The emotional eating I'd being doing because of a stressful year was showing: my jeans were tighter, my energy was non-existent and my face was really puffy.
I had actually let my diet get to such a bad place that I really needed a complete overhaul to get back to cooking quick, simple and tasty healthy meals from scratch instead of relying so much on quick and convenient ultra-processed foods like pre-made oven-cooked chicken and chips.
So I took on Michael Mosley's diet, having lost 5lb in a week of doing one of his different diets, The Fast 800, last year. My colleague ditched sugar and ultra-processed foods for six months and you can see the results and the foods he now can't live without here.
How the 5:2 diet works
It creates a plan week by week, and auto-generates meals that are all based on a Mediterranean diet, high in vegetables, low in carbohydrates, with healthy fats and proteins.
It then gives you a shopping list of everything that you will need that week. I find this incredibly helpful, as coming up with meal ideas and planning a food shop around that can be quite a task. It helps to ensure you only buy what you need. While I try and stick to the suggestions, I make some tweaks here and there to ensure I am trying food I will definitely like and minimising waste.
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Monday
Monday was a fasting day, a day of three meals worth up to 800 calories. I broke my fast at around 10am, with full-fat Greek yoghurt, almonds, seeds and berries, which hit the sweet spot of sweet and crunchy cravings that you get from cereals.
Breakfast: a bowl of yoghurt, nuts, seeds and blueberries (Lydia Royce)Lunch was two poached eggs, grilled asparagus, and parmesan cheese. I really didn't like asparagus until I discovered it grilled with a little bit of salt last year and now it is one of my favourite vegetables. This is really quick and easy.
Dinner was a beef stir fry, which was really tasty and surprisingly filling. I made more so my husband could have some and enough to have for leftovers the next day. It was made up of beef, peppers, broccoli and mushrooms. Overall the day didn't feel like I was in a drastic calorie deficit and I felt quite satisfied most of the day.
Tuesday
I started Tuesday morning with breakfast at 9am: blueberry apple porridge, made with full fat milk, whole rolled oats, chia seeds, grated apple, with a dollop of Greek yoghurt and blueberries on the side. This was surprisingly delicious, coming from someone who never eats porridge. It is definitely a recipe I would reach for again. It felt like a huge portion and kept me satisfied all morning.
Apple porridge with blueberries and greek yoghurt (Lydia Royce)For lunch, I had the beef stir fry leftovers and dinner was cauliflower cheese bites on a bed of salad. The recipe used up a whole cauliflower, so it is safe to say these were very smelly. I'm not a fan of cauliflower, I will happily have it on a cooked dinner drowned in gravy, but I never usually choose it otherwise. But I wanted to go with the flow of the plan and try as many options as it suggested. But they were not very nice and I ended up leaving some.
Wednesday
I started Wednesday morning with one of my favourite recipes: baked oats with strawberries and cream. For the sake of getting through the massive tub of Greek yoghurt I bought that week, I didn't actually use the full fat cream cheese the recipe recommends, but the yoghurt instead. So easy and tasty.
Lunch was supposed to be a naked chicken burger on a bed of salad, but I really didn't want to shape the mince chicken meat into burgers using my hands, so I made a chicken burger salad style dish instead. This was really satisfying, and was the first time I'd tried chicken mince. I loved this and will definitely make it again.
Chicken burger salad bowl (Lydia Royce)By dinner time I was having one of those days where I just wanted to eat something that was very low effort and that I knew I would enjoy. I swapped a suggested recipe for smashed avocado with poached eggs on sourdough toast. The recipe did have tomatoes in it, but I left these out as I wasn't really fancying them. I also added feta cheese, which inevitably bumped up the calorie intake, but again, it was one of those days.
Thursday
Thursday was a fasting day, and I had a simple Greek yoghurt and raspberries at 10am. I have always over complicated breakfasts, but using Greek yoghurt as a base to build around this week has really helped me realise it doesn't have to be hard to start your day with something healthy.
Portobello mushrooms and eggs and feta (Lydia Royce)Lunch was leftovers of the chicken burger salad. For dinner, I had Portobello mushroom toast with smoked salmon and poached eggs. I also crumbled some feta cheese on top. I wasn't that much of a fan of the Portobello mushroom as the base though. It put me off the smoked salmon. I was supposed to have this for breakfast the next day but decided to change it.
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Friday
Friday started off great with another Greek yoghurt dish. The recipe was supposed to be cottage cheese, walnuts and blueberries, but I really don't like cottage cheese. I don't think I've tried walnuts before, and I really loved this combination. They're a great nut to have if like me you love a crunchy cereal.
Lunch was smoked salmon and avocado on sourdough toast. Dinner time is where things went a little wrong. I forgot to get chicken out of the freezer, so couldn't make the pesto chicken traybake I had planned. I'd had a hard week, and I don't work Fridays so my routine was thrown out of the window. I ended up going off plan and making myself some chips in my ActiFry (which are delicious and use very little olive oil), as well as a breaded frozen chicken breast.
I also bought a big bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut chocolate which of course was not on the plan at all, but I'm trying to focus on not feeling guilty if I do indulge, and treat this plan as a lifestyle. Weaning off these kinds of food is a process, and I'm happy that I made it as long as I did without any chocolate after the five-a-day Creme Egg diet I'd been more used to recently.
Saturday
I started Saturday with a breakfast tray bake made up of two tomatoes, one Portobello mushroom, one sausage, one egg, and two pieces of bacon with the fat cut off. It was just enough to feel like a cooked breakfast but didn't leave me feeling stuffed.
I then made banana blueberry muffins to take out for the afternoon with me for lunch. I made enough to have the next day too, and it worked out at around four muffins per serving. The recipe used ground almonds, eggs, and Greek yoghurt. I didn't love these muffins, so much so I couldn't eat them the next day. I think the recipe was a bit too wet and it felt like the muffins were too savoury to have sweet ingredients like blueberries.
Saturday night was another un-prepared night. I ended up having a Chinese takeaway with my parents. I made up a smaller portion than usual, but it made me realise how hard it is to follow a strict plan on the weekends, especially in the summer, when days out of the house are much longer.
Sunday
Because I didn't like the blueberry muffins from the day before, I stuck with the safe baked oats that I knew I liked from earlier this week. I also had another lunch I had earlier this week with eggs and asparagus with parmesan cheese.
Baked oats with blueberries - I forgot to take a photo before I tucked in (Lydia Royce)For dinner, I finally made the pesto chicken traybake that I had planned for Friday evening, and it was delicious and so easy to make. I just chopped up peppers, courgette and red onion and baked them on a tray along with the chicken breast which was stuffed with pesto. I will definitely be making this again, and it reminded me, after a crappy weekend of indulging, that healthy food can also be really tasty.
The 5:2 diet results
On June 3, I felt extremely heavy, bloated, and tight. By June 6, I was down 4lbs. By June 10, I was down 6lbs. And that was without being as strict with the plan as I might have been.
Now people will say "It's just water weight". And of course it is. If someone goes from eating high sugar and high salt food every day to cutting it out completely, of course that person is going to lose a lot of water weight in the first few days, but that doesn't negate the benefits of losing that water weight. After the first five days I already felt like a different person - I noticed my jeans weren't as tight, my face looked much less puffy, my energy levels were up and I felt much less of a slob. I lost 1% body fat, and my BMI dropped by one point too.
Overall, I am so pleased that I took up the 5:2 plan, simply as a reminder of how good, satisfying and fulfilling a diet based on Mediterranean style food can be. There is so much research out there that shows the Mediterranean diet is the best for health benefits.
And the one food that I can no longer live without? Greek yoghurt. It has become a staple for breakfast, and even snacks. I also use it to make flat breads, pizza bases and cake. I would never have imagined that yoghurt could be as versatile as it is. My colleague ditched sugar and ultra-processed foods for six months and you can see the results and the foods he now can't live without here.
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