Hi folks,
I checked out the 5:2 section of the forum a couple of weeks ago. I may do this at some point, but at the moment I think i would find 500 cals in a day, even sandwiched between two 2000 days, hard to stick to. There is a 5:2 area of the forum, as I've mentioned:
5:2 Fasting
If you have a look in there, somewhere (can't remember which thread), they are discussing 5:2 and apparently there's at least two different books on it, and each is quite a different method. On at least one of them there are certain things you can and can't have - such as, restricting carbs and not having certain types of foods and having to fast for a certain amount of hours in a row. So, if you go in there and find conflicting advice, it's worth asking *which* 5:2 diet the person giving the advice in doing. In that whole intermittent fasting area of the forum though, seems to be a mixture of people doing their own, various versions of...5:2...4:3...24 fasts followed by 'eat whatever' for a few days followed by another 24-hour fast and so on. One of the things I've read in there is that, for a lot of the IF (intermittent fasting) diets, they take the basic concept and then mix and match it as it suits them, with the basics appearing to be:
1. Eat healthily.
2. Don't binge / splurge.
3. Still make sure you get enough calories overall.
4. Drink enough water.
5. Fast for *a period of time* (this could be *only* 500 cals within a 16 or 24 hour period, or it could be a straight, 24 hour fast, or some variant of this).
I was reading about the paleo diet yesterday as well and apparently some paleo's include fasting as part of their diet too...paleo is also a low-carb diet which seems could and would work well with calorie counting. Might be worth checking out if you're interested.