5:2

So much for writing every day, still, I have made more headway than I expected, given my history of starting things and letting them slide.

There has been quite a bit of hype, and a degree of skepticism around the 5:2 diet.  Usually the word fast is also involved, and I think that's what freaks people out.  Fasting!!!  Not eating for a whole day?  Why would anyone do that.  That was my own reaction to be honest.  I enjoy my food, what's not to like in a world that has given me garlic prawns, steak and mushrooms and chocolate in a myriad of forms?

I watched the documentary, and loved the idea of all the other health benefits that apparently go hand in hand with this way of eating.  With an undisciplined husband with high blood pressure and cholesterol, who can't seem to sustain any kind of healthy eating plan for very long, and 10 extra kilos myself that I wouldn't mind ditching, I wondered if this might be our miracle.

We have been fasting intermittently now for about 10 weeks, and have each lost about 5 kilos.  I'm hoping that the other health stuff is quietly happening in the background, and my body is staving off the horrible possibility of alzheimers and type 2 diabetes and even cancer. 

I'm happy to say, that fasting really isn't as bad as you might think.  In fact it isn't bad at all.  Today is a fast day, and I've just finished eating an apple and had a cup of tea.  I'm still using full cream milk, I just take that into account when I count up the 500 allowed calories.  I tried using skim, but we just didn't drink it on the other days so it would sit in the fridge and go bad.  I'd rather have two cups of tea I enjoy than 5 or 6 cups that are only barely palatable.  For lunch I'll cook up two fresh tomatoes and have them with salt and pepper.  I sometimes have this kind of thing on non-fast days too, though I'll add cheese those days.  Dinner tonight will be vegetable soup.

Initially when we started fasting, I was buying boxes of chicken nuggets for the kids to have for their dinners, or frozen pizzas, neither of which I like particularly which was a plus, and didn't require me to make much effort with their meals in terms of preparation or cooking.  I am a picker, and cooking without tasting is hard.  I realised that that wasn't going to be ideal as a long term solution, and that I was compromising their diets for the sake of my convenience, so we are working around that.  Stir fry is a good family option, we have Slendier angel hair pasta, and they have noodles or rice.  The slendier pasta is made from some weird vegetable called konjac, and in a stir fry it is quite palatable, and only worth about 12 calories a serve which is fabulous.

So far, I haven't failed a fast day.  I did have one week off, where it was just too hard to fit it into the week, there was a staff luncheon at school, and other stuff, so I skipped one fast which was fine.  I think it is this flexibility that makes it work so well.  I don't do rules very well, and sustaining diet rules for any length of time makes me feel deprived and resentful and grumpy.  With the fast diet, I have two days in the week, where I restrict myself to 500 calories, then the rest of the week, I eat normally, I have the odd treat, and don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong.  On the fast day, my mindset is that I may feel a little hungry that day, but I will eat X Y or Z tomorrow.  It is a good match for my all or nothing personality.

People have been funny about it.  One woman asked me if 500 calories wasn't quite a lot to eat anyway.  It's not by the way.  It really isn't and you do feel hungry.  But it's manageable.  Others seem to think I'm going to pass out or it will be very very bad for me in some undefined way.  perhaps my body will go into the fabled starvation mode and hang on to every gram of fat (probably storing it on my thighs where it will feel at home) and it will be that much harder to lose.  Mostly they look kind of sorry for me.

I'm quite happy with it though, and for me to manage any kind of sustained weight loss program is bordering on the miraculous, so as long as I am still happy to do it, I'll keep going.  I can keep anything up for a day.