Hi there,

Thanks for your question and I'm sorry to hear you're not losing weight as you'd hoped.

I've had a look at your diary, and am a little concerned that you might not be having enough calories. As you are following a 5:2 eating plan, you should be having around 500 / 600 calories on your fasting days, but then around to 2,000 calories on your non-fasting days. I can see that on most of your non-fasting days you are only having 1,200-1,400 calories. Although you may think that having less calories will help you to lose weight faster, this can actually have the opposite effect.

If you look at your calorie intake over the course of the week (in the week view), you are around 2,000 calories short for the week (based on if you were having a 1,400 calorie intake every day). Coupled with the increased amount of exercise that you're doing, this could be having a negative effect on your weight loss.

The reason this might be happening is because the body tries to protect itself against a time when there might not be enough food. The body begins to shut down some of its metabolic processes (almost like going on a 'go slow') to preserve energy. The net effect of this is that less calories are used, and more are conserved and saved in the body, which may result in no weight loss, and sometimes weight gain.

If you want to continue with the 5:2 way of eating, then I would strongly advise you to eat more calories on your non-fasting days. You should at least be reaching your 1,400 calorie allowance, but it would be better still if you increased this to 1,600 - 1,800 calories to counteract the fasting days, and the increase in exercise. If you feel that 5:2 isn't working for you, then try going back to having your calorie allowance every day of the week - sticking to a more continuous calorie intake could help your body to get back on track.

Your food choices are good, and I can see that you're having loads of veggies which is great. Maybe try and add in a few more protein rich foods during the day such as low fat dairy foods, lean meats (chicken, turkey, fish, meat with no visible fat etc), vegetarian protein sources such as Quorn etc. This will increase your calories plus help to keep hunger locked up too.

My advice would be to try increasing your calories for a couple of weeks whilst keeping everything else (e.g. your exercise + food choices) the same. Hopefully your body will start to recognise the calorie deficit, but not see it as starvation, and will start to use energy more efficiently.

If after a couple of weeks you're still not seeing any changes, please do come back to us and we'll have another look.

All the best

Janet