Dancing At Lunacy

I had 2 good fasting days this week. On Tuesday, I had a rather decadent breakfast of egg white and spinach omelette, with a small bit of smoked salmon, and a teaspoon of caviare, which comes in at only 4 calories a teaspoon.  Total breakfast – 100 cals.

Lunch was an 18 cal miso soup.  For dinner, I reheated the Tom Yum soup I made last week.  Sadly, those miracle noodles, though they’d been fine when freshly cooked, didn’t react well to being frozen, and were rather wrinkled and rubbery.  178 cals.

I’ve found myself drinking things I wouldn’t normally – at a meeting on the Tuesday morning I found myself enjoying black coffee, though I’m not normally a coffee drinker.  I bought some Millicano instant coffee, and a jar of  rather enticing smelling maple and walnut flavour coffee.

On Thursday, I blew my daily sugar allowance on a 90 calorie fruit salad – a pot of grapefruit segments in juice, with cantaloupe, blueberries and raspberries.  Lunch was another miso soup, which I’m finding enough in the middle of the day, though I did cave mid afternoon and have an extra light laughing cow cheese on 2 weight watchers wheat and oat crackers.

For dinner, I was aiming to make a sort of faux mash, using turnip and parsnips.  I boiled the chopped up veg in water with a dash of stock, and when they were soft  drained them and added in 2 handfuls of spinach, stirring that round to wilt.  Then I mashed it all together with a potato masher.  I piled the resulting mash on a plate, topped with a pile of blanched samphire (10 calories for a handful) and added a tomato and some thin pastrami slices.  This was a LOT of food – I couldn’t finish the mash – for under 200 cals.

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Into my 6th week of this – managed to stay at the same weight after last week’s single fast. Was the same weight this week, but my body fat % was down, which I’m happy about.

Tuesday’s fast started with a fruit salad – grapefruit, blueberries, blackberries and canteloupe. With careful measuring of quantities, this came in at 70 calories.

I’d started 5and2ing by keeping fairly close to my normal intake of breakfast, snack, lunch of soup and salad, snack, and dinner. I’ve managed to cut out the snacks on fast days, and then stopped the salad at lunch, and am now working on shaving that soup down to a minimum. Today it was Tesco Light Choices Chinese chicken noodle, which was lovely and only 43 cals.

For dinner, I wanted to use some scallops (90g only 80 cals).  I also had some leftover fennel to use up, and about 1/3 can of sliced mushrooms.  I finely chopped the fennel, and simmered it with the sliced mushrooms in a cup (100ml) of Big Tom spiced tomato juice.  When those were cooked, I added in the scallops and simmered for about 5 minutes.  I served this on Aunt Bessies carrot/ swede mash, to which added the leaves off 2 sprigs thyme to give a bit of oomph.  The whole very satisfying plateful was about 200 cals.

My Thursday fast started with a souffle omelette of one egg, 2 egg whites, and a few mushrooms.  I even added a little parmesan for an extra 20 cals.  Lunch was a miso soup for 40 cals, and for dinner I was excited to try the new miracle/ zero calorie noodles.   Reviews had made me worry about the smell (it was fine) the faff about preparing (rinse, then simmer in boiling water for 3 minutes) and the texture (they were a bit like rice noodles but totally edible, and I’d have them again.)  I made them into a Thai soup with Tom Yum paste, chestnut mushrooms  spring onion, and prawns.  Served with coriander and lime juice.

The resulting soup was a huge plateful – the 200g pack of noodles was 2 portions, so I saved half the soup for next week – hope those noodles freeze OK!  A big bowl of soup came to about 175 cals.

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This is often referred to as a 5:2 fast, but it isn’t really a fast. For 2 days a week, you eat about 500 calories, 25% of your normal intake (600 for men). I watched a Horizon documentary on this last year, and then read an article in last week’s Sunday Times, and decided to give it a go.

The theory is remarkably simple – no special foods or additives, no counting carbs, up to me how I spread the calories. Now, I know me. I know that I do NOT function well without breakfast, and that I tend to be a grazer. So I wasn’t prepared to go with only tea or water all day and have a 500 cal dinner. Instead, I ate this:

Breakfast = 100g cottage cheese with a handful of blueberries (110 cal)

Morning snack = 2 crackerbread with a dairylea triangle (80 cal)

Lunch = tin of chicken noodle soup with a large salad of little gem, cherry tomatoes and cumber (160 cal)

Afternoon snack = radishes and sugar snaps ( 30 cal)

Dinner = soufflé omelette of one egg, 2 egg whites, mushrooms and spinach, with steamed courgettes (120 cal)

Now, I was expecting to feel hungry.  The odd tummy rumble didn’t bother me.  To be honest, the fact that this is only for one day. tomorrow I can eat what I like, got me through any odd feelings of hunger.  I didn’t experience any headaches – I switched my usual 7 or 8 cups of tea a day for black tea or herbal tea.  And it was a day when I didn’t have anything else planned.

So…..so far so good!  I will be trying this for a month at least before I give any verdict.  But the scale was down this morning, let’s see if that’s still the case by next week.

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