Anyone doing 5/2?

My husband used to do it. I think he did 500 calories on his 2 low days. I would prep his meal/snacks and then make a low carb dinner we could share.

I have done 16/8 for months at a time while I was losing weight...I had lost 68 pds...now after some medication weight gain I am back doing it again...it has only been a week back and I have lost 4 pds...I changed my window though...I eat between 7am-3pm (sometimes closer to 2pm) it is the only thing working for me!!!

melissawolf946 wrote: »

DancingMoosie wrote: »

My husband used to do it. I think he did 500 calories on his 2 low days. I would prep his meal/snacks and then make a low carb dinner we could share.

How is his progress with this method, if you don't mind me asking.

I just asked him about it and he basically doesn't remember. He didn't like it and didn't stick with it. He had better success when he started tracking calories on his own and cutting out a lot of excess sugar and carbs(like regular yoplait, chips, bread, sodas, and juice). His normal lunch is some meat and cheese or hard-boiled eggs and sugar free clear soda. He snacks on apple and banana, nuts, light Greek yogurt, and then we eat meat with veggies for dinner.

Isn't eating 3 meals a day different (in theory) than TRE (i.e., IF that includes a time window)? I do 3 meals a day (sometimes 2 on the weekend) and don't snack between meals and find that very helpful for me -- I was never a late night snacker but I would eat mindlessly between meals at work when food was out and available. I also find I get used to eating at my usual times, whatever they are, but for me this has zero to do with a limited window -- I like breakfast after my morning workout and before work and dinner after work and home-cooked, so that's usually quite a distance apart (I sometimes have as big a gap or bigger between lunch and dinner as dinner and breakfast). On Friday or weekends I sometimes fall into an IF pattern, but only because if I work out later I might skip breakfast and if I go out to eat before the theater or a concert I eat earlier and save calories for it.

For me (as someone who doesn't do a window), the reasons why it works behind 3 meals a day, no snacks, and the only between 12 and 7 (or whatnot) plans seem the same (have specific eating times and have it be off limits otherwise), but most who do TRE insist that it's very different and preferable to do TRE (for reasons I don't accept, but whatever). For me, by contrast, eating whenever within a limited period is far less workable than just not eating when it's not mealtime.

A friend of mine does 5:2 and loves it -- she was never overweight and lost vanity weight and maintains not tracking on the 5 days and then eating 500 on the 2. The way that works seems quite different to me than TRE; it's about not having to restrict on 5 days a week, which is easier for some.

But this is just something that always strikes me; people should of course do what they like and I can see why 5:2 and TRE each work for some.

Diatonic12 wrote: »

Periods of eating and sleeping used to be called a normal average day in the life of a human but we've made food so complicated while overthinking everything. Like @lgfrie, we can learn to moderate ourselves with foods and I simply moderate my hours of eating like I used to do when I was a kid. I call it returning back to my original factory settings when we all sat down for 3 meals aday, believing that our mothers would put those meals back on the table at the regular appointed times on the daily. Nothing intermittent about it. It was consistency, consistency, consistency for the WIN.

There's truth in that, but I think the real issue is the constant, incessant availability of highly palatable, high calorie foods. When I was a kid, there were three meals a day and no snacks (although, oddly, I managed to be a fat kid). Mom would put some crappy tuna casserole with a side of squeaky undercooked green beans on the table and there was no great desire to gorge on it. That's a lot different than many people experience nowadays.

Within easy walking distance of my house, which is 30 miles outside a city and not an urban hot spot, is a strip mall with a pizza place, Philly cheesesteak sub shop, a bar with an 8 page menu of fried, junky foods (for dieters, that works just great with the alcohol!!!), a burrito joint, a bagel shop where the bagels weighs 7 ounces (490 calories for the bread alone), a Chinese fast food/take out, a Baskin Robbins, a make your own frozen yogurt and pay by the weight place with toppings like nutella and crushed oreo cookies, a gas station with racks and racks of chips and cookies for those too lazy to go into a food store, and of course, a supermarket just in case one can't find one's preferred snack, open till the wee hours.

We weren't biologically designed to be smothered in highly palatable, hyper caloric foods 24 hours a day. We were designed to stuff our faces on woolly mammoth when we managed to catch one, with the knowledge that the next might not come along for a while. We have exactly the opposite programming for food than what's needed for the ubiquitious junk food scenario in which we live.

imho that is not "why we're fat" but is certainly "why some of us are obese".

Take away all those burritos and pizzas and egg rolls and drinks and fried shrimp and mozzarella sticks and replace it all with bananas, nuts, and berries, and I suspect the obesity epidemic would not be an epidemic. You can only eat so many bananas before you find something better to do with your time.

So everyone must figure out a way to coexist with these hyperpalatable, massively caloric temptations surrounding us all day and night. Obviously many of us really struggle with it, over the course of a whole lifetime, battling it everyday.

IF/TRE, whatever you want to call it, isn't magic and doesn't work for everyone, but it does work for some. For me, I think it's knowing that as long as I stay with my 6-8 hour eating window and count calories, I lose the weight, and as soon as I veer off the path, at best I maintain and that's best case. I can have 0 calories worth of junk food outside my eating window, or I can have 2,000, but I have not proven to myself that I can have 150. I am capable of going up to that walking-distance strip mall with all the aforementioned junky foods and having NOTHING, but I can't have one small bowl of wonton soup; I'm either on plan or not. What IF does for me is put a line in the sand which says, simply, if it's before 11 or after 7 pm, there is NO eating, period. And for some reason, that works. I think the reason it works is because I know the repercussions of getting off that train and I don't wanna go there.

In the end, everyone has to find something that works for them, and there are a lot of individualized variables in play.