Waist not want not — the 5-2 diet works

TIME flies. It is now a tad over a year since I went on the 5-2 diet.

It resulted from watching a BBC program that did a thorough expose on the diet industry and another program by Michael Mosely, a medical doctor and journalist, who quickly summarised all that was wrong with the diet industry and then went in search of the best medical advice to see what was the best way to loose weight.

Watching it I became ever more self-conscious of my gradual weight increase over the years. For a long time I was 92kg, but it had crept up to 97.5kg. That is 10kg overweight for someone my height.

I am the sort of bloke who can eat a 200 gram steak and put on three kilos.

Mosely worked out that you could get gradual weight loss and other benefits like improved cardio-vascular performance by fasting for just two days a week. Initially, Mosely did consecutive days. Add sleeping either side at night and you get a 56-hour fast.

More advice suggested that the days need not be consecutive.

But I did the full two-day consecutive fast for 10 weeks and wrote about the result. A loss of 10kg. My weight was 87kg not 97kg.

So a year after starting the diet where are we?

I have not had to go back on to the 5-2 diet. The 10 kg has not gone back on. I am still 87kg.

I even survived a three-week trip to the US – the land of the stegosaurus-sized spare rib.

When you invest in 10 weeks of belt-tightening you do not want to lose the investment so you eat with care. Moreover, the 5-2 diet does not result in cravings for food after the two-day fast. To the contrary, big eating becomes, well, er, unpalatable.

After the admittedly a very difficult 10-week 5-2 diet , the rest is easier. I weigh myself every day. If ever the scales approach 88kg I know restraint is needed.

I don’t ever want to do the full 5-2 diet for 10 weeks ever again. Much easier to cut down on serving size or not eat for two-thirds of a day.

It is surprisingly easy after 10 weeks of 5-2.

I was brought up not to waste and eat everything on the plate. “Starving children in Africa” and all that. Now I no longer regard leaving the excess as waste, rather eating it is the waste (no pun intended).

So, a year later I am reporting back – the 5-2 diet is one of the best things I have ever done. The results look like being permanent. And maybe I will live longer than my father who died of a heart attack aged 67.

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This week in Canada, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won 39.5 per cent of the vote and won majority government with 54% of the seats in the House of Commons.

In 1975 Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party got 43 per cent of the vote but was swept out of office with just 28 per cent of the seats.

That’s electoral systems for you. It also shows the effect of the rise of minor parties.

In 1975 the two major parties (counting the Coalition as one party) got 96 per cent of the vote. In Canada this week they got 16 per cent. In Australia in 2013 they got 21 per cent.

The single member system is delivering winning parties far more seats than their vote would warrant. It usually delivers the losing major party more or about the right number of seats for their votes (the Canadian Conservatives got 29 per cent of the seats for their 32 per cent of the vote and Labor in 2013 got 38 per cent of the seats with 33 per cent of the vote).

And the minor parties lose out unless they are geographically based like the National Party in Australia (which gets rural seats) and the Bloc Quebecois in Canada.

The Greens in 2013 got 8.7 per cent of the vote and 0.7 per cent of the seats.

David Cameron’s Conservatives in Britain did similarly to Trudeau’s Liberals last election – get a substantial majority with a minority of the vote. The UK Liberal-Democrats got many fewer seats than their vote warranted.

It is not very good for democracy because it erodes confidence and angers a fair slice of the electorate, even when tempered with an Upper House elected on a proportional basis and preferential voting, as in Australia.

Electoral systems matter. Unfortunately, changes to the electoral system are made by those who are elected — who usually act in their own interests rather than the interests of fairness and democracy.

But there are exceptions. The ACT and New Zealand are cases in point.

In both cases moves away from single-member electorates were greeted with predictions of chaos.

But both the ACT’s Hare-Clark system and New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional system have provided stable, workable government with arguably more co-operation and opposition for opposition’s sake than seen in the Federal Parliament.

The system for electing senators is utterly corrupted. Micro-party candidates with less than 1 per cent of the vote have been elected. The new Special Minister of State, Mal Brough, says he hopes to change it in time for the next election. Good luck with that.

If it is not changed for next year’s election, the Feds should look closely at what happens in the next ACT election.

They will see the so-called preference whisperer, political strategist Glenn Druery, fall flat on his face. Druery masterminded the preference swapping deals among micro-parties in the Senate election in 2013 and plans to advise ACT micro-party candidates on how to do the same thing.

But we do not have above-the-line voting and the order of candidates is randomly generated, appearing differently on different ballot papers. Power is with the voter, not with the parties and the preference dealers.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Fairfax Media on 24 October 2015.