I’ve tried intermittent fasting in the past, limiting myself to eating during an eight-hour window every day for a month. It didn’t really work for me. I lost no weight and I felt hungry and/or stressed out about eating at the right time. So when I got a book on the Mosley method, which advocates limiting your calorie intake (to 600/800kcal per day for F/M practitioners, respectively) for two days per week, I was somewhat skeptical.

Turns out I was wrong. Fasting for one day at a time is way more feasible, because it will always soon be over, right? And whereas I would be frothing at the mouth to get at all the good (i.e. bad) stuff at the word go when using the previously mentioned method of “window eating”, going to bed hungry seems to ensure you aren’t particularly ravenous in the morning (odd, but true). This means all the things your brain dreams up for you to crave when fasting suddenly seem less desirable the day after, which is good news.

The brain will try to make you eat tho, so it’s good to have your allotted calories at hand (and avoid having temptations at home). I eat one avocado and four or five boiled eggs when fasting, and that’s it, save for some cherry tomatoes or a couple of handfuls of popcorn for snacks. The latter are more to keep me occupied than anything else – it’s remarkable how boring it is not to eat. Since we are creatures of habit, chances are you will find yourself walking into the kitchen several times a day to get something to put in your mouth – that’s when a bowl of relatively healthy snacks come in handy.

Quite apart from all the supposed benefits of the ketosis these breaks from eating induce (and they are legion, on organs as varied as liver and brain, apparently), it seems the 5:2 method works to achieve weight loss, too. This wasn’t my primary goal, and I have continued to indulge in sweets and baked goods for the rest of the time, but even so I have dropped 3.5 kilos in three weeks. Not bad. Even better: I have done so without muscle loss, as ketosis means the organism switches to burning fat rather than carbs for energy.

The one drawback I can see with this method is that the above phenomenon leaves you quite tired and with low energy levels, as the switch to fat burning takes its toll – something which makes exercising quite hard. When I tried LCHF eating more consistently this occurred once, and then I stayed in fat-burning mode, but going back and forth is more demanding, so one should probably combine the two – eat few carbs and more greens and healthy fat on eating days, and add intermittent 5:2 fasting to the mix. That might be the fastest way(!) to seeing results.