The Ultimate Party Dress Diet... with the BEST EVER 5:2 RECIPES
By Dr Clare Bailey with DR MICHAEL MOSLEY
WE HAVE given you the science behind the Clever Guts diet and why it works so well to improve your gut health and help flatten your stomach. Today, we’ll show you how combining Clever Guts with the now famous 5:2 regime will get you into that Christmas party dress by giving even better results than just following one or the other.
In 2012 Michael found, through a random blood test, that he was a type 2 diabetic. Rather than start medication, he decided to see if there was a more natural way to reverse it. He spoke to scientists and learned about intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting doesn’t mean cutting out food altogether. It means reducing calories, fairly dramatically, for a couple of days a week. Intrigued, he made a documentary called Eat, Fast And Live Longer, with himself as a guinea pig.
It included seeing what would happen if he cut his calorie intake to around 600-800 calories a day for two days a week, and did this for eight weeks. He found it surprisingly easy, and on what he was now calling a 5:2 diet lost 20lb, took 4in off his waist and, most impressive of all, reversed his diabetes. That was how the internationally best-selling The Fast Diet book was born.
There are various reasons why this works so well. It’s partly because you aren’t constantly on a diet, which makes a big psychological difference. If you can’t eat your favourite meal today, perhaps you can have it tomorrow.
But there’s a more fundamental reason. Because the calorie restriction forces you to cut out rubbish on fasting days and eat vegetables and good quality fats and proteins, you start to change the bacteria in your gut. And with more of the healthy bacteria in your gut, you’re more likely to crave healthy food when hungry than sweet-tasting junk, even on non-fasting days.
There is one particularly important type of bacteria called Akkermansia that flourishes when we fast or cut down on our calories.
Akkermansia thrives on fast days because, unlike most other microbes in your gut, they don’t live on the remains of the food that makes its way down into their home, the large intestine. Instead, they feast on the mucus that your gut wall secretes to protect itself against attack by the trillions of microbes that live in the gut.
Oddly enough, the presence of Akkermansia actually strengthens and thickens this protective mucus layer, reducing the risk of inflammation in the gut. A recent study found people with higher levels of Akkermansia in their gut, who went on a diet, lost more belly fat and had better blood- sugar control than those with lower levels. The good news is short-term fasting has been shown to boost levels of Akkermansia. People often misinterpret the 5:2 approach, claiming it lets you eat ‘whatever you like’ on days you don’t fast. This is not true. Especially if you hope to lose weight. The best way to do 5:2 is to ensure that on days when you’re not fasting, you eat a healthy, diverse diet. That’s why, when it comes to weight loss, it works so well with the Clever Guts diet, which not only encourages you to eat a varied spread of foods, but also puts fermented foods, such as live yoghurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and kefir, front and centre.
It prioritises foods that either feed the friendly microbes that live in your gut or are packed full of these friendly bacteria. People with a mixed bag of a microbiome tend to be thinner than those with a more depleted population, so a diet that encourages a diverse range of bacteria is very good.
After a few years of intermittent fasting Michael knows the pitfalls that will lead you astray and tricks that will help you succeed — so read on for his tips to make your fasting days as successful as possible. Although the original fasting diet book suggested men eat 600 calories on fast days and women 500, some people struggled. Recent studies suggest 800 is more doable while giving similar benefits.
To kick things off, we’ve put together four days of meal plans that all come in at around the 800-calorie mark and still give you delicious and nutritious breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
If you don’t w the hassle of calorie counting, follow these plans two days a week, and stick to the basic principles of the Clever Guts diet for the rest of the week. Not only will you love the tastes and flavours, you’ll love how it makes you feel — and look.