Of course, there are lighter, more enjoyable aspects of living in London: Regent’s Park rose garden, tiny dogs, spotting celebrities
getting keys cut in Timpson’s. And the 5:2 diet. For a brief spell in 2013, everyone was on the 5:2 diet, and I found it very, very amusing.
At this point in the summer of 2013 there is nothing most urban Westerners need more than advice on how to cope with a friend,
colleague, loved one, or fellow lift user who is on the 5:2 diet.
For those who don’t know what the 5:2 is, it is a diet wherein the dieter eats perfectly normally for five days of the week—then
spends the remaining two days on a very restricted diet, of no more than 500 calories for women and 600 for men. The 5:2 is
also referred to as “intermittent fasting,” which gives it a pleasingly religious/medieval air—the subconscious suggestion
being that the dieter will end up not only more slender, but also wiser, calmer, and closer to God.
Current proponents of the diet are bogglingly varied, and are said to include Benedict Cumberbatch (“It’s the only way to
slim down into Sherlock”), Sir Mervyn King, Beyoncé, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and the book The Fast Diet has now sold over 250,000 copies in the UK. So, yes—the 5:2 is all around you. There is no escape. Indeed, you are almost
certainly going to spend some time today with someone who is following it. Here is my advice for you, when that interaction
should happen.
- Establish, as soon as possible—as if it were an emergency—if they are on a “Fast Day” or not. This is key information you
will need to know right up front, before you say or do anything. I cannot stress how vital it is that you discover this. Thankfully, it’s very easy to find out if someone is on a Fast Day,
because anyone on a Fast Day will tend to say “I’m on a Fast Day” in a small, tense voice within thirty seconds of meeting
you. They will then look at you as if expecting you to respond with something that expresses great sympathy—“Oh no! A Fast
Day! You must be very, very hungry!”—but also admiration—“But, then, eating only 500 calories for a whole day is an amazing thing for you to be doing, Sue! Go you!” Bear in mind that even if you do give this perfect greeting—rather than the far more likely nonplussed “Oh”—it’s important for you to realize that, ultimately,
nothing can go well between you and this Fasting person today. This is someone functioning on 40 percent of their brain capacity,
at best—disabled as they are by extreme hunger and constant thoughts of how much they would like some delicious, frangible
buttery toast. They hate you because you are a person who can have some toast. And if you go so far as to eat some toast in front of them, they will turn away in a poorly suppressed murderous
rage, probably to go and stab a picture of you eating some toast, which they are about to draw, in the aching hours of free
time unfilled, today, with lovely breakfasts, dinners, lunches, and snacks. Although any point in the day with someone Fasting
is basically going to be a tense and unpleasant pain in the arse for you, there is a particularly dangerous time:
- Between two and five p.m. on a Fast Day is usually the peak of the hunger—and, therefore, the peak of the danger for you.
During this spike in hunger, brain capacity appears to drop as low as 9 percent, and Fasters become actively evil. Like demons.
Personally, were I prime minister, I would make it so people you were talking to on the phone had to say, at the start of
the conversation, “It’s four thirty p.m. and I’m on a Fast Day,” and then you could just simply put the phone down before
they inexplicably refuse to process your claim, send out an engineer to mend your boiler, or authorize an emergency crew to
come and cut you, bleeding, out of the wreckage of your car. NB: In all likelihood, the person who just crashed into your car was someone else on a Fast Day, who’d just driven past a Burger
King, and was blind with tears of hunger.
- Often the rage suddenly turns to sorrow, accompanied by massive physical weakness. You see fully grown women struggling to
open a can of Diet Coke; or big men trying to turn stiff door handles before collapsing, shouting, “My wrists suddenly feel
as limp and powerless as Cheestrings. Oh GOD! HELP ME! THINK MY BODY HAS STARTED TO CONSUME ITSELF FROM WITHIN!” Operating
a photocopier is beyond these people at this point—you will have to do it for them. You will essentially become one of those
Helping Hands monkeys that disabled people have—but for a thirty-eight-year-old accountant from Hackney.
- Smugness. On “normal days,” this: “I’ve lost three-quarters of a stone!” they will say, folding fistfuls of chips into their
mouths. And you’ll be all like, “Hang on—you only did that because we didn’t kill you on the days you were behaving like a Roid Rage Colin from The Secret Garden! This is society’s achievement—not yours!” But they just sit there, being a size 10, not listening.