When it’s steam engine time, you get steam engines and when your head is in slimming mode, the whole world suddenly turns out to be obsessed by it too. Not that obesity and dieting and all that are obscure subjects otherwise, of course. Anyway, no sooner had I posted last night or a Horizon episode popped up on BBC2
about the science of fasting to live longer/healthier. We long sort of known that if you restrict your calorie intake you can live longer and that doing so also might help protect against developing diabetes or heart diseases and even cancer, but it turns out there are easier ways to get these benefits than through strict everyday calorie counting. The idea is that instead of this you fast every other day, restricting your intake to one meal of roughly 500-600 calories, than eat normally the next day with no restrictions. People doing that tend to lose weight easier and get all sort of nasty cholesterol levels down too.
An even less stringent variant on that, which the Horizon presenter went on to test it, is the 5/2 regime: eat normally five days a week, fast on two days. It sounded interesting as he got good results on it (cholesterol down, weight down) and as importantly, it sounded doable. The greatest problem with every diet is with sticking to it, which is of course easier if you do it for a limited period than for basically the rest of your life. There’s also the problem that if you do stop with a given diet, you might quickly bounce back into unhealthy eating habits.
This method seems to avoid these two traps, while still delivering roughly the same benefits as the more stringent variants of restricted calorie intake diets. I can acutally see myself doing it and keep on doing it for the rest of my life, which is why I’ve decided to try it out. Hence today I’m skipping lunch in favour of eating a light dinner tonight.
- Drinks morning: 3 mugs of coffee (0.5 litres), 0.5 litres water, 1 can Coke light.
- Lunch: skipped today.
- Drinks afternoon: 1 can Coke Light.
- Dinner: salad (lettuce, cucumber, olives, a bit of sausage, some feta cheese)
- Drinks evening: half a litre light orange soda, half a litre Coke light
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