The second week of my 16-week challenge to drop from ~20% to 10% body fat has also not gone as planned! However, it was an improvement over the first week.

I decided to make the lean days into actual fasts, to see if not eating was easier than eating only a little bit. In the end, it wasn’t easier, but because of the health benefits of a full fast, I have decided to switch to full fasts and see what happens.

Here’s the hard data:

• Monday: fast day. I broke down at 18:45 and had 1000 calories.
• Tuesday: maintenance day. I had only one snack brought to me lovingly by my wife (and I couldn’t say no, it was a spontaneous thing), totalling 200 calories.
• Wednesday: fast day. Successful! It was hard, and even when I was going to sleep I was thinking about eating.
• Thursday: maintenance day. since I had the afternoon off for an event, I went into “weekend mode” and had at least an extra meal, totalling 500 calories.
• Friday: maintenance day. Had a few snacks with some drinks late at night, but given the high volume of training I had that morning, I consider this to be within the rules.
• Saturday: maintenance day. Another “weekend mode” day, where I overate by at least 1500 calories.
• Sunday: maintenance day. The “weekend mode” persisted, albeit more tempered, by probably 500 calories.

This week I created a deficit of 3500 calories and overate by about 3000 calories. So the net loss was negligible, less than 1000 calories. Measured like that, progress was very small this week.

In terms of days, I did do a full fast (out of two), and I managed to not snack on two days (Tuesday’s snack doesn’t count). That’s already better than last week.

The output numbers look a bit better: I am at 76.8, the exact same weight as last Monday. Waist remained at 94cm. The weekly average was better for weight (75.6kg vs 76.2kg last week) but worse for waist (93.1cm vs 92.5cm last week).

Some more notes on what worked and what I want to change:

• The 5:2 pattern is great, I’m definitely sticking to that.
• I’m also sticking to doing full fasts, despite the fact that they are harder than lean days. I’m interested in two things: 1) the health benefits; 2) the fact that it’s much easier to draw a clear boundary on the eating rules for that particular day (“no food” is clearer than a “little bit of food”). The extra 500 calorie deficit is just gravy.
• I started using again the Zero app for tracking my fasts. Thanks to it, my Wednesday fast survived multiple near-misses.
• Meditation also helped a couple of times during urges in the lean days.

Will report again next week!