mini meals (mainly because people have a tendency to underestimate how much they eat).

So which of these approaches is the best one? 

I think the best approach is the one that suits you and which you find you can stick to. We all respond differently to different diets, which is why we called our book “The Fast Diet”, rather than the 5:2 diet. I developed the 5:2 approach because it suited me, but I recognise it won’t suit everyone. Some will prefer the more disciplined “Two Day Diet” approach, others will prefer the more obviously “feast and famine” approach of ADF (alternate day fasting). Yet another approach, which I know some people here have tried, is a 4:3 approach. I would be very interested to hear the experiences of those who have tried either or both.

Fast Exercise

As well as making a range of documentaries in 2013, I was busy researching and writing a book on exercise, which I’ve rather imaginatively call, “Fast Exercise”. Like the Fast Diet it is a radically different approach to the standard advice and like the Fast Diet, it is the product of cutting edge science. I hope you will find the science behind it as fascinating as I do.

The main idea behind Fast Exercise is that instead of trying to shed weight and get healthier by plodding away on a treadmill or jogging in the rain for hours every week, you can get many of the more important benefits of exercise from a few minutes a day of intense activity.

Although the exercises we demonstrate in the book are intense, they are not prolonged. This is not like “Tabata” or “Insanity”, exercise regimes designed for people who are already very fit.

The exercises we recommend will enhance existing exercise regimes, but they have been primarily developed to ensure they are safe and suitable for people who are older (50 plus), overweight and with conditions like diabetes.

I’ve written the book with Peta Bee, an award winning health and sports journalist, and with the help of Professor Jamie Timmons, who featured in a Horizon I made in 2012 called, “The Truth about Exercise”. If you want to know more then do buy the book or visit fast-exercises.com.

The versions of HIT (high intensity training) that we recommend in Fast Exercise have been shown to improve your aerobic fitness (the strength of your heart and lungs) and your metabolic fitness (how your body responds to a sugar rush) more effectively and in much less time that standard exercise.

If you want to lose weight, improve your health and get better toned (who doesn’t) then intensity is the key.

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And a really warm welcome to the Fast Diet website. This first week of January is, of course, prime time for embarking on a get-fit-lose-fat programme – and lots of people (across the world) are about to fast for the first time. So what do you need to know? You’ll have gathered the basics from the book – but my year of intermittent fasting has taught me a few more subtle things that might help anyone trying the plan for the first time.

First, be kind to yourself. For me, the main psychological advantage of the Fast Diet – and the key that differentiates it from conventional diet plans – is that it is never about admonishment. It shouldn’t feel like an unending slog, or a continual nagging in the gut that says you should be eating less, doing more. It will work best if you allow yourself to be human, slip up, make mistakes – always knowing that tomorrow is another day. Flexibility is built in: choose your Fast Days, adapt the diet to suit your diary, stop if it doesn’t feel right, start again when it does – thinking of it as a broad, on-going lifestyle change, not a daily drudge.

Second, do (however) stick to your targets and exercise willpower. On the days which you have designated as Fast Days, do try to be a bit tougher on yourself. Hunger is a canny beast, and you will certainly encounter it if you’re only eating a quarter of your usual calorie intake on any given day. So, use your mind to master your appetite. Keep busy. Stay engaged. Share your day with a Fast Buddy (or this forum). Try hard to stick to the calorie quota, but don’t dwell on it too much. Demote eating on those particular days and find something else to occupy your mind.

Third, know that fasting (like anything at all) gets easier as it becomes a habit. Week four will be easier than week one. Week six will almost certainly be easier still, particularly if you’re seeing a shift on the scales. Plenty of people report that they come to enjoy their Fast Days. OK, so that may sound like baloney if you’re only just setting off on this journey, but there’s something galvanising and strengthening about understanding your appetite, embracing the odd period of hunger, eating well, with thought and application rather than simply shovelling in whatever comes to hand.

So, stay committed, stay light, stay strong. After all, it’s not for long. And do let us know how you get on. Mimi x

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What a year it’s been! The Fast Diet has, much to our surprise and delight, become part of the national conversation – one of those instantly recognisable titles that became a buzz-phrase of the year. Michael and I have had an incredible 12 months since the book was first published. I remember being with friends in the sticks of Somerset last New Year’s Eve and watching it climb, bit by bit, up the Amazon chart. At 2am, having had a cup or two of wine, my mates all decided to buy a copy to see if it affected the rankings. It didn’t. But we sold an extra 17 copies just to prove a point! Since then, the Fast Diet has held fast at the top of the charts, ending the year, remarkably, as Amazon’s best-selling book, and back in the top ten as we tumble into 2014. That’s great, but the real story – the thing that makes us both tick – is the countless individuals who have lost impressive amounts of weight on the Fast Diet. Some have succeeded in spectacular fashion, others have found the going tough; many have found support and encouragement on this site. We’re still only just beginning to discover why the 5:2 method works so well for some – and we really enjoy reading and hearing stories from Fast Dieters around the globe. Thank you for your commitment and your enthusiasm, good luck to all those about to embark, and huge congratulations to all those who’ve hit their target weight this year.

And so to 2014… Michael’s new book, Fast Exercise, comes out in the next few days – it’s a great companion to the Fast Diet and offers a similarly radical approach: add a few minutes of high intensity exercise to your weekly 5:2 plan and you’ll maximise your health, fitness and well-being in the year ahead. My new book, Fast Cook, is published in early spring – a collection of simple, satisfying, satiating and distinctly yummy recipes to get you through your Fast Days with ease (with really lovely pictures too – thanks Romas!) But for now, we raise a glass to you all. Happy New Year. Let’s make it a good one.

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Michael and Mimi are loving this. Too lazy to read the book? Here’s The Fast Guide to the Fast Diet by Kevin Partner. (We think you should still buy the book though. At least the recipe book.)

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One of the reasons The Fast Diet seems to have become so popular is that it is incredibly easy to thread into a life. The psychology of intermittent fasting is its USP: no two days are the same. There’s no drudge of daily dieting. It is a part-time commitment for a full-blown result.
It seems to me that the 5:2 method is so appealing that it could easily be applied to other areas of life. There’s something really pleasing about the ratio. It feels like just enough, but never too much. 5:2 feels feasible, a comfortable compromise that gets results. By the time the next Fast Day rolls around, you’re ready for more. So how about going beyond diet? A 5:2 regime for other things, other activities beyond mealtimes: two days a week, we could ditch the car. Or play squash. Two days a week, we could switch off the TV, or eat as a family, or practice yoga, or walk to work. We could steer clear or meat, or stop drinking wine. For two days a week, anything is possible, right?

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The Bookseller reports that The Fast Diet has now spent its 19th consecutive week at number one in the UK Paperback Non-fiction chart – ‘the first title to enjoy such extraordinary longevity since Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution 10 years ago.’ Michael and I are overjoyed at the success of the diet, and how so many people are gaining real benefit from it – losing weight, finding fitness, discovering a new way of eating that is low-key, sustainable and (can it be true?) fun. Even JLo has been on the 5:2. You’re certainly in good company.

I was travelling recently in Morocco, and even there, the diet seems to be causing a buzz. People are talking about it, sharing stories, proud of their achievements, swapping tips, sharing plans. In the coming months, the book will be published in more than 20 new territories – it’s already out in the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Korea – so welkom, benvenuto, powitanie, dobrodošli, добре дошъл, bun venit and hwan-yeong to you all (with apologies for poor spelling!) Please join in the conversation and let us know your stories from around the world.

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The official Fast Diet forums are now open for discussion. As Michael says, “We have a well informed and supportive community who will encourage you on your way and throw in some of the latest research to keep you motivated.” So pull up a chair, have a cup of tea (I’m having mine black, it’s a fast day) and let’s chat.

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At last, a few rays of sun arrive – and with them the first Fast Diet spring. When Michael and I started work on The Fast Diet back in October, the weather in the UK was already cold and gloomy, which, even with the best will in  the world, made eating on a Fast Day something of a challenge. British food in winter tends to rely on filling meals, on pies and stews and dumplings and potatoes – all delicious, but hardly ticking any boxes for Fast Days. But that’s all changing with the season: warmer weather means that eating and cooking plenty of protein and plants – the good old Fast Day mantra – is suddenly so much easier.

Next week sees the arrival of the Fast Diet Recipe Book – it’s already being dispatched by Amazon, so some of you will have got your copies. As you’ll see, each recipe is carefully calorie counted and nutritionally balanced – thanks to our resident nutritionist Dr Sarah Schenker. There are tons of great low-calorie recipes for winter evenings, but you’ll also find lots of the ideas that are perfect for summer nights: plenty of fish, tasty salads, lots of light veggie dishes which are easy to prepare and delicious to eat, ideal for a Fast Day, but just as good on any day of the week. The American edition of the cook book comes out in a couple of months, and all of the recipes will have been translated into US measurements. We hope you enjoy it and that it helps make all your Fast Days a breeze.

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While many people have found that they easily adapt to the 5:2 Fast Diet, others find it more challenging. If you persist it will work. If you are sticking to your normal diet on the other 5 days, then what you are doing is reducing your total calorie intake for the week by around 3000 calories. This translates to the loss of around 1lb of fat a week.

1. If you want to lose weight faster, or have hit a plateau, then you might want to consider doing Alternate Day Fasting, which I have written about in the book. As the name implies, with ADF you cut your calories to ¼ of their normal level (ie 500 for women, 600 for men), every other day. On your non-fast days you should eat normally, though in some of the trials that have been done on ADF the volunteers were actually allowed to eat pretty much what they wanted and still lose weight. Studies on people doing ADF have shown that, on average, they tend to lose around 2lbs a week, most of it fat. Some more, some less. You don’t want to obsess about weight. What you really want to do is lose fat, preferably around the gut. I always encourage people, before they start, to measure their girth (around the belly button), and monitor the change over a period of time.
2. Look at the calories you are getting from drinks on your non fast days. Juices, lattes, alcohol, fizzy drinks, smoothies all contain a lot of calories. If you can move to drinking more water and sugar free tea/coffee that will help. Calories you drink do not satiate. If you eat three apples they will fill you up. Drink 3 apples in form of a small fruit juice and it will not fill you up.
3. Simply moving more will help. I always take the stairs, even up 7 flights. Get a pedometer. Aim to do 10,000 steps a day. Most people do less than 5000. A long term study on people who lost weight and kept it off found that those who were successful all increased the amounts they walked.
4. Keep a diary of everything you eat or drink for a week.  Then look at the calorie content. Some foods may leap out. I was horrified to discover a muffin can be anywhere between 300-600 calories. Lots of evidence that people who keep an honest diary lose more weight
5. If you cut your calories 2 days a week, don’t overcompensate on the other days and keep reasonably active then you will lose fat. Unfortunately fat is incredibly energy dense, which is why for some people the process can be frustratingly slow.

I wish you all the best and let us know how you get on.

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Easter has come and gone and with it rather more Easter eggs than I had intended. I start off each year thinking that I will eat just a small amount and every year I end up wolfing down far more than is healthy. Why do we have this tradition of chocolate eggs at Easter? Apparently one reason is symbolic. The hard shell of the egg symbolize the sealed tomb which encased Christ; cracking the egg is like cracking the tomb, a celebration of the Resurrection.

Unfortunately, while eating real eggs is pretty healthy, as they are packed full of vitamins and high quality protein, the same is not true of chocolate ones. I would probably feel better about myself if I had eaten eggs made from dark chocolate, since there are some health benefits to eating the dark stuff (including a slight lowering of blood pressure), but the truth is most of what I ate was milk chocolate. Fat and sugar. Sigh. Ah well, tomorrow is a fast day…

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As readers of The Fast Diet know, the very best drink on a Fast Day is water – plenty of it, still or sparkling, with nothing added save an ice cube (if the weather ever improves enough to warrant it!). A lemon or lime slice can be nice. If you are looking for flavour, go for herbal tea, green tea, black tea and black coffee – if you add milk, the stealth calories soon add up.

Fruit juice and smoothies, though considered a ‘healthy’ option, in fact contain a lot of fruit sugars and are no replacement for eating the whole fruit, particularly on a Fast Day, when you are looking to avoid anything that will lead to an unwelcome spike in your blood sugars.

Lots of people have asked about The Fast Diet position on fizzy drinks. ‘Full-fat’ sodas are, of course, stacked with sugar – up to 10 teaspoons per can – so it’s no surprise that they should be avoided on a Fast Day. Diet sodas generally rely on aspartame or sucralose for their sweetness. There is some concern about the effects of these intense sweeteners on appetite and gut bacteria, and one study recently linked aspartame with certain blood cancers in men (though not in women).

The answer is that there is no clear answer on diet soda, at least not yet – so exercise caution. If a Diet Coke gets you through a Fast Day, fine. But limit your consumption over the course of a week. And if you’re reaching for the can time and again, reach for the tap too, whenever you can.

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As we say in the book, it’s important to find a pattern that works for you when it comes to the timetable you decide to use when eating on a Fast Day.

My method is to wake up on a Fast Day morning and have breakfast of around 300 calories at about 7am, before going to work. Then I drink lots of calorie-free fluid but go without food until 7pm, when I have a 300 calorie supper with my family (I eat the 300 calories, they tend to eat rather more).

I think of it is as ‘a day of fasting’. This makes it straightforward to explain and understand. However, as some of you have pointed out,  if you eat supper at 7pm on the night before a Fast and then have a normal breakfast on the day after a Fast, you can argue that you are actually eating 600 calories over the course of 36 hours (7pm Fast Day 1 until 7am two days later).

If, however, you decide to fast from 2pm until 2pm, as some fasters do, you would have a normal lunch on Day 1, then a 300 calorie supper on Day 1 and a 300 calorie breakfast on Day 2.  If you have a normal lunch on Day 2 this would be a 24-hour fast, full stop.  You can, of course, decide to skip lunch on Day 2 and wait till supper to break your fast.

On the 2pm-2pm method, because your fasting window is diminished, your overall weekly calorie count will probably be higher than with the 7am-7am method. You will probably lose weight more slowly.

Some people find it hard to sleep when they are hungry and for them a 7pm to 7pm method might be easier. That way you never go to bed hungry. Again weight loss will be slower. Also, here are some great suggestions from Twitter about dealing with nighttime hunger, if you’d like to look at those. If one routine doesn’t suit you, try another. Flexibility (within the basic parameters) is key – do let us know what works for you.

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So, Easter is on its way, with its glorious high-calorie promise of holiday bingeing and general excess. I must confess that I have never really been one for Lent; as with dieting, giving up something entirely – especially chocolate – is not my style. Over the course of my 20-year career, I have in fact been emphatically anti-diets, so it may seem odd that I have now written a book devoted to one. It’s no U-turn; The Fast Diet, co-written with Dr Michael Mosley, works so brilliantly because you don’t have to give anything up at all. You eat absolutely normally for five days a week and only restrict calories (to a quarter of your usual intake) on two days. So come Easter Sunday, I’ll be eating the kids’ chocolate eggs, just as I do every year. And on Easter Monday (or even Tuesday, if I fancy a little bank holiday indulgence) I will return, guilt free, to my bi-weekly 500-calorie fast.

It is times like Easter that illustrate why the Fast Diet has been so well received. In just two months, we have garnered a huge following and it is the diet’s flexibility that seems to be the key to its success: most of the time, there are no awkward dinner-party clichés (‘just salad, dressing on the side – I’m on a diet’), no need to be the dull colleague passing on post-work drinks, no need to count or fret. The diet works because you know that tomorrow you can have that glass of chardonnay/roast dinner/chocolate muffin. If you have ever struggled with the strictures of conventional, every-day dieting, it’s a liberating thought.

The book has now reached number 1 bestselling status on both sides of the Atlantic, which is hugely exciting for Michael and me. While the science is still young, the research is mounting and the results impressive. Some of the most common questions we get are about what to eat on the Fast Days; for this reason we are publishing a comprehensive Fast Diet Recipe Book on May 2, including plenty of information about how the method works, together with more than 180 meal ideas, rich in protein and complex carbs, so you won’t find yourself flagging on a Fast Day. This Lent, I reckon we can all have our cake and eat it.

You can read Mimi’s blog on Huffington Post today

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Well, Good Morning America! The Fast Diet is now on sale in the States, and – incredibly – has immediately shot to number 2 in the Amazon book charts. We’ve been waiting a while to get the Intermittent Fasting message to a wider, international audience – and this marks the beginning of that project. Michael has been on ABC’s Good Morning America today (among other things, he served up some of the recipes from our new cookbook), and The New York Times is set to run a comprehensive feature on the Fast Diet this coming Sunday.

So, a warm welcome to you all. We hope you like what you see, and that your experiences will mirror the success stories we’ve been hearing here since the New Year. We’re fascinated to learn how the Fast Diet format will translate to other territories, and hope that a new American audience will discover the simplicity and benefits of the 5:2 method, as so many of us in the UK have done. Please let us know how your fasting days go – keep us in the loop.

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I recently read a comment in a newspaper by obesity researcher Professor Lau from the University of Calgary. He made the point that “muscle protein breakdown occurs in the first 24 hours of starvation,” and expressed concern that people who fast may be losing crucial muscle mass.

My response to this is that he is really talking about long term fasting, ie fasting for days or weeks at a time. With intermittent fasting you are not fasting for 24 hours or longer. In the version that I practice, I never go more than 12 hours without eating. If your protein intake is adequate, and we actually recommend an increased protein intake on fasting days, then you are not going to get “muscle protein breakdown”. In fact the evidence from human studies clearly point towards intermittent fasting being better than standard diets when it comes to muscle preservation.

Dr Krista Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago has done a number of human trials using intermittent fasting. Her most recent paper was in, Metabolism, Volume 62, Issue 1, Pages 137-143, January 2013. In this study thirty-two overweight volunteers, average age 42, were put on an ADF (alternate day) intermittent fast for 8 weeks. At the end of 8 weeks the volunteers had lost an average of 4kg and seen significant improvements in biomarkers related to the risks of diabetes and coronary heart disease.  Interestingly, the weight loss was all fat, not muscle. As she points out “A similar preservation of lean mass was noted in a previous ADF study conducted by our group.” This retention of lean mass, ie muscle, is not seen with standard calorie restricted diets. “The reason why ADF may assist with the preservation of lean mass is not known at present, but will undoubtedly be of interest in future studies in this field”

In another study of intermittent fasting (Int J Obes . 2011 May;35(5):714-27), 107 young overweight women were randomly allocated to either a standard low calorie diet or a diet where for two days a week they ate 650 calories a day. At the end of 6 months the intermittent fasting group had lost an average of 6 kg of fat and 3 inches from their waists compared to 4.9 kg of fat and 2 inches from waist for the normal dieters.

Doing the diet, I have now lost just over 22lbs and my body fat is down from 28% to under 20%. I walk everywhere and do 30 press ups each morning. Keeping muscle mass is important, not just because it looks better but also because muscle is more metabolically active than fat; it burns calories even when you are asleep. Rest assured, the diet will keep you healthy as well as help you lose weight.

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Many people have found that they easily adapt to the 5:2 Fast Diet and start losing weight straight away, others find it more challenging. If you persist it will work, but there are things to bear in mind.

Firstly I would not obsess about weight. What you really want to do is lose fat, preferably around the gut. I would always start by measuring your stomach, around the belly button, and see what happens over a period of time. On a normal diet you will lose a mix of fat and muscle, which is why it is important to up your exercise levels when you diet, to maintain muscle mass. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat; it burns calories even when you are asleep. What is unusual about Intermittent Fasting is that studies have consistently shown that people on it tend to lose mostly fat and very little muscle.

I also think that people have to be realistic about what they eat and drink on non-fast days. You shouldn’t be obsessing about calories on your non-fast days, because that defeats the whole purpose of it, but nor should you go wild.

If you are not losing weight/fat then I would look first at the calories you are getting from drinks on your non fast days. Juices, lattes, alcohol, fizzy drinks, smoothies all contain a lot of calories. If you can move to drinking more water and sugar free tea/coffee that will help. Calories you drink do not satiate. If you eat three apples they will fill you up. Drink 3 apples in form of a small fruit juice and it will not fill you up.

The other thing is you should be moving more. I always take the stairs, even up 7 flights. Get a pedometer. Aim to do 10,000 steps a day. Most people do less than 5000. A long term study on people who lost weight and kept it off found that those who were successful all increased the amounts they walked.

Good luck

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Busy times at Fast Diet Towers. We are delighted that this website is proving so popular, and that many of you are sharing your inspirational stories with the growing army of Fast Diet fans out there. We try to answer directly as often as possible – please forgive us if we can’t, we read them all and we are delighted that several key voices are emerging to hold hands, share their ups-and-downs and inspire the rest of us. Thank you.

Meanwhile, the Fast Diet book goes from strength to strength – it has been the UK’s bestseller for three consecutive weeks now. Overwhelming. But the book could only ever be the beginning of our understanding of the benefits that Intermittent Fasting can bring. The start of a conversation. As we’ve often said, the science is in its infancy and we are learning all the time. Some answers are not definitive. Some questions remain. We really want to hear your experiences to help us understand more about this radical, refreshing and healthy approach to diet. For us and for many, it has become much more than a ‘diet’ – it is a way of life, really – and sharing our experiences, good, bad or indifferent, will certainly lead to new ideas, new avenues, new thinking. We hope you will accompany us on that fascinating journey.

And so, onwards… The Fast Diet Recipe Book is due out in early May (it is available for preorder here). I have been working closely with dietician Dr Sarah Schenker, a nutritionist with both Spurs and Chelsea football clubs (and Norwich City too, just to prove she is non-partisan). The cookbook will, of course, be stacked with tons of great, tasty recipes (more than 190 of them at the last count), but there will also be a glut of nutritional advice for anyone who really wants to get to grips with what best to eat on a Fast Day when calories are scarce. Some dishes will be simplicity itself – we certainly understand that not everyone wants to be in the kitchen when fasting – while others are designed to appeal to home chefs who want to bring a bit of low-cal flair to their Fast Days. Plenty of dishes can be made ahead of time and frozen; others are quick, fresh and full of goodness. And, yes, there will be plenty of warming, filling meals too (not just leaves!). We hope you’ll enjoy them all.

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28th April 2013

I’ve written about the 2 Day Diet  before (see below) and I promised to write a review; somewhat belatedly, here it is.

I think Michelle and Tony Howell have done a great job. There are lots of  books out there based on some variation of intermittent fasting, but this is one of the few that is actually written by two people who genuinely know what they are talking about. The book is based on research they have been carrying out for many years at the Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention project based in Manchester. As the name implies the emphasis is on intermittent energy restriction for 2 days, while encouraging people to eat a healthy Mediterranean diet for the other 5 days.  They suggest that the two days should be back to back, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly they think that if people do them back to back they are more likely to actually do them.

Secondly “it may have additional health benefits”. The reasoning is that if you do your fast days back to back you are spending more time in a better metabolic state. As they point out, “levels of insulin and leptin fall quickly (within 24 hours) when we eat less, so cells can put more effort into staying in top condition”.

I suspect that many people find it easier to split the fast days; that is certainly what most people who contact me say. I would be very interested to see a trial comparing back to back with split days eg Mondays and Thursdays. I have had a lot of contact from people whose blood glucose and cholesterol levels have improved markedly using the split day method.

In addition to the science, “how to do it” and recipes, there is lots of sensible advice on exercise. I think it is well worth a read and I wish their research all the best

Michael

An interesting variant on intermittent fasting is something called the 2 Day Diet, based on research by Dr Michelle Harvie and Professor Tony Howell. You will be hearing a lot more about this as they have a book out soon and the book is being serialised next week in the Daily Mail. It is also given a lot of support in today’s Daily Mail by Jenni Murray

Dr Harvie is a leading research dietician and Tony Howell is professor of medical oncology at the University of Manchester; he is also research director of Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention based in Manchester.

Their primary motivation is finding ways to reduce the risk of breast cancer and I have written about their research in The Fast Diet.

Their most recent study was a randomised trial at the beginning of last year, the results of which have been sent off for publication to a nutrition journal. In it they did a three way randomisation of 115 women comparing a daily energy restricted Mediterranean style diet (ie a standard diet) to two different versions of the 5:2 diet.

The first version of the 5:2 diet involved eating 650 calories a day for two days; on those days the women had to cut out pasta, bread, potatoes and all fatty foods. The diet consists mainly of milk and vegetables. For the other five days a week they could eat as much as they liked, although encouraged to eat healthy foods.

Women on the second version of the 5:2 diet were banned from eating carbohydrates for two days of the week but they did not have a specific calorie limit. A sort-of modified Atkins approach.

The third group followed a standard weight-loss diet, sticking to about 1,500 calories a day and avoiding high-fat foods and alcohol.

The striking finding was that after three months the women on either of the 5:2 diets had lost an average of nine pounds (four kilos) – nearly twice as much as those on the standard diet, who lost just five pounds (2.4 kilos). They were also almost twice as likely to have stuck to their diet.

As I mentioned above, they have a book out called The 2 Day Diet which I look forward to reading. It provides considerable further support to research showing that intermittent fasting offers benefits over and above standard dietary advice.

I’ve been in email chat with Dr Harvie, who generously praised my “excellent” Horizon. “The fact that you did it and showed it worked was, to us, very powerful television. We see intermittent dieting as another approach that people may wish to use but it clearly does not suit everyone. However it could have considerable public health importance and that is why we wrote our book, the proceeds of which will go to the charity Genesis who support our work.”

I will write a review when they send me a copy.  I will also keep you up to date with further developments. Exciting times…..

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A review article in the Journal of the American Medical Association which was published on the 2nd January caused a lot of excitement in the press/

The excitement came because the scientists involved claimed to have found evidence, based on 97 studies involving nearly 2.9 million people, that people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of between 25 and 30 (which officially makes them overweight) are 6% less likely to die than people considered to have a healthy BMI ie 18.5 to 25.

So is “Being overweight OK”, as some headlines claimed? I’m not convinced, and nor were most obesity experts. The criticisms were vigorous and in some cases vitriolic

Professor John Wass, vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “Have you ever seen a 100-year-old human being who is overweight? The answer is you probably haven’t”, while Dr Walter Willett, from the Harvard School of Public Health said: “This is an even greater pile of rubbish” than a study conducted by the same group in 2005.

The main criticisms were:

1. Confounding factors. The people regarded as “normal weight” may have previously been overweight, then lost weight through ill health
2. Mortality is not everything (though it is, of course, pretty important). What this study didn’t reveal was whether the overweight lived that extra 6% longer in good health or in hospital with drips in them. Living longer is not the same as living better. We know obesity is a strong predictor of diabetes and diabetes can lead to serious and unpleasant health problems
3. BMI is probably not the best measure that can be used to measure obesity. A tape measure may be a better predictor of future health. Gut fat is extremely unhealthy, but it is not clear that fat on your bottom or thighs is quite as bad. It is all about distribution, not quantity.

I certainly am not going to allow the pounds to creep back up in the hope this will allow me to live 6% longer. I like being slimmer, feel much better on it and all the tests I’ve done to date suggest that I have extended my healthy life, not shortened it.

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This is one of those questions that I get asked a lot and the short answer is, “yes, it seems to be fine to combine the two and may indeed be beneficial”. The long answer is a lot more complicated. I am just working my way through the academic literature on this, some of which is in the book, but the headlines are:

• Make sure you are well hydrated. We get a lot of fluid from food (some of it added during the manufacturing process to add weight, bulk and therefore value), so if you cut your calories to a ¼ during your fasting day you will be consuming less water. I recommend drinking lots of calorie free fluid during the day, whether you are exercising or not. This can be black tea, black coffee (the idea that coffee makes you dehydrate is a myth), water from the tap, herbal teas, whatever. I am not a fan of diet drinks for reasons i will write about later.
• I have had tweets saying things like, “i have a dry mouth” or “my mouth sometimes tastes funny on a fasting day” and this is almost certainly a sign of dehydration.
• Men seem to not only tolerate but respond better to exercise on fasting days. For women the picture is more complicated. I welcome feedback on this

One of the key benefits of exercise and fasting is they both increase insulin sensitivity, and insulin sensitivity is an independent predictor of future mortality. But they work in different, complementary ways. Exercise for example, particularly short burst of HIT (High intensity training) depletes the glycogen stores in the muscles, while Intermittent Fasting (IF) depletes the glycogen stores in the liver.

On a more general note I had a look at the government guidelines for the BBC R4 series, You and Yours, on exercise, 5 a day and alcohol. I attach links to features I wrote about them for the BBC

BBC features:

‘Confusion’ over how active we should be

Five-a-day campaign: A partial success

Alcohol message ‘is confused’

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Like Mimi and many others I spent the run up to Christmas and then into the New Year feasting, rather than fasting. It is so strange; I know that I shouldn’t and that I will feel bad afterwards, but I still couldn’t resist eating far too much chocolate, cake and mince pies. It is because it is there, right in front of me, all the time.

Normally I try to ban such things from our house as I have a sweet tooth and know that when I am feeling peckish they will be hard to resist. As Oscar Wilde once famously put it, “I can resist anything but temptation”.

There’s a book I’m reading at the moment called The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt that helps explain why we sabotage our own best interests.  As he points out, we can probably muster the willpower to resist ordering a dessert but not the willpower to resist it if one is put in front of us.

Or, as the poet Ovid wrote “Desire and feeling pull in different directions. I feel the right way and approve it, but I follow the wrong”.

We are like riders on the back of an elephant. We hold the reins and think we are in control; we can steer the elephant as long as the elephant has no desires of its own. But in the end the elephant does what the elephant wants to do and we are left helplessly raging at our own apparent weakness.

But is it really weak will or is it mainly about context and opportunity?  I have a lot more to say about unconscious impulses, but that will have to wait for another day.

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My features on drinking triggered a lot of media interest, some of which seems to have misunderstood what I was trying to say. I am not, for example, telling people they should not drink but rather trying to give them the evidence so they can make their own judgements. The science researchers I spoke to were keen to emphasise the value of having two alcohol free days a week, something which fits in neatly with the Fast Diet.

The Public Health Minister Anna Soubry came on Radio 4 after my series had gone out and said:

“That was a brilliant report if I may say…I thought the 2:2 was a cute message. Good, simple and accurate as well. Certainly I’ll talk to the CMO (Chief Medical Officer) about that.”

I have listed the media response to the guidelines below if you would like to see what others are saying.

BBC Breakfast TV interview

I was on the sofa up in Manchester on Tuesday 2nd January talking about the Fast Diet but also about a new series for You and Yours looking at government guidelines in relation to exercise, booze and “5 a day”. If you want to watch the BBC Breakfast interview the link is here. As an added bonus you get to see a Christmas present from my wife, a new shirt that is not pink.

The media response to drinking guidelines

UK press:

Alcohol guidelines ‘too high’ say doctors

The new Puritans don’t understand the joy of drinking

So it’s OK to be a little plump, then. Raise a glass (or three) with me to another blow against the health fascists

Julian Baggini: Confused about health? Drink more

Even a tipple a day is one too many – warning from doctors

Foreign press:

A daily tipple may be the death of you

Anti-Alcohol Guidelines ‘Ineffective’

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Hi Michael,
My wife has lost 1.5 stones doing IF and is loving it, but I feel a little deflated I am not seeing weight loss. I will get my bloods tested to see if cholesterol has fallen (incidentally my BP has gone from ELEVATED to COMPLETELY NORMAL) but it would be fantastic to lose some weight too. Any thoughts gratefully appreciated. I await your book with some excitement.

I am surprised that you aren’t losing weight and I wonder if on your non fast days you should try a higher protein – lower carb approach (lots of stuff on this in the book). You should also try to identify if there is something in your diet that is particularly calorie rich. Typically it will be drink (alcoholic or fruit juice or lattes) as you can drink a lot more calories than you can eat without ever getting satiated.

Thanks for the response. I drink lots of fruit juice so will watch that and with your book will give it a determined go starting next week.

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