Types of intermittent fasting and BSD

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  • posted by Bess
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    Hi
    I tried fasting the 5:2 format but have found that restricting my eating window to 11am -6pm suits me better. Should I still calorie restrict on some days or can I just adopt the Mediterranean diet and forget the calorie counting? I think I will still lose weight doing it this way. Any thoughts or wisdom on this would be appreciated. Thanks

  • posted by Verano
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    That’s almost like asking ‘how long is a piece that of string’! I guess if you put your mind to it you could pack in a lot of food/carbs/calories in that time slot. You don’t say if you need to lose a lot or a little, whether you’re have diabetes or not. Best thing you can do is try it and see. It may be an idea to weigh all you food and log everything you eat and drink in an app such as myfitnesspal or Fatsecret. Then after a week or so you will know if you are losing weight with the way you are eating and if not you can tailor your intake to your individual needs. Most people restrict their carbs to less than 50g a day but some need to go as low as <20g to lose weight.
    Think a bit of trial and error is called for here or you could just do the 800/30(cals/carbs) diet.

  • posted by Luvtcook
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    Bess, as Verano was alluding to, intermittent fasting covers a very broad range of tactics to lose weight, the common element being periods of time without eating. The least restrictive is no calorie counting but limiting eating to 6-8 hours a day, to the most restrictive being full on water fasts for 24, 36, 72 hr etc.

    The higher up on the restriction ladder you go, the faster you will lose the weight.

    Michael Mosely’s two “versions”, the BSD and the 5:2 are both less rule driven than a lot of previously published diets. The have just the simple premise that you restrict calories during the periods you are eating (800 a day now for both BSD and 5:2), and build in periods of fasting in between those. Longer periods of fasting or more frequent days of partial fasting have additional health benefits. He was “keeping it simple” to allow the maxiumum flexibility for those wanting to try it.

    The Mediterranean diet is a food choice list that can be added as another element…..gives you the most nutritional bang for your buck in terms of health as well as healthy vs empty carbs.

    So your choice is: how stringent you want will determine how fast your lose. Do you want to lose 1, 2 or 3 lbs a week? If you are restricting carbs to 20-30 for the first time, you are likely to drop 5 lbs the first week but that won’t continue for long without adding calorie restriction as well.

    Simply restricting your eating to a window of 8 hours has been shown to result in weight loss, but its only about 5 -10 lbs over the course of a year. But if you combine that with the 800 calorie BSD you now have a more powerful set of tools. Adding low carb (20-30 net carbs a day) adds another powerful tool. And making sure what you are eating is off the Mediterranean diet list of foods ensures that you are eating very healthy foods that will give you the maximum satiety for your 800 calories.

    Hope this helps.

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