5:2 Diet – Fast Days & Feast Days, Weekly Meal Plan and a LOW CALORIE Breakfast Omelette Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the 5 and 2 meal plan? ›

The 5:2 diet is actually very simple to explain. For five days per week, you eat normally and don't have to think about restricting calories. Then, on the other two days, you reduce your calorie intake to a quarter of your daily needs. This is about 500 calories per day for women, and 600 for men.

A typical 500-calorie fasting day might include oatmeal with fresh blueberries for breakfast, a tangerine for a snack, and a chicken and vegetable stir-fry for dinner. You will drink lots of water and may also have calorie-free beverages such as tea, coffee (no milk or sugar), and club soda.

The idea is that you restrict your calories to 500 for women and 600 for men, for two days a week and the other five days you eat a normal healthy diet. Typically men need 2400kcals a day and women need 2000kcals a day, however on the fasting days you will only have a quarter of your usual allowance.

To lose 10 pounds in one week, you'll need to burn between 3,500 and 5,000 calories more than you consume each day by restricting your diet to small portions of nutritious yet low-calorie foods, and significantly increasing your aerobic exercise with interval training, sports, and other vigorous activities.

So researchers thought burning or cutting 500 calories a day led to losing 1 pound a week. But this isn't true for everyone. In general, if you cut about 500 calories a day from your usual diet, you may lose about ½ to 1 pound a week.

If you can eat 500 fewer calories every day, you should lose about a pound (450 g) a week. Always talk with your health care provider to determine a healthy weight for you before starting a weight-loss diet.

Studies suggest that the 5:2 diet is as effective as calorie restriction for weight loss and may offer some additional benefits such as improvements in fasting blood sugar and appetite management.

The premise of 2 Meal Day is that by eating just two meals in a day — either breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner, thus introducing a daily 16-hour fasting period — you can retrain your body to become "fat adapted," meaning you burn stored body fat for energy, rather than being dependent on sugars from food.

On the 5 2 diet plan, you can eat what you like for 5 days of the week, and then dramatically scale back your calorie intake for 2 days (hence the 5:2 diet name). Supporters of the diet like the fact it's relatively simple to follow compared to other diets.

Can you do 5 and 2 diet consecutive days? ›

The 500 or 600 calories can be eaten throughout the day as snacks, or as one or two meals. And the two days of fasting do not have to be consecutive - they could, for example, be a Tuesday and a Friday. You should try not to compensate for the lower calorie intake on the 2 days by overeating on the other 5 days.