[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Aj6hRYg4A&rel=0]
I made this video to explain the Fast diet to friends and family - it's now been seen over 160,000 times!
My first day on the “Fast diet” was Tuesday 25th February 2013. I remember it well because I’d spectacularly buggered my back up to the extent that I was resting it for a day in bed – something I have to do, on average, about once or twice a year. I could have put off fasting that day but I was determined so, laptop on, err, lap I sat in bed working and starving.
I won’t lie: there have been times when I’ve felt very hungry but the main effects on my body of fasting on Mondays and Thursdays have been that I get cold and grumpy. All of these effects have reduced over time so that now, a year on, fast days are routine – sometimes I even look forward to them. Really. I was worried about feeling light headed or lacking energy on fast days but this simply hasn’t happened at all.
I’ve been lucky in that my wife has also been on the diet. Our routine is to have a 100-200 calorie breakfast and then nothing until tea time. Dinner is usually based on fish, quorn or chicken with mounds of vegetables (you’d be amazed how few calories carrots contain). We also add 100 calories of carbs. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with having just a banana for breakfast and then another at lunchtime – this seems to help me psychologically as it makes the day feel a little shorter.
Over the past year, we’ve fasted twice a week for the vast majority of the time. We dropped to one day a week when we moved house in June (a particularly traumatic house move) and stopped fasting altogether over the two weeks of Christmas but we dropped back into the twice a week routine like a pair of old slippers when January rolled around.
So what has been the effect? I’m slimmer than I’ve been since I was a teenager 30 years ago. I’m within half a stone of what would be considered a “normal” healthy weight – something that’s been out of sight all my adult life. I don’t weigh myself regularly now but rather content myself with looking in the mirror at a stomach that is almost flat(ish).
This is the first “diet” I’ve stuck to for this long. In fairness to myself, I’ve never been a yo-yo dieter as, when I diet, I try to permanently change how I eat rather than just sticking to the latest fad plan. So, over the years, the average number of calories I eat per day has reduced. I remember doing the F Plan in the 1980s and permanently introducing fibre into my diet. I lost a couple of stones with weightwatchers in the late 1990s although it was the logging of what I ate that was the true cause of the weightloss rather than anything specific to weightwatchers. I didn’t keep it all off but, over the years, I’ve reduced my weight from its maximum 16 stone 11 (a value which frightened me into doing something about it) down to its current level of around 13 stone 2. I’ve lost 6 inches off my jeans size. I would like to be 12 stone 10 at some point and am confident I’ll get there, bit by bit.
How much of that is due to the fast diet? When I started, I weighed 13 stone 13lbs so I’ve lost 11lbs net (probably a bit more by now since I took that measurement in November). This may not sound like a lot but this is weight I have never shifted before – other diets will get me to around 14 stone but none would dip beneath that. 5:2 is the only eating plan that holds out the prospect of my achieving my ideal weight whilst living something approximating a normal life.
Why does it work?
It’s all in the psychology. I like to think I have a pretty healthy attitude to food (I know a lot of people have psychological issues around it, but not me) but even I get fed up with diets that cause me to deny myself every single day. With the 5:2, I only deny myself twice a week – I am never more than 24 hours away from a peanut butter sandwich. This doesn’t mean that the other 5 days are a binge-fest but that, on average, I stick to a normal calorie intake. For me, that’s around 2,000 calories per day. I simply don’t have to worry about it.
As with all diets, however, this plan only works if you accept your responsibility for what you eat – it will not work if you blame other people or circumstances for not sticking to it. If you follow this, or any other calorie restricting diet, you will lose weight – the 5:2 makes this simpler (for us at least) because we only concern ourselves with dieting twice a week. If a two day per week investment in your long term health doesn’t motivate you, then I suggest no diet will work.
Salt and Sugar
As part of this process of improving my health I’ve also looked into what I believe are the two pariahs of the modern diet. I read up on salt and discovered that the only reason the recommended daily salt ration was reduced to 6g was because any reduction is better than none, and not because 6g is safe. In truth, it is almost impossible to get too little salt – in fact it’s damn near impossible to get a safe amount. We’ve become much more aware of the salt in our food and began with the obvious step of removing it from the dinner table – this cuts consumption by 25% at a stroke. I was worried it might reduce the enjoyment of food (chips being the prime example) but it honestly, truthfully, doesn’t. We went cold turkey and now it rarely occurs to me to even think about adding salt to my dinner in exactly the same way that sugar in tea now tastes like treacle.
More recently, following high profile campaigns, we’ve also become more aware of hidden sugar. I nearly fell over when I worked out that a 125g pot of my favourite yoghurt (rhubarb) contains the equivalent of 4 teaspoons of sugar. And bear in mind that 125g is roughly the same as half a mug of tea – can you imagine having 8 teaspoons in your tea? The government could make one simple change that would reduce type 2 diabetes at a stroke – force all food manufacturers to put a high profile graphic on the front of their product showing how many teaspoons of sugar it contains since everyone understands that measure (by the way, 1 teaspoon = 4g).
Most of this sugar is unnecessary. We now buy natural Greek yoghurt and add a teaspoon of strawberry jam or honey to it – it tastes just as sweet but contains half the sugar. I fully appreciate that some foods need to be sweet – it’s when the sugar is hidden that I get annoyed. Yoghurt is portrayed as a healthy food by its makers when, in fact, you’d be no worse off having a Cornetto.
Fat, and particularly saturated fat, is held up to be the bogie-man of health but opinion is starting to change as the weight (ahem) of evidence simply isn’t there. Personally, I limit my fat intake largely because it’s become a habit but I now have butter (on non fast days) rather than low fat marge, for example. Sure, there’s a correlation between fat people and disease but the fat itself might not be the main culprit – how that fat got laid down (through a diet containing too many calories for the body to handle, too much salt and a sedentary lifestyle) might be more important. My view now is that salt and sugar will turn out to be more significant when it comes to lifespan and health but the food industry is showing precious little interest in working them out of our diet.