Hello fellow beauty lovers.
The other day I spent my morning in front of the TV and stumbled across an episode of the German TV show “Wissen macht Ah” where scientific topics are presenting in entertaining ways to particularly appeal to children and teens. The episode was about a rather interesting self-experiment in which the protagonist tried out the latest trend diet. Upon seeing that I really felt the urge to research this matter further and here we are now.
The so-called 5:2 diet or “Fast Diet” dictates that you eat 5 days a week like you normally would and 2 days a week you merely reduce your calories to 600kcal for men and 500kcal for women. The most important thing is that you keep eating the normal amount of food on the normal days and don’t overeat after the short period of fasting.
It is said that the diet supports fat loss and improves insulin sensitivity. The obvious benefits of this diet are easily explained. For one, this diet is easy to cooperate into your daily life because you only have to reduce your calories on 2 days of a week. Those two days can be chosen by you and you alone. The other benefit is that it is much easier to pull through as you can eat pretty normally on your non-fasting-days provided you don’t exceed your calorie balance for that day.
The flaws in previous diets are for instance the facts that you either don’t pay enough attention to your macronutrients, don’t eat enough or both. The consequences vary and are severe: The low calorie balance causes your body to go into a sort of power saving mode. Your metabolism slows down, your performance during workout days lack and every ounce of fat will be saved on your hips, belly and bum afterwards. Additionally, you’ll eventually suffer from muscle loss, which will bring your weight down but only because muscle weigh more than fat. In the course of the 5:2 diet you can compensate your protein losses on the other days.
The concept is quite easy: The 5:2 diet can work really fast because due to the days of fasting your clearly save calories, which benefits the weekly balance provided you stay in the calorie range during the other days. I personally find this concept intriguing as I would rather fast two days instead of further lowering my calorie intake on every single day of the week. I personally go with 1500 calories and at least 5 training units per week and have been losing weight as well as gain muscle mass but I get that for some, including me, this Cut is a little bit too slow and to fasten things up a bit without having to lose muscle mass is to try out things like this diet.
And funnily enough, today is one of my fasting days. On my agenda are three protein shakes and a meal that includes 150gr of chicken and 150gr of green beans. The macronutrients are quite good seeing that I get nearly 120gr of proteins out of this day without exceeding the 500 calories. The micronutrients that include fibres, potassium and calcium I can get from the green beans and as for carbs and fats, well, I can compensate them on my normal days in which I can eat 1500 calories.
Basically you can think of it what you want. The only important thing is that you find something you can work with on a daily basis and keep in mind that whatever you do, at the end of the day, you should have a calorie deficit to lose weigh.
Yours truly,
Lana Hoang
Image Rights: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maßband, photo by Simon A. Eugster
Copyright and Source: http://www.elle.de/beauty-fitness-ernaehrung-5-tage-essen-2-tage-fasten-the-fast-diet-176300.html, http://www.focus.de/gesundheit/ernaehrung/abnehmen/simple-abnehmstrategie-5-2-diaet-fuenf-tage-normal-essen-zweimal-tapfer-sein_id_3572459.html
