With Christmas coming up I thought this would be the perfect
time to share with you my dieting do’s and don’ts.
There is always a diet revolution capturing the public
imagination; a celebrity or medical-maverick endorsed program that promises to
help you lose more weight, faster, with less effort – from only eating foods of
a certain colour, at a certain time of day etc.
Dieting isn’t easy. If losing weight was as simple as piling
it on, the term ‘super-morbidly obese’ might never have been coined, and the
phrase ‘we’re going to need the winch for this one’ wouldn’t be the second-most
common phrase used by firemen after: ‘someone get the ladder, that cat just
isn’t coming down....’
Some diets are backed by solid research and provide you with
the nutrients and energy needed to stay healthy in retirement, but others can
be downright dangerous.
Crash diets are like an odd reversion of the ‘stone soup’
story that I used to read my children. For those of you who were never read
bedtime stories (or never read to your kids) it’s about a couple of travellers
who visit a nearby town and claim that they can make a delicious soup with just
a pan of water and a stone. The villagers are understandably sceptical, but
hungry, so oblige. “Now all we need are some potatoes” they say, so the
villagers bring a sack of potatoes. “Now all we need are some leeks” they say –
so the villagers bring armfuls of leaks, and so on until they have all the
ingredients for a delicious soup. The chefs take out the magic stone – and
voila! Stone soup, made with nothing but a stone, a pan of water, and all the
villagers’ vegetables.
Any diet that revolves around the principle of ‘eat very
little of the same low calories, bland food for breakfast and lunch and that eat
whatever for your dinner!’ is so blatantly ridiculous you’d think that people
would laugh it off – but they don’t, because all the buzz created by
testimonials such as: “I lost 40 pounds on the cereal/cabbage soup diet – it
really works!” complete with obviously doctored photographs. Of course you can
eat very little of something healthy for two meals, build up a calorie deficit
(remain ravenously hungry and dangerously irritable throughout the day) and
then eat a large dinner and lose weight.
REMEMBER: Don’t starve yourself, not least because not
eating isn’t the quickest way to lose weight as it slows your metabolism,
causing you to burn calories at a slower rate than a well-regulated eating and
exercise program. You need to choose the foods that will make you feel most
full whilst giving you the nutrients you need.
Use common sense and don’t cling on to fads that promise you
miracle results for minimal efforts. You will slip into a cycle of hope and
despair that will only make you want to eat even more.
