Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days (3 page)

Monday 20th October to
Friday 24th October

Starting weight: 16 Stone
0 lbs

The 5:2 diet is often
described as a ‘part-time’ diet, perfect for those who want to stay in shape
but have a penchant for chocolate cake. The idea is that you eat normally for
five days out of seven, but put your body into starvation mode for the other
two. It seems to have taken the dieting world by storm in the last year or so,
and celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston, Miranda Kerr and even breakfast TV
legend Sir Phillip Schofield (I’ve promoted him to a Sir - surely it’s only a
matter of time and it saves having to edit the book in the future) are
reportedly fans of intermittent fasting. The 5:2 diet is a fancy name for what
is essentially intermittent fasting.

Intermittent fasting is
seen as an effective way to lose weight because by cutting down on your calorie
intake intermittently, rather than for one long period, your body goes into
‘repair mode’ instead of ‘starvation mode’. This repair mode causes the body to
restore damaged cells, which uses more energy, whereas starvation mode causes
your body to store fat. According to my nutritionist, Louis, it is down to the
body activating a gene called SIRT1 (also known as the skinny gene). He
explained, however, that this gene is also activated during times of low
insulin, so the answer could simply be to eat less sugar rather than to starve
oneself completely.

Having conducted his own
research, Louis has concluded that whilst there is plenty of documentary
evidence to suggest that intermittent fasting can help you live longer and
reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer, most of the actual research has
been carried out on mice. Another cause for concern in his mind is that there
is very little clinical evidence, with most studies quoting phrases such as
"One of our medical experts said..." Louis is keen to know who the
medical expert is and why he or she is so reluctant to give their name. I see
his point – there’s a reason why some journalists write stories including phrases
such as "a source confirmed" or "an insider said", and I’ll
leave you to decide whether it’s because the source didn’t want to be named or
whether they never really existed in the first place.

Some of you may have
already spotted the flawed maths involved with me taking on the 5:2 diet. The
eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that ten diets in fifty days means
five days per diet, and I hope none of you needs a calculator to work out that
5 plus 2 does in fact equal 7. Well, my logic is that the 5:2 diet requires you
to eat normally for five days out of seven, so I simply decided to count the
previous two days as ‘normal’. To be honest, I was really keen to include the
5:2 diet as one of my ten diets as it intrigues me, so by making it my first,
it still fits perfectly into my fifty-day challenge. As I have still been
eating normally for the last two days, I don’t think I’ve broken any rules.
Actually, that last sentence is a bit of a lie – I haven’t been eating normally
at all. Eating two packets of biscuits, four Kit Kats and an entire multipack
of crisps can’t be considered normal, can it? In preparation for the fifty-day
challenge, I decided to spend my weekend ridding my cupboards of temptation.
Unfortunately this meant that my daughter’s packed lunch was a little light
this morning, which was regrettable, but it also meant that my wife and I have
had our first falling out, just a few hours into what could now be a very long
fifty days…

As much as I want to
succeed in this challenge, I’m going to be brutally honest and admit that I
will be doing everything I can to make it easier on myself. Put simply, if
there’s a shortcut, I’ll take it. I took that mantra very literally back in
1993 when I was getting increasingly frustrated with coming last in cross-country.
I was pretty good at P.E. and was lucky enough to make most of the school
teams, even being captain of some, so it was simply a matter of pride in the
end. One particularly cold winter’s day, when I was once again bringing up the
rear, it dawned on me that once I was out of Mr Leadon’s view, I could simply
cut around the back of the cricket pitch in order to get ahead of the others.
It led straight to the canal, which in turn formed the start of the home
straight. By hanging around in the wooded area to the side of the canal, I
could see my school friends making their way down the hill having completed the
full loop and I simply joined in just behind the front few. With pride restored
and having not even broken a sweat, I remember thinking that the phrase ‘Cheats
never prosper’ might just need a re-write. That lasted until three days later,
when the cross country team was announced, and a further seven days after that,
when I disgraced myself not just in front of my own class, but the whole of the
local area.

500 calories a day isn’t a
lot. I can tell you that with absolute certainty as I’ve spent hours
researching potential recipes. I would describe myself as an enthusiastic home
cook, always keen to try new ingredients and learn new techniques, but right
now my enthusiasm is waning. I keep thinking back to what I cooked last week,
where the potatoes dauphinoise alone contained more than 500 calories per
portion. I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t meant to be easy and
that the diet is also known as ‘intermittent fasting’.

Fasting isn’t simply about
cutting out a bit of this or a bit of that; it’s defined as an act of willing
abstinence or reduction of food, drink, or both. I’ve decided therefore that in
order for me to be successful, I won’t be planning any recipes or doing too
much calorie counting; I will simply eat as little as I possibly can to get
through the day.

I decided to walk a
different way to the platform this morning to ensure that I wouldn’t be tempted
by the smell of freshly-brewed coffee wafting seductively around the station
kiosk, but just ten minutes into my journey I was feeling decidedly grumpy.
Coffee is known to have hunger-suppressing qualities and I spent a long time
trying to work out whether the headache from caffeine withdrawal was more or
less annoying than the hunger pangs from the caffeine deficiency. I decided
that the headache was worse as it was affecting my ability to write, so I
reached for the headache tablets. It was then that I did a very strange thing
indeed. I proceeded to check to see if my headache tablets contained any
calories! Even more ludicrous than that, I started to get annoyed when it
became apparent that calorie content is not high on the list of priorities of
the labelling department of a pharmaceutical company. You would have thought
that the absence of calorific information from all of the labelling and
packaging would have been enough for me to drop the matter, but no. I proceeded
to Google the question and when that got me nowhere, I took to twitter to ask
Helen Zaltzman (presenter of Answer Me This - a hugely successful podcast which
answers questions submitted by listeners).

@helenzaltzman:
@AsTheySlept there might be some sugar in the coating, but such small volume
that it's prob less than one calorie per tablet

I took a couple of
tablets, put down my iPad and told myself to get a grip.

The first few hours were
horrible. I’ve only ever found myself having to fast prior to an operation, and
that was easy because the operation itself acted as a natural suppressant –
I’ve always been too anxious about the operation to be concerned about the lack
of food leading up to it. But today has been incredibly testing. One thing that
I have learned very quickly about the 5:2 diet is that it gives your stomach a
voice, and not content with that, it has provided it with a microphone, a
four-piece band and a group of backing singers. The noise is incredible as it
yearns for food, desperate for you to hear its cries and put it out of its
misery. I’ve come up with a theory that the reason singers often wear
microphones strapped to their heads is because they are on the 5:2 diet and if
the microphone were any lower down it would pick up the rumbling of their
stomachs.

By 11:30am I felt truly
awful. I felt sick and dizzy, and as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t
concentrate. This was an issue as my main job today was to finalise my
company’s payroll. When working in finance, you learn very quickly that the
most important job you will ever do is payroll. People are very sensitive about
their pay and rightly so; I am too. It’s the job with the biggest
responsibility and the smallest of rewards. No one is ever going to call you up
and say, "Andy, thanks ever so much once again for making sure that I got
paid correctly". Get it wrong, however, and they’ll be picking up the
phone quicker than a trader at the New York stock exchange.

With just 500 calories to
play with, I decided that I should try to go as long as I possibly could before
taking on any calories. It was a dangerous tactic, considering I’d already very
nearly added a zero to the end of two people’s pay. My theory was that by
eating, I would actually end up making myself hungrier. It’s like adding fuel
to a fire, and in order to keep the fire raging you need to keep adding more
and more fuel. Instead of food, I opted for green tea and black coffee –
calorie-free drinks, designed to douse the fire inside. With an ember still
glowing, I decided it was time to feed the fire inside and so at 2pm I bought a
tomato soup and an apple. I’d already consumed about 2 calories courtesy of the
two headache tablets on the way to work, so I had 498 left. The apple worked
out at around 80 calories and the soup was 196. I decided to space out the
calories to ensure that I could still have something to eat if I felt hungry,
so I ate half of the soup at 2:15pm, an apple at 3:15pm and the other half of
the soup at 4:15pm.

I doused the fire on the
way home with another black coffee (having learned that black coffee was
effectively calorie-free and so caffeine withdrawal would no longer be an
issue), and my evening meal consisted of a slice of toasted, wholemeal bread
with a small tin of baked beans. The bread worked out to be 128 calories and
the beans were 109 and when I added the 196 for the soup, the 80 for the apple
and the 2 for the tablets, I realised that I would go over by 15 calories. As I
was waiting for the toast to pop up I considered whether the 80 calories in the
apple included the core or not and if it did, then I figured I was still
probably under. I decided that today wasn’t a day for taking any chances – not
day one of a fifty-day project, so as soon as the toast popped up, I went ahead
and cut off the crusts. I’m sorry, mum.

*
* *

Today is day two of the
project and day two of the 5:2 diet. I have to say that I feel fantastic, which
is something I didn’t expect. I imagined that I would feel miserable and
lethargic the day after fasting, but I actually feel the opposite. Part of that
may be down to the fact that I went to bed a full two hours earlier than I
normally would. I tend to go to bed at around 11pm, but having eaten an
incredibly small evening meal, relatively early, I found that I was hungry and
tired by 9pm. I figured that the best remedy was just to go to bed, as what was
the point in staying up and feeling miserable? The end result was a longer,
deeper and far more rewarding night’s sleep. While the 5:2 diet clearly isn’t
going to do much for your social life, I can already see the benefits in other
areas.

In principle it’s fairly
straightforward – you eat what you like for five days and fast for two. You
have five days of heaven in exchange for two days of hell. It means you’ll
spend 71.5% of your life happy and 28.5% of it miserable. Some would argue that
that’s a pretty good deal, and could even be sustainable long-term, but my
worry is the effect that the 28.5% has on others. You see, it’s not just 28.5%
of your life – it's 28.5% of everybody’s life who comes into contact with you.
In fact, for work colleagues, it’s likely to be as high as 40% as they don’t
get to see you at the weekend, and who in their right mind is going to choose a
Saturday or Sunday to fast? If the 5:2 diet did ever take off in a big way, I
would be worried about the long term effect on the economy as it’s likely that
productivity across the nation would immediately drop by between 23.5% and 40%
overnight.

Louis had mentioned that
some of the possible side-effects would be difficulty sleeping at night, bad
breath, irritability and anxiety. I have to say that as of yet, I haven’t
experienced any of these. My wife might beg to differ on the bad breath bit,
but could it be any worse than on another day when I might be eating fish or
garlic?

I’m aware that my
positivity today may just be the euphoria of no longer being in starvation mode
and that come Thursday I’ll once again be an irritable, anxious arsehole with
ridiculously bad breath. I always find it funny how short-sighted we can be.
When we’re suffering a hangover, with head in our hands we tell everyone who
cares to listen that we will never, ever, ever drink again. Cut to Pete’s party
on Saturday night when, with wine bottle in hand, we tell everyone who cares to
listen that we really, really love them.