To count or not to count on feast days?

To count on feast days or not to count.  That is the question.

The first week I started on 5:2 I wasn't watching what I was eating on my feast days and still lost weight.  Then in my second week, I started counting on feast days too just to have an idea of the calories I was taking in.  While I did keep track, I wasn't overly strict about it.

While this was going on I was also a part of a 5:2 group on facebook that consists of 12K people at the moment.  There is much debate on where one should count calories on feast days.  So, like any normal person who wants to stuff their face with as much food as possible while still loosing weight, I gave up the counting.  See if you can see where I did this in my chart below:

Did you see that little blip over on the right side?   Yep...that is the week that I stopped keeping track of my calories on feast days.  Probably, you can also notice when I started keeping track again.

What did this tell me?   Well, it tells me, that for me personally, I need to keep track obviously.  I don't think that I go crazy on feast days, but what I do when I'm keeping track is that I'll swap stuff out.  For example, if I feel like a glass of wine after dinner, I might forgo the pasta and have extra broccoli.

So my little experiment set me back 2 weeks in my weight loss, but I learned a valuable lesson.