to recommend the 800 cals a day diet?

[Settle59]

I know a book has been written on this - the fast 800 - by Dr Michael Mosley. I haven't followed his recommendations in the book to the letter and his recommended recipes but I still stick to 800 cals daily - since April 14th this year I've started this diet and the results in 4 weeks have been amazing. When I started I was 5ft 1 and around 12 - 12 and a half stone - now I'm around 11st 4. I know I'm still overweight but feel so much fitter. I also run for at least 30 mins every day. My previously tight size 16 clothes feel looser. I had so much difficulty losing weight before- for the past 3 years I've not been able to diet and binge eaten a lot. However, now I've stuck to this for nearly 5 weeks I feel I'm on a roll and determined to keep it going. Has anyone else tried this diet and had similar success?

Intermittent fasting is what the human body is evolved to deal with.

Or you could just eat the correct portion size for your height and sex and quit the snacking.

Yes just find what works for you although intermittent fasting can be pretty good for many and has the advantage of being very cheap indeed if money is an issue!

If only everyone found it so easy Elmerrrrrrrr

you don't actually believe that calorific diets work do you?

CICO (calorie in calorie out) method has worked for a lot of people. That said, it is unfortunately time consuming and a bit of a faff. It does work though.

this is a bullshit way of encouraging people to buy into diet culture

There are scammers everywhere.

But CICO and intermittent fasting do give results. They are different methods, but the best diet is obviously the one you’ll stick with long term.

yes I do actually feel that the whole fucking world is made up of people who are focussed far too much on what they look like rather than how they feel about their bodies, their lifestyles and themselves

That’s your opinion. You can’t feel too good about a body that feels tired and shit either?

You might say something about skinny fat people, but I reckon that the majority of fat people will not feel good in their bodies no matter how much you try to encourage them — they know intrinsically it’s not how things are supposed to be.

The fact is the less you eat the more your body will crave food

Not necessarily. Those into fasting report that this isn’t the case.

Tbh I think that British people just do not know how to prepare meals and eat junk and processed foods instead, it’s a huge problem. You don’t see cultures with strong food traditions with this kind of problem.

I am not from here and where I used to live everyone grew up knowing how to cook proper meals from base vegetables and a tiny bit of meat and seasoning. Hardly any fat people and they certainly weren’t starving themselves but just eating like a normal person.

Schools need to have cooking as part of their curriculum from day one since those skills are lost in the home in the UK for reasons that I can’t grasp.

Careful not to generalise. I am British and my family always cook fresh and from scratch. Most of my friends are the same.

@wowfudge Fast800 and BSD are NOT calories in/calories out diets. In fact they are the opposite. They are all about eating the right kind of food (and yes, not eating too much of that) rather than getting your calories any way you want.

I lost over 4 stone on the fast 800. You only stay on the 800 cals for maximum 8 weeks. Then you go onto 5/2. It's the only diet that has ever worked for me and has been shown to reverse diabetes. You are not starving yourself by the way - you just eat your own fat instead. I wasn't hungry after the first week. Also, as I was only eating 800 cals I was very careful not to eat any empty cals so the nutritional value of my diet went up loads.

Careful not to generalise. I am British and my family always cook fresh and from scratch. Most of my friends are the same

I’m speaking generally and I do think that home cooking is a lost art in Britain. It’s not just a matter of time — a lot of people just don’t seem to know how to make healthy meals from veggies as a base ingredient. Peasant food, basically.

Of course there are British families who can cook and learned from their own parents. But they are a minority imo unless they come from an immigrant background.

@bridgetreilly - you're preaching to the converted. I was responding to Chocolate who stated that restricting your calories leads to craving food, etc.

I don't know what your family background is Mango but a lot of traditional British meals which are made at home from scratch date from a time when it was necessary to fuel people for manual work. Those kinds of meals can take longer to cook. Now that the majority of working age people aren't down the pit, in the forge, etc. and far more women from social classes not limited to the working class work outside the home. We also, generally, work longer hours than other nations and have longer commutes. Cooking from scratch doesn't have to mean spending hours in the kitchen, relying on convenience foods doesn't equal poor quality/poor nutritional value, or eating a poor diet.

@MangoFeverDream unfortunately people who get sucked into restrictive diets often never feel good about their bodies, hence why they're vulnerable to diets such as these in the first place.
Calorific content is man-made & bullshit. Designed to play on insecure diet culture. Next year there will be another 'diet fad' equally as crap.
And yes if you restrict food intake you Will be hungry. Saying'not necessarily' doesn't mean anything at all.
It is this horrible culture that leads people into binge purge type anorexia or bulimia.

MangoFeverDream wtf are you on about 'immigrant background' that's not smart you're assuming the same thing about cultural & class differences as you are about diets!

My friend did that Cambridge diet?

She lost a whopping 5 stone

As soon as she could eat. She put back in 4.

These kind of diets are sustainable and people go back to their bad habits after.

Calorific content is man-made & bullshit

It is not. CICO is not a new concept and not faddish at all.

Designed to play on insecure diet culture

Scammers are out there, but there are well reviewed options and old fashioned options like CICO that do get results.

And yes if you restrict food intake you Will be hungry. Saying'not necessarily' doesn't mean anything at all

Intermittent fasting has been getting a lot of scientific interest and it won’t necessarily lead to hunger. Nor do other diets like low-carb or Atkins (not my preference but others find results with those so who am I to judge?) that definitely do not lead to hunger.

Why do you want people to fail before they even try? This isn’t about being skinny but just a normal weight. Something that is easily achievable in much of the globe, btw.

Westerners are the abnormal ones, it was so obvious from the first day I lived in the UK. Yet you pretend that this is all normal.

wtf are you on about 'immigrant background' that's not smart you're assuming the same thing about cultural & class differences

I don’t understand the class system, but people from an immigrant background often have the skills and knowledge to cook healthy meals from scratch. It’s my observation that British have largely lost these skills (although some are saying that healthy cooking was just not a traditional thing in the UK, but surely you weren’t eating large slabs of meat for every meal, were you?! Has to be some peasant food as well?)

Just look at the difference between an ethnic supermarket and one catering to locals. This know-how can be lost by the second or third generation, it seems.

I broadly agree with @MangoFeverDream . There are some fucked up attitudes to food in this country and across the West. Body positivity/HAES is a horribly anti-science, anti-health movement which people fall for at their personal peril.

OP, you’ve said a few times that you aren’t following the book ‘to the letter’ which makes it sound like you’re just tweaking it a little bit. That is not the case! All you are doing is cutting to 800 calories. You can’t have read any of the explanation of this diet beyond the calorie restriction. What you are doing - (eating ten digestive biscuits a day and nothing else to lose weight and save money??) - is a very unhealthy, dangerous and disordered approach. It is frightening to read.

Mosley recommends 800 calories of nutritious, satisfying food that is good for your body and helps to tackle sugar cravings. The 800 calorie restriction is time limited, not an ongoing plan.

There is a huge amount more to the Fast800 diet than the 800 calories. You are not just ‘not following it to the letter’. You are not doing this diet at all. You are doing something different, which sounds extremely damaging and trying to convince yourself it’s safe because it’s a mainstream diet book. But you are not doing the Mosley diet, nothing like it. You cannot have read the rationale behind the diet if you think you can substitute the whole, fresh, unprocessed foods high in fat and protein that you have to eat on this diet with biscuits that add up to the same calorie equivalent. It is light years away from every single principle that Mosley espouses.

It's bullshit. Science based research changes from one year to another & from one decade to another.
You tell scientific research to people who have been seduced by diet culture and people who profit from these fads & have ended up with severe ED's or worse. Bloody disgraceful that MN is accepting threads such as these. Scientific research my arse. Scientific bullshit as aimed at insecurities & only going to line the pockets of people who have 'researched' & 'invented' them.
Research can be twisted any which way, it's not absolute when someone says that this is what it's based on, what research? What's the quality of it?who benefits from it? Ask these questions & you'll soon uncover that the research only serves to sell the product. Don't fall for it. Love yourself for who you are the rest will follow.

Love yourself for who you are the rest will follow

Magical thinking is not going to help combat the obesity epidemic in Western countries, sorry.

If only everyone found it so easyElmerrrrrrrr

I didn't say I found it easy.

@Settle59 well done!! Come and join us on the fast 800 thread. Lots and lots of amazing support and some fantastic mind blowing results!

@Chocolate50 fluffy maxims like "Love yourself for who you are" presuppose that overfeeding oneself to the point of obesity is an act of self-love rather than self-hatred.

And I didn't say that you found it easy Elmerrrrrrrr.

Research develops and progresses over time. There are new findings and new experiments conducted. Of course things change over time. It's called progress. I think you are projecting Chocolate. I may have eaten too much for my activity levels in the past, but that doesn't mean I had an eating disorder then nor do I have one now. I have had prolonged periods of stress which contributed to eating too much, but that is not an eating disorder.

"The fact is the less you eat the more your body will crave food"

I started on the Exante 800 plan, but as I changed my eating, I'm now doing 2400-3000 calories over three days.

I never thought that I could give up refined carbs. I'm post menopausal and 5'2", CICO doesn't work without changing what I eat. If I get up of a morning and have two pieces of toast, my really hungry mid morning. If I have a tin of tuna and plum tomatoes for less calories, I'm full until around 2.

I'm actually more full with fillets of fish and veg, than a fish and chip meal. There is a science behind resetting your hunger when you've been brought up on a traditional British carb heavy diet.

What your food nutritional values are, is more important than calorie content, hunger level wise.