My dream diet: No counting, no cabbage soup, and no cutting back

I know I’ve been lucky. Until fairly recently I was the kind of annoying person who could eat anything and not put on an ounce. Since leaving home at 18, I’ve eaten more than my fair share of toast and baked goods. I have introduced several people to the joy of a chip-butty breakfast. But the years catch up with all of us in the end and it turned out that the older friends who blamed their expanding waistlines on the passage of time weren’t making excuses. It really is harder to keep the weight off after 40.

Back in the day when I never had to think about my weight, I found it incredible that anyone ever got sucked in by fad diets. It seemed obvious that a diet which, say, involved eating nothing but cabbage soup for a week would be effective but that it could never be sustainable in the long term. Likewise a diet which cut out all carbs. For a while I shared a flat with someone devoted to the Atkins Diet. He lost weight but he was rarely out of the bathroom. Eggs, bacon and a double-dose of Dulcolax? No thanks.

But now it’s my turn. Since I’ve decided not to buy any new clothes this year, I’ve got to be able to wear the old ones. The seam allowances in most shop-bought clothes – and my sewing skills – don’t allow for any wiggle room. My skirts aren’t going to get any bigger so I’m going to have to take myself in at the sides. The question is, which hideous regime will do the job for this diet sceptic with negligible willpower.

When the 5:2 Diet burst on to the scene about five years ago, it seemed to be the answer for those of us who only have to say the word “deprivation” to feel the urge for cake. The 5:2 offered a solution for anyone who baulked at the thought of cutting back seven days a week. You only had to find willpower for two days a week, reducing your calorie intake on those days to 500-600 while eating normally for the rest.

It turned out that for me, and many like me, even two days a week spent having to count the number of calories I was eating was too much like hard work. The counting itself made me think about food in a way I hadn’t done before and it wasn’t a way I liked. I never wanted to be the sort of person who wonders whether the egg they’re about to boil is medium-large or large-medium. These things matter when you’re limited to 500 cals a day.

Call me pathetic, but the 5:2 took up too much head-space. Thankfully, since the 5:2 Diet, the thinking behind it has developed. What if you could achieve the same results without calorie counting? What if it’s not the calories that are restricted but the amount of time each day during which you are allowed to eat them?

Recently, I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She told me that she’d lost weight through intermittent fasting. I’ve known her for 20 years but that lunchtime was the first time I’ve ever seen her eat bread or choose from a menu without calculating the calorific value of her choices first. It was as though most of the weight she lost was in the form of the pile of food guilt that used to sit on her shoulders.

Intermittent fasting, which was the most searched for weight-loss regime of 2019, is less a diet than a meal-timing exercise. There are various patterns. Some people choose not to eat at all for a couple of days a week. Others restrict their eating to a period of eight hours each day. So, say, they eat between midday and eight in the evening. Or between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. During your eight-hour eating window, you eat as normal. What it usually means in practice, is skipping one meal a day. If you choose to skip breakfast, intermittent fasting is not too antisocial.

The weight loss claims for intermittent fasting are impressive – it certainly worked for my friend, who was a stone lighter after two months – but it turns out that losing a couple of pounds may not be the only benefit from restricting the daily window in which you eat.

In December 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a review by Rafael de Cabo, PhD., and Mark P Mattson, PhD., which said that: “Evidence is accumulating that eating in a six-hour period and fasting for 18 hours can trigger a metabolic switch from glucose-based to ketone-based energy, with increased stress resistance, increased longevity, and a decreased incidence of diseases, including cancer and obesity.”

It works like this: when we fast certain adaptive cellular responses are triggered that suppress inflammation and enhance our bodies’ defences against metabolic and oxidative stress. Damaged molecules are repaired or removed and glucose regulation is managed more effectively.

If you’re eating three times and day and snacking in between, your body simply doesn’t have time to initiate these important processes before it has to deal with the next meal. Our ancestors weren’t always lucky enough to have three regular meals a day but perhaps in some ways they were healthier for it.

I decided to give intermittent fasting a try, skipping breakfast so that my “eating window” took place between midday and eight in the evening. I was relieved to learn that you are allowed to drink before you break your fast, so long as it’s calorie-free. That means you can have tea or coffee so long as you have them black. The idea of tea without milk didn’t fill me with joy but it was surprising how quickly I got used to it. Particularly, when the only milk in the fridge in any case was oat milk, which leaves tea tasting of the box the tea-bags came in.

I was astonished (and very pleased) to find that the changes for me seemed almost instantaneous. After just two days, I had a flatter stomach. A week in, the waistband of my jeans no longer felt uncomfortably tight. I didn’t have to risk breaking a finger to get the zip pulled up. The scales didn’t seem to have shifted much but I definitely felt a difference.

My experiment with intermittent fasting also made me realise how much the way I eat was largely defined by habit. I always ate breakfast because I always have done, telling myself that it’s the most important meal of the day. How does the saying go? “Breakfast like a king; lunch like a prince; dinner like a pauper.”

The reality is, I don’t feel hungry until midday. If I bypass the fridge first thing, I can stay away from it for another four hours or so without feeling horribly deprived. I love breakfast food so I sometimes ate “breakfast” at lunch time. There’s no reason why you can’t have porridge or yogurt at lunch, right?

Two weeks in, and three pounds down, I’ve decided this intermittent fasting thing might just be the solution I need. With no counting and no cabbage soup, I can almost kid myself that I’m not cutting back at all.