I’ve bought the book. Had it about 3 months. Still not started…

To the OP.

Good luck. It worked for me. My advice:

– empty your cupboards of all the crap
– plan a week’s meals and shop for just those ingredients
– you will get hungry, black or green tea got me through the pangs
– if the hunger becomes unbearable snack on plan – nuts work well

I was surprised how well I got on. I was less hungry than expected and really only ravenous after some exercise.

There’s some good support on the BSD website and also groups on Facebook.

You can’t eat many nuts if you’re on 800 calories a day!

I would echo a large number of the positive comments made here (and ignore the naysayers).  I wasn’t overweight, but had put weight on in a lot of hard to shift places (midrift, manboobs) when I started.  For reference, 5ft 11 and was 12st 4lbs.  Started with some scepticism about 5 weeks ago and thought I’d be starving all the time and riding would be a challenge.  I’ve had to adapt to accommodate and 8hr plus week bike training plan.  I’ve lost 8lbs in that period, and would echo a comment about about the joy of feeling hungry again.  Plenty of standard white carb substitutes such as quinoa wholegrain rice, chick peas and other pulses / beans.  I’ve spent time considering my recovery from longer  / harder rides with whole milk and full fat yoghurt recovery  shake.

I’m convinced there is still a few more lbs to come off, and will continue for a few more weeks to see if the progress remains.

What I’ve learnt: –

Good fat = less hungry

Greater protein intake = less hungry

No white carbs / sugar or seriously restricting this = less hungry

Time restricted eating (down to approx. 8-10 hour window) = less hungry

So, my take is that it works and I was certainly very cynical to begin with.

Just following up on this to see how people are going. My shock came when I realised I was 50lbs heavier than when I did the TCR in 2015 and my 8 year old weights 58lbs! 10lbs added during the first 6 months of lock down. So though I’d give this a go. 8 months ago id given up full fat coke and switched to pepsi max and obviously this wasn’t helping. So the first week of fast800 was hard, getting rid of the sugar and caffeine out of your body. Since the middle of week 2 it’s not been too bad and it is surprising what you can eat for 800 calories. I’m having 200 cal breakfast at 10am, 300 cals at lunch and 300 cals at dinner before 6pm. And loads of water…. So far in 21 days I’ve lost 20lbs. So happy with that. Working from home has made this easier, as it is easy to hide the hangry and temptations.

So 4.6kg lost in the first 3 weeks of the programme.
I’d lost a couple of kgs before I formally started it, so I’m hoping this is fat lossy rather than water/glycogen.
I’ve not stuck to 800 cals every day, but usually sub 1000. I’m not using strictly following the meals because I’m also cooking for the rest of the family, but doing what I can.
If I can stay clear of the bread, it’s much easier. At this rate I might hit my intermediate target by Christmas 🤞

I’m rather late to the conversation but doing the fast 800 I’ve lost a stone and a half/10kg in ten weeks. Gone from 16st 10lbs to 15st 3lbs or 106kg to 96 kg. My BMI was 32 now I’m a shade under 30 (so now overweght not obese). It is very doable and I’ve rarely felt hungry. As above a lot of the days have been more like 1000 calories. having a week off now as on holiday in Northern Scotland, but I’m confident I can lose whatever I put on this week within a week or so and then push on and lose another stone without feeling hungry all the time.
I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to shift weight.

And another kilo this week. Maybe a bit of a plateaux, but still feeling good on it.

If I had my way in a Bond villain-y sort of way I’d measure numbers monthly rather than daily/weekly. Sadly for my world domination plans, the evidence suggests that each person should decide to what degree they follow their numbers (some find it a positive motivating thing, others find it negative), so I don’t get to tell people…. To be clear body fat loss is the metric we are interested in (not the same as weight loss), and muscle loss is to be avoided. Fluid shifts will mess up the scales hourly/daily/weekly and to a lesser extent monthly (hence daily/weekly weights are often not telling us as much useful information about the type of weight loss as we would like)

My advice is to trust the process. It is such a significant calorie deficit that it cannot not work (in the short term anyway**) so worrying about whether it is working or not is wasted energy.  Following protocol driven diets is easy/hard for a few weeks depending on your personality I guess. If following it is fairly straightforwards then I’d worry less about actually following it/daily and weekly targets, and more about the plan when you come off it. I don’t mean don’t follow it, just focus on the medium to long term changes, rather than whether or not it is working (which it will be if you are properly following it, no matter what the scales say)

** In my experience there is a definite slowing down in fat loss after around 8-12 weeks in a reasonable percentage of people. If pushed I’d guess that it is another example of the body’s amazing ability to adapt, and hence is staving off the fasting mode you have entered (which makes sense from the viewpoint of evolution) and that maybe the body up-regulates the pathway to recycle ketones to use for energy rather than them being waste products. But I’ve not looked into that in any detail so I don’t know. If that happens an option is to move back to a calorie-neutral diet again until the body adapts to that (?3 months… a useful trial run on your new healthy lifestyle in any case) and then decide if you want to go again at the sort of calorie deficit you were doing before.

TLDR: Don’t worry about 1-2 weeks of apparent plateau or even weight gain. Fat is what we are interested in, and the scales aren’t terribly accurate for that in the short term. If 3-4 weeks then consider ** above.

You guys are doing well. As expected. (This is the easy bit though….)