Читать книгу The 5:2 Bikini Diet: Over 140 Delicious Recipes That Will Help You Lose Weight, Fast! Includes Weekly Exercise Plan and Calorie Counter - Jacqueline Whitehart, Jacqueline Whitehart - Страница 41

If you are reading this without reading the section above about eating healthily on your normal days, then please have a look. It is by far the most likely reason that you are not achieving the desired weight loss. If, however, you think you are eating healthily on those days but would like to give yourself an extra push, then there are a number of additional options worth trying in the short term to help you reach your goals.

One of the things to try is extending the window. This means increasing the length of time you are fasting. A standard window might be from the last thing you eat the night before the fast until the time you eat breakfast the following morning. So if you start the fast on Sunday at 10 p.m. and fast until Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. then the total fasting time would be 34 hours. To extend the window to an optimum 36 hours, you could just make sure that you don’t eat after 8 p.m. on Sunday.

If, on the other hand, you find the 36-hour window a bit too long then you could try a 24-hour fast. This means starting at either 2 p.m. or 8 p.m. after lunch or dinner respectively and fasting until 2 p.m. or 8 p.m. the next day. This is slightly easier as you are eating a normal meal on both days, never having a full-day fast. This is also a good option if you don’t want to lose weight but want to gain some of the health benefits of the diet.

Another way to extend the diet is to add another day, making it a 4:3 diet. Try this if you want to lose some extra weight. The days should be non-consecutive, such as Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Finally, try a mix between the two. This is a kind of two-and-a-half-day diet. Have two normal days of fasting, say Monday and Wednesday – these are 36-hour fasts as described above – then have one day 24-hour fast day, say from 6 p.m. on Thursday to 6 p.m. on Friday. This is something I do occasionally and means I still get my relaxed weekend.