5.2 – the pros and cons

Headline news: Steve ate toast for breakfast this morning – and lots of it.  This was quite something. Last week he fixed our 25 year old Dualit toaster (it had been working at 25% of its capacity for the last 10 years), and even polished it up so it looked new again. Then, after meeting Dr Sarah Myhill in Guernsey, he gamely announced that he was going to combine the 5.2 diet with a full time no carb regime...

I was not convinced of the wisdom of this, and, after a couple of days when he stoically refused all grains, potatoes and pulses – at which point I suggested he must remember he has a busy and physical job – the thought of lovely toast was obviously too much for him.

I tell this story because it demonstrates one of the main problems with the 5.2 diet: that, if you are the obsessive type, a regime like this could potentially fuel an eating disorder. A number of people have told me they would never consider the 5.2 for just this reason – mostly they are people who have had an eating disorder in the past, and know that they can easily start to obsess about counting calories or skipping meals. Success for people like this tends to create a craving for even more success. If they can cope with one day on 500 calories, why not do it every day? Come to that, why not restrict your calories even further and live on 300 a day?

As we know, when your body slips into starvation mode – which is what happens when you seriously restrict calories long term – it stores all the fat it can and rejoices in doing so once you try to eat “properly” again.

So, however manageable 500 calories may become once you have cracked the best options, it is important to resist the temptation to do it on more than intermittent days.

Here are the pros and cons I’ve learned so far:

. Pro: 500 calories is actually very easy to achieve, once you know what to eat and have found satisfying meal choices. The way I do it now is to make sure each meal is under 200 calories (hence not busting a gut to make each one 166!). Yesterday, for example, I had low fat yogurt with berries and two bites of banana for breakfast; tuna salad with 1tsp mayo and one ryvita for lunch; and prawn and tofu stirfry (mushrooms, broccoli, pak choi, a few slivers of pepper with loads of spices and just 1tsp coconut oil between two of us) for supper. Steve’s reaction (I cooked it, because he loses the will to live let alone cook on the 500 calorie days) was: “That cannot be within our limits!” But I weighed and measured and I am sure it was!

. Con: 500 calories becomes so easy that on these “fasting” days you may start to wonder why you don’t eat like this every day... I mean, why would you squirt mayo all over your salad, or let your stir-fry slosh around in oil when 1tsp is enough? Don’t go down that slippery slope!

. Pro: I now find I feel clean and fresh on the fasting days, and much heavier in-between.

. Con: This feeling can be addictive for a lot of people. It seems a strange state of affairs when one has to consciously eat more on the in-between days.

. Pro: A meal of 400 calories feels like a King’s feast on the non-fasting days. Hang on to this feeling and don’t let it creep up too much. In theory a woman can consume 2000 calories a day without gaining weight, but this does depend on your size, BMR(mine is just 1200), and activity level – a lot of us will be maintaining our weight on 1500 calories a day (I need between 1644 and 1860).

. Con: Thinking like this shows you are already becoming a bit calorie obsessed, when the whole point of this diet is that you should not be obsessing about calories.

. Pro: The diet seems to work... In six weeks (is it already that long?) I seem to be fastening my belt on the third notch, instead of the second one (albeit there is still a bit of muffin over-hang). And Steve seems to have completely lost his “love handles”. I have heard of a number of men losing huge bellies, and one of my friends, after a very slow start (during lent), seems to have dropped a dress size. I live in hope.

. Con: I am not quite sure how it works... Most of the research is around the insulin like hormone IGF-1, high levels of which are linked to various ageing conditions such as diabetes, cancer and dementia, go down with intermittent fasting, but I am not quite sure how this affects weight, except by maybe also interfering with insulin. Some say the diet just works by restricting the overall number of calories we consume in a week. That seems rather pedestrian, but probably true.

. Pro: The diet may prevent the above ageing diseases.

. Con: It could encourage overeating on the non fast days. One friend told me: “It’s so hard to make up the balance of calories you've skipped that I had a pasty and cream cake today without feeling guilty”.

. Pro: It is so do-able. Knowing that “it is just one day”, is highly motivating for those of us who give up on other diets (see John Briffa's blog re what happens when we deny ourselves something), and those who do not become obsessed about calories, but just become more mindful about what we eat are – I hope – the most likely to succeed long term.