Eat, Fast, and Live Longer?

I'll admit, I've tried Weightwatchers.
I'll admit, I lost about a stone on it.

However, I've come to the conclusion that I am not the sort of person that can do diets: I love bread, pasta, cheese, curries, and pretty much ALL THE FOODS far too much. I fell off the wagon spectacularly and put on way more than I'd lost.

The problem with loving food too much is that, despite having a fairly active job (at least some of the year), the pounds creep on like you would not believe, especially once over the age of 30. Cue a conversation in my office about a month ago, whereby a colleague told me all about the BBC Horizon programme - Eat, Fast and Live Longer (I had to make sure I got the comma in the right place. If eating fast was a prerequisite, then I'd live to 100).


So it goes like this: eat what you like five days a week, but on two non-consecutive days you can only eat 500 calories (or 600 for men). It sounded tough, but the alleged health benefits seemed a bonus to me: weight loss was only one, there was also reduction in cholesterol, lowering risk of diabetes and heart disease, and retarding the development of cancer cells. If even the NHS had it on their website then it couldn't be that bad, in my mind.

I've been doing it for around a month now and I'm the lightest I've been in a long time. I've lost a fair few pounds and am feeling rather good about it all. I even had two weeks off in the middle to go to fieldwork and just picked up where I left off on my return. I've been out for massive curries, I've not given up anything I love. The "hungry days" are actually not so bad. I've found that fizzy water is a great filler and you can eat quite a lot on 500 calories if you choose your veg wisely.

The anal retentive in me has been keeping track of progress in Excel and, as of yesterday, starting tracking body fat and H2O as well. I have a set of scales that measures these - I realise it's not massively accurate, but I'm still interested in seeing what it says.

So, here's my progress. I'll be updating as the weeks go on. The grey bars indicate my hungry days, and the blue my weight (note the gap in the middle when I was away). So far I've noticed that I - unsurprisingly - always drop the day after a hungry day, but then go up again afterwards. However, that rise is rarely as high as my previous weight, so overall the trend shows a gradual drop. It seems sustainable so far, but we'll see!