It’s no easy feat losing weight and many of us try and do it “the quick way” by crash dieting and drastically cutting calorie intake.
This is especially true after the Christmas and New Year binge, where everyone is feeling bloated and is desperate to rid themselves of the newly acquired bulge.
There are loads to choose from: Atkins, the baby food diet, the metabolism diet, and what could be better than shedding half a stone in just a few days?
Is this sounding too good to be true?
Well maybe that’s because it is.
Over the past few weeks I have put a few well known diets to the test to see how much weight you can lose, and more importantly, how much you can keep off after resuming a healthy-normal daily diet.
We all know that it’s not healthy to crash diet but the allure of a quick fix is too great.
However, what I found out by doing two well known “fad diets” is that the results aren’t as good as you might think – and therefore there isn’t much point in doing them.
Diet one: the three day diet
This one consisted of three set “meals” each day – and no snacking.
When I say meals what I mean is half a chicken breast and a few vegetables for your evening meal and a dry piece of bread with dry tuna on for lunch.
This actually comprised of only 2,000 calories over the three days, which is just a third of the recommended daily amount for women.
Weight loss: six pounds. Weight loss after seven days eating normally: two pounds
Diet two: The cabbage soup diet.
Seven days of eating cabbage soup was, as you can imagine, not great.
On some days you could also eat fruit, vegetables, steak and rice; but on the days where all I could eat was vegetables and soup meant it was carrot and cucumber for breakfast.
This was hard to stick to because it was so depressing to eat the soup, which had that many spices in it my tongue was dyed yellow.
I gave up after six days.
Weight loss: five pounds. Weight loss after four days of eating normally: one pound
Diet 3: Slimming World.
Food optimising is the name of the game on this eating plan.
At a first look this is really confusing but once you get into it is surprisingly simple and it enables you to eat as much of the designated “free foods” as you want.
On some days this means that I could eat loads of pasta or bacon; I was still able to eat some chocolate too and it didn’t really feel like a diet at all.
For snacking, albeit on healthy foods, to be part of a diet meant is was even easier to stick to.
The drawback of following this is that I had to pay for classes but handing over the money and the thought of someone else weighing me really spurred me on.
This is not meant to be a quick fix; the point of sticking to this plan is to change your lifestyle.
Weight loss (over seven days): 3 pounds. Weight loss after five days of eating normally: 3 pounds.
If you want to read more about any of the diets I have tried (and how hard they have been!), then refer to the Hannah’s Food Diaries blog on forgetoday.com