Nonsense slimming diets

Part 5: The pattern repeats

1994 saw the return of the infamous Hay diet in a proliferation of 'food-combining' diet books. I walked around a well-known bookshop and counted five different ones. The combinations varied from book to book. In one breakfast cereals were listed as 'carbohydrate' and milk was 'protein'. Presumably you have your cornflakes dry for breakfast and the milk at lunchtime! Two books said that bread and meat could be eaten together, while two others said they could not. Frenchman, Michel Montignac, has his own food-combining method, which differs significantly from Hay's. If both of them work, then obviously, it cannot be because of the way foods are combined. Incidentally, Montignac states that rice is a complete food, containing all the nutrients needed to sustain a healthy life. This is patently untrue: rice contains no vitamins A, B-12, C or D, very little iron or calcium and is deficient in some of the essential amino acids. Even if it weren't, you would need to eat over 2 kg (4lbs) of it every day merely to get sufficient protein.

Calories don't count

All these modern slimming diets have a fatal flaw they rely on trying to measure the amount of energy a person uses and tailor their intake of energy (calories) to be lower. To do this the total amount of calories is measured regardless of its source. But, as we saw in Chapter Two, this is patently silly as it assumes that all food eaten is used to provide energy.

Cellulite — the truth

After puberty, a woman's thighs tend to develop an 'orange peel' effect. You do not have to be overweight for this to happen it happens to slim women as well and it is perfectly natural. The phenomenon is restricted to women as part of the process of coming to sexual maturity. This store of fat, for that is what it is, prepares a woman for childbearing and, primarily, for lactation. But it can be unsightly and women do not like it. A French cosmetic company gave fat in this part of the body the name cellulite as an advertising gimmick in order to sell its products. And so began a myth.

Women are told all sorts of nonsense about cellulite. The most usual seems to be that it is a store of the body's waste material. Rosemary Conley in her book The Complete Hip and Thigh Diet , talking about constipation, states on page 205: "if the waste matter is not leaving the body through the normal channels the body will store it away from the bloodstream and again the islands of fat cells causing cellulite provide the perfect storehouse". It's patently silly to imagine that if a woman does not go to the lavatory, her body will deposit its faeces in her legs! This sort of thing is utter rubbish - yet women fall for it. As men also suffer from constipation - but don't get cellulite - I wonder where Conley imagines their waste goes?

The removal of cellulite has become the goal of many a slimmer. The problem is that women generally do not want to lose weight from their busts at the same time. This has led to dietary regimes which are so selective that, their inventors claim, a dieter can reduce some parts of her body, invariably the lower parts, while leaving other (upper) parts untouched. My experience is that with all diets, including that advocated in my own Natural Health & Weight Loss , weight loss is invariably from the top down. Thus, your chest and then your tummy are more likely to lose their excess fat before the excess will start to disappear from your thighs. You cannot do it the other way around. It is fortunate that this is the healthiest way to do. However, the myth of cellulite has led to a plethora of diets, massage creams and exercises which make their inventors rich while having little effect on the perceived problem.

Liquid protein diets

Most diets allow slimmers to eat 1,000 calories per day. In 1975 a much more worrying trend began when a different form of diet the very-low-calorie, liquid protein diet was introduced, which allowed only between 300 and 600 calories a day. The first was The Last Chance Diet devised by an osteopath, Robert Linn. His formula was manufactured from sow's belly and cowhide. The resulting 'Prolinn' was a gelatinous protein with little nutritional value and which was so deficient in amino acids as to be insufficient to sustain life. Not surprisingly, there were a number of deaths among those taking it. Although it claimed to affect only body fat, post-mortem examinations on the dieters showed that many who had died had lost a large proportion of protein from their heart muscle.

The Last Chance Diet was discredited. Nevertheless, in 1980 a version of it, The Cambridge Diet , was launched, heavily advertised as 'a new scientific breakthrough'. Again a liquid protein diet, the Cambridge Diet was based on skimmed milk. In nutritional terms, this was an improvement on Prolinn, but not by much. There were more deaths. Other adverse side effects included constipation, diarrhoea, dizziness, headaches, hair loss and loss of blood pressure on rising from a sitting or lying position. In spite of widespread condemnation in the medical press, the Cambridge Diet crossed the Atlantic into Britain in 1985.

In 1983 came the Amazing Micro Diet, yet another very-low-calorie liquid diet manufactured by a company trading as Uni-Vite Nutrition. By 1985, its inventors estimated 500,000 Micro-Dieters in Britain. This concoction allowed only 330 calories a day and promised weight losses of between 16 and 20 pounds a month. In their book that explains the diet, the authors show how nutritious it is by comparing it with 330 calories worth of sweets!

Liquid diets, however, are popular with long-term users who find the preparations acceptable. Short-term weight loss is usually quite quick and according to Dr Susan Jebb, a sub-set achieve a long-term weight loss. But there are concerns about the loss of muscle and other lean tissue in those using these diets for a long time.

These formula diets are real money-spinners. Many of the ingredients that go into their manufacture are waste products of the food industry such as skimmed milk powder and bran. They cost very little to make but are sold through 'counsellors' at hugely inflated prices. They are dangerous and expensive, yet they sell. History has shown that they are totally unnecessary.