Yesterday was my 10th (full) fasting day, which means I’m about to head into my sixth week of 5:2. Hooray! Yesterday was a great fasting day – I actually didn’t feel hungry, nor did my brain start to fade, until 4 pm – so I didn’t eat anything (besides a cup of coffee) until 4 pm. Unfortunately my morning didn’t start off so smoothly though. Yesterday, I learned what happens when calorie counting goes wrong.
When I first started considering 5:2, the very first food I checked on CalorieKing was coffee. After all, a day that starts with coffee is manageable no matter how few calories you can have. A day without coffee… not so much. So I distinctly remember looking up the calories of the coffee itself, and being surprised to find that there’s pretty much zero calories there, then looking up skim milk. A 220ml (small) coffee with skim milk is approximately 70 calories.
Unfortunately for me this seems to be the point where I got myself confused. At home we always have Paul’s Pure Organic Unhomogenised Full Cream Milk in the fridge. It’s delicious, and from the start I assumed I couldn’t have it on fasting days- but I looked it up anyway. I think what I probably did at this point was get the 70 calories confused with the milliliters of milk in the drink, thus looking up 70 ml of milk and finding it had about the same number of calories. Which means for the last five weeks I’ve been consuming an extra 100 calories each fasting day, bringing my total to somewhere around 600 calories. Bugger.
Anyway, the fix to this is easy – switch the full cream milk for skim in my morning coffee on fasting days. Done! That’s an easy 100 calorie swap, and without even noticing it (I normally order skim lattes when I’m buying them anyway) I’ll have dropped down to 500. The interesting thing will be to see what effect taking that extra 100 calories out has in terms of weight loss. The 5:2 is definitely having an effect, although it’s very slow. Don’t get me wrong, slow and steady is great, especially because it’s sustainable, but I did think there might be some faster changes at the very beginning. Maybe this change of 100 calories will make the difference!
On the Right Track 
Have you tried almond milk? It has fewer calories but some can’t stand it.
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I have – although my first few almond milk coffees were with beautiful freshly made almond milk, which makes everything else taste horrible by comparison. I’ve been a bit spoiled! Have you tried hazelnut milk? A hazelnut milk hot chocolate’s pretty awesome!
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Never tried it but I’ll have too.
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I am not counting milk so far, it will have to be counted soon enough! I would say my first week’s loss isn’t so huge (2 lbs) in part to my milk consumption. However, breaking myself back into this way of eating, I am happy to have the odd cuppa with milk to get me through x
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