An Introduction

I am a 27 year old woman and have been a type 1 diabetic since I was 15, and use insulin in injection form. I have always been interested in fasting but never really attempted it through a (not irrational) fear of hypos. I have also had depression since a young age, and in June/July 2013 an extremely bad episode decreased my appetite considerably, something that had not really happened to such an extent before. This led to the bad relationship I have had with food since my diabetes diagnosis to escalate into something more: I more or less stopped eating for about 3 months. While obviously being bad for my health, the experience did reveal more about how much insulin my body used when food was out of the picture (I needed about a third of my basal insulin dose, about 12 units, and basically no bolus).

Since then I have managed to get my calorie intake to a much more healthy level (probably between 1400-1900 a day). One method of trying to get back to eating properly was to eat a much more healthy diet - basically to 'eat clean', to reduce my snacking where possible, and to do more exercise. This way I could encourage myself to eat more without feeling guilty. 

I heard of the 5:2 diet from a friend, while talking about religious fasting in our Bible study group. (My friend's sister had easily lost over a stone and a half by following the regime.) After this, I kept hearing about the diet from various different sources. Almost a year ago now, I went onto an online forum, asking whether anyone with diabetes had any experience of the diet, which was 'not recommended' for diabetics, but sounded really good to someone keen to lose excess baby weight from two pregnancies. A few people gave some interesting replies, but none with any great detail of insulin amounts etc, such as I would need if I were to follow the diet myself, and because I knew that I had quite sudden changes in insulin sensitivity from fasting. I was also breastfeeding twins once a day at the time! However now, no longer breastfeeding, and with the new insight and motivation, I decided to try the 5:2 again.

As I am still technically overweight (BMI of 25.9, just over the 'healthy' range of 18.5 - 25), and still struggle with depression and eating issues, I am hoping that this will be a good way of managing my weight in a healthy way, reducing my insulin sensitivity, and generally improving my health. This blog is a detailed log of my experiences with fasting and diabetes.