What Is the 5:2 Diet?
The 5:2 Diet is a weight management eating strategy that requires its followers to stick to 2 days of fasting every week after eating however they want for the remaining 5 days. This concept is an ancient one but it has been reinvented over the centuries until this latest form.
If you are considering a fasting program, then you may want to consider the 5:2 Diet, but it is a very good idea to check with your doctor before you get started as it is not necessarily appropriate for everyone.
Many people consider this to be a kind of part-time diet, as it really only involves altering your eating habits for two days per week. That said, those two days require some serious limitations every week as you will need to cut back to one quarter of your recommended daily caloric intake. For an average man, that means you’ll need to scale it back to a measly 600 calories per day, while the average woman is afforded even less at 500 calories per day.
For many people, that component of the 5:2 Diet can make or break their willingness to keep up with it. For some dieters, the fact that they need to restrict their eating only twice per week instead of every day makes it worthwhile. They’re willing to pour everything they have into those two days in order to be able to feast the rest of the time.
However, for others, the side effects of fasting can be too great and it decreases their willingness to keep it up. Some of those side effects can include hunger pangs, irritability, anxiety, mood swings, headaches, dehydration and sleepiness throughout the day while suffering from insomnia at night.
This diet first became popular in the United Kingdom in August 2012, when the “Eat Fast and Live Longer” episode of Horizon was aired on the BBC. Within it, Michael Mosley, respected journalist and doctor, proclaimed this diet as being “genuinely revolutionary” and followed up by publishing “The Fast Diet” at the start of the next year. Later that year, former BBC journalist, Kate Harrison, published her own version of that diet using the ratio as the title. This rapidly crossed the pond to the United States where the slightly altered version of Mosley’s strategy caught on with considerably greater grip.
That said, many people are also combining that strategy with the use of high quality diet pills like Phentramin-D on the five days that the fasting is not occurring. This way, even when they are not fasting, they are still shrinking their food cravings, boosting their fat burning and increasing their energy levels.
