The surprisingly spiritual benefits of Mosley’s 5:2 diet

Having lost weight and discovered the advantages of feeling hungry, George Pitcher is grateful to Dr Michael Mosley for popularising the ancient spiritual practice of fasting. Just don’t be smug about it, he says

I have the late Dr Michael Mosley to thank for making me less of the man I am today. A decade ago, after 20 years of what we were pleased to call “business lunches”, I had ballooned into a self-satisfied whale.

I was persuaded to go on Mosley’s 5:2 Diet, which consists of consuming a maximum of 500 calories on two separate days of the week and largely eating what you like (within reason) for the other five. I gradually lost four stone, which overdid things a bit and people said I looked ill, or “like a geography teacher on a field day”. So I regained a stone and stabilised with a 6:1 maintenance diet.

I’m aware that last paragraph makes me a contender for world’s most boring dinner-party guest, so let me get, I hope, to a more engaging point. Mosley called it the Fast Diet. In some of my old jobs, which were basically talking nonsense for large sums of money (and lunches), I would have called that terrible branding.