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The 2-day diet has a totally different root to the 5:2 diet, despite its similarity in name and action.

The 2-day diet grew out of some amazing research by Dr Michele Harvie at the University of Manchester over the last few years. Harvie is a breast cancer specialist and has been looking at ways to reduce breast cancer risks through diet. She has done experiments with groups of overweight women, where she radically changed their diets just two days a week. The diet has many similarities to 5:2, in that you restrict calories two days a week and eat normally for five. But the calories are restricted to 650 for both men and women and the food eaten on a fast day is more prescriptive – it includes a certain amount of milk and is totally carbohydrate free (rather like the Atkins diet) on the fast days. Most contrastive to the 5:2 diet is that the two days must be consecutive.

Her research highlighted two important things. First, that dieting two days a week was easier and that more people stuck to it than dieting all the time. Harvie compared two groups of women. The first group fasted two days a week and the second group followed a standard calorie-restricted diet, sticking to 1500 calories a day. After three months of following the diets, the research showed that intermittent fasters were almost twice as likely to stick to their diet.

The second and most impressive finding of her research was the reduction in a breast-cancer-causing hormone called leptin, which was reduced on average by 40 per cent, and a drop in insulin levels of 25 per cent, cutting the diabetes risk in these women.