Sandy McFadden

Today is the start of my second week trying out the 5:2 or fasting diet, so far I quite like it.

A couple days ago I managed to have a brief conversation with one of my neighbours who has been doing the diet for about a year. His wife is still doing it but he has fallen off. Neither of them had any negative things to say except that in the beginning they did find on the fast days they were hungry. They typically stuck with Monday and Thursday as the fast days. He said after a while when Sunday night rolled around he was looking forward to fasting Monday and felt he needed it.

They also experienced how and when they took in their limited calories on the fast days. They started out how I’m doing it, three very small meals at regular meal times. They found this made them too hungry and instead moved to one meal late in the afternoon.

I’m still doing good with three small meals so think I’ll stick to this, at least for now.

As always there are mixed reactions to this diet. But even negative articles like this one, “The 5:2 diet con: why there’s a better option that starving yourself silly” say that it appears the science may have some merrit behind it, both for weight loss and the other health benefits.

The author feels there are better ways to do it, and that very likely could be true. However the negatives he mentions in this article aren’t anything I’ve experienced so far.

Like my neighbours, I haven’t noticed any major downsides. On the fasting days I’m not too hungry, I still have good energy and even run and workout without issues or being tired.

The other thing he mentioned is that people could develop food obsessions or overeat on non fasting days. I’m sure this could happen but I think I had a bit of a food obsession before anyway and I have it more under control now. For the most part I haven’t overeaten on non fast days, except yesterday but I’m hoping that was an exception as it was Father’s day and I was being treated. I certainly did over do it though.

The good thing I think is that overeating really did effect me now. Whereas in the past I constantly overate and it didn’t bother me at all. My body certainly let me know last night, and even this morning that it didn’t like how much I put into it. Today will be a much better day.

Alright, now that my first ever attempt at a link bait title is out of the way let me explain a bit.

On January 1st, 2014 I weighed 258 lbs. This wasn’t the highest weight I’ve ever been, but pretty close. If things didn’t change there are very good chances that I would develop serious health issues that could very easily kill me.

Even though I knew all this I lacked the motivation to actually do anything about it. I just couldn’t seem to get myself going.

Near the end of 2013 my sister and wife showed me a group on Facebook that an acquaintance setup. It was going to be an online biggest loser type 12 week challenge. My sister was joining and wanted me to as well. After a fair amount of pressure from my wife especially I decided I would join. The rules were basically put in $25 and at the end of 12 weeks the three people who lost the highest percentage of body weight would each take home a chunk of the total money people brought in.

So I’m ashamed to admit that it wasn’t all the health benefits that I could see, the increased energy, or the potential for more happiness that motivated me, it was the fact that I wanted to win and not lose my $25.

That’s how it started out anyway. But a number people in the group were great at keeping me motivated a long the way. There was a good group of us who all kept updating each other on how we were doing. If I was having a bad day the people there would keep me on track and not let me get down. When I injured myself and I thought I was out, they reminded me that eating right accounted for a lot of the progress not just working out.

I’m certain that if I didn’t have this group of like minded people all working at the same goal, plus the added benefit of the competition aspect, that I wouldn’t have stuck with it and would still be stuck in my old ways.

I ended up coming second in the competition.

During the competition my workout routine was fairly intense, at least to me it was. It was a 12 week challenge so I started a 90 day workout routine, Jillian Michaels 90 Day Body Revolution. It comes with a meal plan and workout DVDs. I didn’t really follow the meal plan, but I did stick with the calorie intake recommendations that it made. So I was around 1200 – 1500 a day most days during the competition. There were some days that I fell off, but with the groups and my families help I stayed pretty true to those amounts.

The other modification I made was that the DVDs are meant to be one workout a day for six days a week. Most of the time I did two workouts a day. I usually did take the rest day sometime during the week though.

At first the getting up early before anyone else and doing a workout and then doing another one once the younger kids were in bed was very tough. My family helped out a lot and I ended up in a pretty good routine. My family also ended up changing their eating habits with me to an extent. Portion size especially and passing up on the wonderful deserts my wife makes was by far my biggest eating challenge.

But things didn’t end there. Being a three month competition and having seen success I was able to change my lifestyle around. I’ve built up pretty good eating habits, I have developed a love for running, I feel so much better about myself and have more energy to do things with my family that my happiness and self confidence is the highest it’s been since I can remember.

I’m not done. I still have a ways to go before I am am even not classified as overweight. But seeing as I’ve had success and I’m still on the right track I wanted to start this blog to keep track of my progress and maybe even share with other people the things I’m doing.

Most of the early posts are my statues copied and pasted from the Facebook group. They are a pretty good record about how I was feeling and stuff that happened to me along the way.

Again even though the title of this post might be a little over blown, if it weren’t for my wife and the people in this Facebook group I would not be where I am today. I am very thankful to all of them for giving me the push and help I needed to get started on this journey.

Yesterday was my second “fast” day since checking out this 5:2 diet.

I’m already seeing results in weight loss. Having been stuck for months not getting below 198 lbs, this morning I was at 195!

I feel really good and haven’t changed my routine at all. I’m still just as active I’ve just eaten a lot less calories for two days. If this is how things will go, so far I’m very happy with this program.

Since the competition that got me started on this journey has ended I’ve been basically stalled at my weight. Fluctuating back and forth between 200 and 198 lbs. I’ve been fairly OK with this weight but I realize that I’m still not where I need to be. According to the BMI charts for me just to get into the normal range I would need to be about 179 lbs.

I’ve come a long long way. I’m in the best shape since my teens, I have a good routine of running going on. Lots of lunches I go for a good walk with my manager. But my eating has really slipped back. Obviously not enough to send me gaining weight but I’m not going down and there is still a lot of fat I need rid of. Especially around my abdominal area.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading into it this is about the worst type and place to have fat. It has been linked to all kinds of diseases and things that will shorten your life span. Here are a few links.

• http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/study-belly-fat-officially-the-worst/261630/
• http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2008/12/25/is-belly-fat-more-dangerous-to-our-health/
• http://greatist.com/health/belly-fat-worst-kind-fat

So this is why I have made an effort to step it up and try something different again.

Back a couple months ago someone first mentioned to me the 5:2 diet from the documentary Eat, Fast, Live Longer. I didn’t think to much of it at the time but did a bit of reading just to see what it was about. At the time I was still making good progress doing what I was doing and figured that was good enough.

Well now that I’ve stopped doing well someone else brought this up to me again. I thought I would dig in a bit deeper. I actually watched the documentary and everything sounded pretty reasonable. There seem to be many other possible benefits other than just weight loss by intermittent fasting, which is the whole premise behind this “diet”.

It appears that you don’t have to completely fast but that if for two days a week you reduce your calorie intake to about a 1/4 of your proper amount you can get most of the benefits seen from actual alternate day fasting.

So yesterday I started this and only had about 600 calories. I broke this up over three small meals throughout the day. I was very surprised to find out that it wasn’t very hard at all.

I woke up this morning and could feel I was hungry, but not even close to being over whelming. So I went about my usual routine and went for a run and then had my normal breakfast when I got back.

My wife is a bit skeptical and even a bit worried about this. But from the reading I’ve done and after how I felt today I think if I see results and if there is even a chance that it can help me ward off some of the less desirable effects of aging than why not try. If I start seeing any negative come from it, I can simply stop.