B00AFYX78I EBOK (4 page)

Yesterday, I found myself Googling diet drugs - the kind that
‘bind’ to the fat you eat and help you pass it before it gets digested. The
side-effects are utterly revolting and yet I went as far as filling in an
online form to find out if I’d be eligible for them. I am, but apparently
they’re out of stock.

So I’m not alone in seeking a quick fix.

A
Lost Cause…

Maybe
I just have to accept this is the shape I’ll stay. I could take down all the
mirrors in the house to start with…

There’s a BBC TV programme I’m going to watch tonight about
fasting - the description of the show is intriguing. But let’s face it - I
don’t have the willpower to do a ‘normal’ diet, never mind a fast. I suspect
it’ll just give me even more to feel guilty about.

10.05pm

Wow.

That was an amazing programme… really fascinating, full of
counter-intuitive science and new information - plus fasting REALLY worked for
the presenter.

Even better, it wasn’t a ‘true’ fast - he did still eat on his
fasting days, just an awful lot less.

The potential benefits also seem to go way beyond weight loss.
There’s a possibility that ‘intermittent calorie restriction’ - a more accurate
but less catchy description than fasting - could reduce the risk of breast
cancer, diabetes, heart disease and even Alzheimer’s.

This is a diet that could offer more than weight loss alone.

But I have been here before, with low-carb, high-fibre,
tum/bum/thigh. The fact is, miracle diets don’t exist.

Or
do they? Maybe this time, I might be able to get slim – and stay slim.

Chapter Two: The
maths of weight loss – and why fasting adds up

Slim
people don’t just look better by the pool.

They also live longer. The
rats.

It’s the reason your doctor monitors your weight and
calculates your BMI - Body Mass Index – when you have a check-up. The BMI is a
simple calculation based on your height and weight (some would say too simple:
we’ll talk about that a little later).

 Broadly, if your BMI is over 25 - or 23 for some ethnic
groups - you’re officially overweight. And if it’s over 30, you’re classed as
obese: the higher the figure, the higher the statistical risk of disease.

You can either calculate it by this formula, or by using the
chart:

BMI = Weight (kg) / [Height
(m) x Height (m)]

BMI is far from perfect – you may have heard about rugby
players or athletes who train for hours a day yet are classed as ‘obese’ by
BMI standards because they have lean bodies with high muscle mass. BMI is also
pretty hopeless in children. Plus, the risk calculations are based on
large-scale studies so it can’t tell you much about
your
specific risks,
which depend on so many other factors: family history, genetics, lifestyle,
environment.

Also, BMI isn’t the only indicator of the effect excess
weight may be having on your health. Your waist measurement is also a strong
predictor of your likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease: it’s an
indicator of how much ‘visceral’ fat you’ve accumulated around the vital
organs. This distribution of weight is important – ‘pear’ shaped people with
larger hips and thighs tend to have lower risks than ‘apples’ who store more
fat around the belly. The more you have, the higher your chances of developing
heart problems or Type 2 diabetes. The current NHS guideline is that you are
at greater risk if your waist (measured round your belly button) is more than
37 inches/94cm if you’re a man and 31.5 inches/80cm if you’re a woman.

Research presented at a conference in France in 2012 advises
us to fine-tune that even more – by aiming to keep our waist measurements to
less than half of our height. So, in my case, I am 64 inches tall, so my waist
measurement should stay under 32 inches (it has fallen from 32 to 29.5 since I
began the diet).

A six foot man (72 inches) should be aiming for a waist
measurement under 36 inches. The research looked at data from 300,000 people
and found the ratio between the two measurements was more effective at
predicting the risk of diabetes, strokes and heart problems than the BMI – and
if you measure your height in inches or centimetres, it’s a very simple
calculation.

Lies,
damned lies – and home truths?

Of
course, the risks are calculated based on averages across a population as a
whole – and we all hope we’ll be the exception to the rule. But before you
write off the BMI or the waist circumference guidelines, remember statistics
don’t tend to lie. For every chain-smoking Great Aunt Winifred, who was the
size of a horse and ate like one, and celebrated her 100th birthday with a
bottle of gin for breakfast, there are millions of us whose diets are damaging
our health.

Excess weight can increase our risk of developing a range of
diseases and conditions including:

Of course, you could hope you’re going to be the exception
that proves the rule. Or you can try to maintain to a ‘healthy’ weight to keep
the statistics on your side.

Whatever your BMI, the truth is you probably don’t need a
figure to tell you you’ve put on too much weight. My guess is that if you’re
reading this book then you, like me, want to reduce your risks of these life-shortening,
or quality-of-life reducing, conditions.

As well as looking better by the pool…

But, as we all know, losing weight is easier said than done:

I was first taken to a
slimming club at the age of 11 and have been dieting ever since, sometimes with
success, sometimes not. I originally lost weight when I was 17 by starving. I
would have 1oz All Bran (dry) in the morning, an apple at lunch time and plain
salad in the evening. I used to tell my mum I was having lunch at college so
that I didn't have to eat in the evening. I did this for 2 years and got down
to 8 stone which is too thin for my 5 foot 7 inches! Once I started eating
normally again the weight piled on. In my mid 20s I went to a slimming club
and got to within 7lbs of my goal weight. Again, as soon as I started eating
normally the weight piled on! Then Weight Watchers - Slimming World, Rosemary
Conley classes, Atkins, Paul McKenna, Scarsdale ... far too many diets to
mention!!!

Jeanny, 53

I've tried all sorts - from
The Cabbage Soup diet, Slimfast and the Beyoncé diet to Weight Watchers. The
one that's worked best for long term weight loss was WW. I've had two successes
there, though gradually the weight has gone back on. I'm greedy, really, it's
that simple.

Sarah, 49

Eating
too much makes you fat - and other annoying things thin people say

People
who don’t struggle with their weight often have a maddening habit of stating
the obvious.

‘Losing weight is easy,’ they’ll say. ‘Couldn’t be simpler.
Eat less, move more.’

Or they might point out the basic maths - that if you
consume more food (or calories) than you burn off, you’ll put weight on, and if
you do the opposite then you’ll lose it.

‘Oh, if I feel a bit chubby,’ they might say, pinching the
imaginary inch (more like a millimetre) around their waists, ‘I just hold off
the chocolate for a couple of weeks and I’m back to normal.’

Well, bully for them! For many of us, it’s a lot more
complicated.

Don’t
blame yourself, blame biology

There
are a whole range of reasons, a lot of them external. But one important
internal factor is our biology: we are designed to take in as much energy as we
can in the ‘good’ times, to help us survive in the leaner times.

It’s
only very recently that starvation has ceased to be a threat to most developed
populations. Now, we have the widest choice of foods available to us –
including all the healthy, fresh, minimally processed foods that doctors and
diet experts recommend.

So
why do so many of us make such bad choices?

Because
our bodies still act as though we’re living in caves, rather than
centrally-heated houses, and still work as though we have to hunt and gather
our food, instead of nipping to the supermarket or even ordering our groceries
online. What that means is, we naturally crave high energy foods.

Our
bodies can’t think ahead. All they can do is react to now. So when sweet and
fatty foods are on offer, we’re programmed to like the taste and texture, and
to eat as much as possible – so we can lay down fat stores for a nutritional
‘rainy day.’

For
our ancestors that made perfect sense, because there were plenty of times when
there was no food to be had, so we relied on the times when we’d eaten
everything that was available, to store energy for survival.

But
now, even if the economy is suffering, we tend not to cut back on food. And we
still crave the sweet, fatty stuff.

Some
people do manage to strike a balance, and stay slim. However, increasing
numbers of us are becoming overweight or obese. And we need a new strategy to
help cope with external factors like those glamorous air-brushed actresses,
enticing new foods and energetic marketing.

Turning
biology to your advantage

What
5:2 and fasting does is to go back to basics – I think of it as reintroducing some
of the ‘rainy days’ our ancestors were only too familiar with, by providing
less energy from food, in a controlled way.

How the body responds is incredible, as we’ll see in
Chapter
Three
. More and more experts are convinced it’s what we were designed to do.
But the mind adjusts well, too. Fast Days are limited, but Feast Days allow us
to enjoy food, including the dishes we love, without feeling guilty. You might
expect to binge, but research shows you rarely do. And if you shed the guilt,
you begin to eat like a slim person. Here’s what Sally has to say about it:

I like the idea that no foods
are sins. As a lifetime yo-yo dieter, I've found something that really works
for me. It isn't too hard to fit it into my lifestyle as it's flexible, and if
I can't fast one day for any particular reason (i.e. a social occasion) I don't
feel that I've failed. I just start again the next day.

Sally, 49

I’m
the same: within a couple of weeks I no longer felt deprived, or guilty, or
ruled by my emotional response to food. As I felt less guilty, I was much more
in touch with eating what I needed and no more.

Which meant weight loss became less about the psychology and
more about the maths.

5:2:
just a different way of eating less?

On
the simplest level, 5:2 - or 6:1 or 4:3 or ADF – appears to work the same way
as every other diet - you lose weight because you consume less energy (food)
than you’re using. The weight loss comes because, overall, you’re eating less.

It doesn’t sound very exciting - though some of the other
physical and mental effects really are - but, ultimately, it’s the same with
all diets. It is possible that with fasting – as well as some other diets –
there’s what’s known as a
metabolic advantage:
that is, eating this
particular way will generate more weight loss (or, more specifically,
fat
loss)
than can be attributed to the reduction in calories. But further research is
needed.

Until we have more data, calories count on all diets. Take
low-carbing. There’s lots of talk about ketosis, which is a state where the
body begins to access stored fat for energy because it’s run out of the  easier-to-process
sugars it usually has access to when we’re eating carbohydrates. Those behind
various low-carb regimes say that ketosis is one of the key factors in the
weight losses observed by followers: it is seen by some almost as a ‘magic’
state.

However,
many studies have shown that it’s much
more straightforward than that. Low-carb dieters are consuming fewer calories
than they did before, simply because they’ve cut an entire food group out of
their diet.

That’s what happened to me when I did low-carb. I ate less,
without really thinking about it, because I had fewer choices. Yes, I could
eat butter, which I love, but what was the point without crusty bread or a
lovely hot baked potato? I didn’t feel hungry, particularly, because protein
tends to make you feel fuller, which is one advantage of a high-protein diet
(there are potential disadvantages, too, as we’ll see elsewhere). Of course,
low-carb diets are also often high in fat, which is another factor: all that
fat made me feel a bit sick after a while and I didn’t want to eat anything.
Therefore, I was eating fewer calories, almost by default.