The 2-Day Diet is the original 5:2 diet. The rules are simple – two days on, five days off. Just cut your carbs, eat plenty of healthy proteins, nuts, fat and vegetables for two days – and eat healthily for the rest of the week. You don’t have to fast – in fact the diet is designed to help you stay full, and this makes it easier to stick with because you never feel hungry. It’s nutritionally balanced, there’s no calorie counting and there’s loads of choice – so you never get bored. And, rather than forcing you to diet, The 2-Day Diet retrains your eating habits, so the weight stays off.

The 2-Day Diet is low enough in calories to enable you to lose weight without leaving you feeling hungry, it is nutritionally balanced so you get your full vitamin, mineral and protein intake, and it easily fits into a busy lifestyle. It’s effective too – in clinical trials, dieters were more likely to stick to The 2-Day Diet than to other diets, and lost twice as much fat as a calorie controlled diet. On top of the weight you’ll lose – and will keep off – The 2-Day Diet lowers blood pressure, improves well-being, mood and energy, and reduces insulin and levels of other hormones and inflammation in the body known to cause cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

The diet was developed by award winning research dietician Dr Michelle Harvie and Professor of Oncology Tony Howell. The original approach – the Genesis milk diet – was very successful and showed that dieting for just two days a week worked. But, this diet only allowed a limited range of foods, and the concern was that people would struggle to stick with it in the long term. So over the next seven years, working on the same principles, they developed The 2-Day Diet.

The final version of this ground-breaking diet involves two consecutive days of low-carb, high-protein eating, and healthy Mediterranean style eating the rest of the week. It has been extensively tested on a large number of dieters. The results of these tests (which are covered in their book) show that intermittent dieting is more effective and easier to follow than a standard continuous diet – a 65% success rate versus 40% – and that it retrains your appetite on the unrestricted days to eat fewer calories. As mentioned before, on The 2-Day Diet you don’t count your calories, but overall you will be eating around half of your normal intake. The 2-Day Diet is designed to maximise fat loss, minimise muscle loss, and keep you feeling full.