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• beer, lager and cider
Use the recipes in this book as a guide for healthy, balanced eating. Just add rice, pasta and bread as necessary, but avoid processed additions.
Three of your normal days should also be exercise days. Try and get yourself into a good routine so the exercise becomes an integral part of your normal days. If you like, you can split your normal days into three healthy days with exercise and two normal days where you can be a little bit more relaxed. This means you can effectively have the weekend off. But remember, don’t go overboard and cancel out all the things you have achieved during the week.
My schedule looks something like this:
Tweaking the 5:2 diet for greater weight loss
If you are reading this without reading the section above about eating healthily on your normal days, then please have a look. It is by far the most likely reason that you are not achieving the desired weight loss. If, however, you think you are eating healthily on those days but would like to give yourself an extra push, then there are a number of additional options worth trying in the short term to help you reach your goals.
One of the things to try is extending the window. This means increasing the length of time you are fasting. A standard window might be from the last thing you eat the night before the fast until the time you eat breakfast the following morning. So if you start the fast on Sunday at 10 p.m. and fast until Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. then the total fasting time would be 34 hours. To extend the window to an optimum 36 hours, you could just make sure that you don’t eat after 8 p.m. on Sunday.
If, on the other hand, you find the 36-hour window a bit too long then you could try a 24-hour fast. This means starting at either 2 p.m. or 8 p.m. after lunch or dinner respectively and fasting until 2 p.m. or 8 p.m. the next day. This is slightly easier as you are eating a normal meal on both days, never having a full-day fast. This is also a good option if you don’t want to lose weight but want to gain some of the health benefits of the diet.
Another way to extend the diet is to add another day, making it a 4:3 diet. Try this if you want to lose some extra weight. The days should be non-consecutive, such as Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Finally, try a mix between the two. This is a kind of two-and-a-half-day diet. Have two normal days of fasting, say Monday and Wednesday – these are 36-hour fasts as described above – then have one day 24-hour fast day, say from 6 p.m. on Thursday to 6 p.m. on Friday. This is something I do occasionally and means I still get my relaxed weekend.
GETTING BEACH FIT (#ulink_e0b36988-b23a-5f85-b072-edc001e46e33)
The 5:2 diet will help you lose weight and look and feel healthier, but to look good all over we need to look at body tone. The good news is that exercising just three times a week together with the two fast days will dramatically improve how you look and feel. There’s no magic cure, but fasting plus exercise should even improve the appearance of cellulite. Remember, all exercise should be done on your normal days, not on your fast days.
What to do if you are unfit or don’t exercise?
Start slow, but if you want to look good for summer I recommend walking or swimming. I wouldn’t recommend starting on the exercise programme in Part 4 (#litres_trial_promo) without improving your general fitness first.
Walking is exceptionally good for you as a starting point for exercise. It’s free and very simple to start. Walk with a friend or take some music to listen to. Plan your route before you start and time yourself. You should be aiming to walk for 20 minutes, three times a week in the first week, increasing to 30 minutes, three times a week from the second week onwards. Your speed should be brisk with intent so it’s not a dawdle, but it’s not a speed test either. You should find that you naturally walk a little bit further every time you go out.
Swimming is another good way to get started with exercise. Choose your favourite stroke and swim gently, don’t push yourself – for 20 minutes in the first week, increasing to 30 minutes when you can. You could also try water walking, where you walk up and down through the swimming pool. The natural resistance of the water makes this a great exercise technique to try.
The Sculpt 30 exercise plan
If you exercise or have an active lifestyle then this programme is for you. Even if you don’t exercise regularly but are not sedentary then you can find success with this programme. This means if you are running around after active children or walk/cycle to work every day then you are ready to step up and look stunning for summer.
The 4-week plan on here (#litres_trial_promo) has been especially designed to fit in with the 5:2 Bikini Diet and your life. By following the programme three times a week on your normal days, you will notice considerable changes in your body shape and tone.
The plan uses a combination of resistance training (for your muscles) and cardio exercises to raise your metabolism and burn body fat for up to 24 hours after each session. The exercises can be done at home with some basic equipment or at your local gym.
The plan is quick and fun, so you don’t have to spend hours on the treadmill. The training plan comprises 12 training sessions over four weeks that get progressively more difficult. For best results, make the three sessions a week part of your routine and don’t let anything interfere with them. Remember, it’s all about balance. Fitting this routine into your schedule is the simplest way to achieve amazing results.
Busting cellulite the 5:2 way
The 5:2 Bikini Diet is a fantastic way to reduce cellulite. Cellulite is just a type of body fat, but it is a horrible lumpy body fat that’s deposited in all the worst places: hips, thighs and bottom. What’s worse is that it has a dimpled ‘orange peel’ appearance that can make us feel self-conscious, especially in a swimsuit. The good news is that the 5:2 Bkini Diet is ideal for reducing cellulite, because when you lose weight through fasting, all the weight that you lose is body fat, and that includes cellulite.
The distinctive ugly appearance of cellulite comes from the fibrous tissue that only occurs in certain parts of the body like bottoms and thighs. In these areas, the fibres tether the skin to the muscle below. The cellulite is where the body fat bulges through the skin. The fibrous tissues cannot expand as the fat layer increases so we get the dimpled texture that we hate so much. You can’t do anything about the fibres connecting the skin to the muscle so the only way to reduce cellulite is to reduce fat in these areas and to increase the tone of the underlying muscles. By fasting two days a week to reduce the fat and exercising to increase the tone, you should see a marked reduction in cellulite.
‘Most surprisingly my cellulite seems to have melted. It used to be all over my bottom and on my thighs, but now there’s just a little bit on my bottom and I’m confident that will go too. I didn’t expect that kind of result at all, let alone so soon.’
Emma
There is a known medical process by which the body deposits fat on the hips and thighs. If we reverse that process then the fat will be removed from these areas first. An excess of insulin is one of the triggers for depositing fat in these areas. Intermittent fasting has been proven to reduce insulin levels, so that is one reason why the 5:2 Bikini Diet has an impact on cellulite in particular. Another trigger is an increase in oestrogen caused by pregnancy, the pill or HRT. If you are on the pill or HRT you may notice an increase in your cellulite. Other factors are smoking, too much alcohol and not enough exercise. If we keep these factors to a minimum, fast two days a week and exercise to increase muscle tone, we are doing everything possible to reduce cellulite.
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Can I drink alcoholic drinks?
On a ‘normal’ day, yes, alcoholic drinks are definitely allowed. Obviously beverages that are higher in calories – such as beer and lager – should be kept in moderation, but wine and spirits are relatively low calorie and can be indulged.
On a ‘fast’ day I would not recommend drinking alcohol. It is unlikely that you can fit it in easily within your reduced calorie intake. If you do drink on a fast day it may make you feel light-headed and ultimately lead to you breaking the fast on that day.
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