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Dieting fads are bordering on the ridiculous.
Notice how with every change of season or at the end of a major holiday the buzz is all about the latest dieting trend? Every new diet would promise to finally unlock the secret to losing 10 kilograms a week (impossible) while living on food item X combined with food item Y (yeah right) resulting in that slim physique you’ve always dreamed about! Yeah, right. Meanwhile, long queues form outside the latest fast food restaurant to hit our shores and we wonder why we’re all getting fatter. But have no fear!
With Finns recently crowned the most overweight of the Nordic countries, the latest diet is here to rescue us all from our ever-expanding waistlines and general pudginess. As 6D mentioned already last year, it is the diet to end all diets. Because, with it, you don’t eat. That’s right. The “Fast diet” (aka the 5+2 diet), involves eating normally five days a week and fasting for two days a week, where calories are cut to the bare minimum.
Apparently packed with numerous health benefits such as improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels, plus better insulin sensitivity, naysayers call it a stepping stone to disordered eating.
The jury is still out. But one thing’s for certain: this joins the likes of the Baby Food Diet, the Blood-Type Diet, detoxing, the Atkins diet, the French Woman Diet, the Paleo Diet and the Karl Lagerfeld Diet, to name but a few of the calorie curbing options available.
But do any of these actually work?! Cutting out this, indulging in that, with a pinch of whatever, is the final equation more of a matter of just exercising more than you eat? And making sure that you’re not going overboard with the burgers and fries?
Anyway, the proof of each diet’s success, as they say, is in the pudding. Which you typically don’t get to eat anyway.
Tania Nathan
