It's that time of year again, bikini time, and the dieting industry enters crazy season - anything goes, the wilder and more fantastical the better! Patches and pills that promise reductions in appetite, specially designed plates and cutlery to fool your brain and, the darling of celebrity culture, the detox.
In amongst all of these, screaming their preposterous claims from magazines, book shelves and internet pop-ups, are the fad diets themselves.
Diets which insist you add certain foods to each meal.
Diets which instruct you to remove listed foods from your life.
Diets which demand that you weigh and 'count' some foods but eat others in seemingly never-ending quantities.
Diets which rule one group of foods edible on some days but outlawed on others.
The promises certainly have initial appeal - who hasn't, at one time or another, thought longingly about achieving the 'perfect' body - but, ponder just a little longer with our top 3 dieting conundrums...
First, the science! No matter what they say, many of us know from personal experience that these diets will leave us hungry or dissatisfied (often both!) - they will leave us looking longingly at other people's plates and with a gnawing ache of emptiness by bedtime.
As Beyond Chocolate E-course graduate Annie remembers, hunger is often seen as 'the enemy to be overcome on diets.
' As the Beyond Chocolate book explains, by leaving this hunger unanswered, we send our bodies into famine mode, creating a chain reaction which lowers metabolic rates and encourages future fat conservation.
So, diets certainly aren't the solution - they're part of the problem! A life fully and joyously lived shouldn't focus on diets and food restrictions.
Imagine a perfect day - does it involve weighing foods? Saying no to a food you are hungry for? As the statistics bear out, dieting might work for a short time but the majority of dieters regain the weight they have lost, and more besides.
Can you really imagine yourself sticking to a diet forever? And, now for the big one.
As the Social Issues Research Centre's timeline shows, dieting is nothing new.
As early as 1550, Luigi Cornaro documented his daily food limits and dietary antics and, a little over a hundred years later, walnut juice was being heralded as the latest super-food by Italian physicians.
By 1894, the first diet book followed and within no time at all, fad diets became commonplace.
So, by 2009, with well over 400 years of diets and dieting experience behind us it seems pertinent to highlight that, if diets worked, surely we would all be slim by now! So - what does this leave us with? Diet companies don't just sell diets, they sell dreams.
They don't sell you a weight loss method, they sell you the image of being on an exotic beach in your bikini, with all your friends and acquaintances at home gossiping about how you did it, aren't you so beautiful and restrained, wonderful and perfect...
and the dream goes on.
And that's exactly what diets are - dreams that become nightmare realities because we all know, from facts and figures, from our own deprivation and despair, that diets don't work.
In amongst all of these, screaming their preposterous claims from magazines, book shelves and internet pop-ups, are the fad diets themselves.
Diets which insist you add certain foods to each meal.
Diets which instruct you to remove listed foods from your life.
Diets which demand that you weigh and 'count' some foods but eat others in seemingly never-ending quantities.
Diets which rule one group of foods edible on some days but outlawed on others.
The promises certainly have initial appeal - who hasn't, at one time or another, thought longingly about achieving the 'perfect' body - but, ponder just a little longer with our top 3 dieting conundrums...
First, the science! No matter what they say, many of us know from personal experience that these diets will leave us hungry or dissatisfied (often both!) - they will leave us looking longingly at other people's plates and with a gnawing ache of emptiness by bedtime.
As Beyond Chocolate E-course graduate Annie remembers, hunger is often seen as 'the enemy to be overcome on diets.
' As the Beyond Chocolate book explains, by leaving this hunger unanswered, we send our bodies into famine mode, creating a chain reaction which lowers metabolic rates and encourages future fat conservation.
So, diets certainly aren't the solution - they're part of the problem! A life fully and joyously lived shouldn't focus on diets and food restrictions.
Imagine a perfect day - does it involve weighing foods? Saying no to a food you are hungry for? As the statistics bear out, dieting might work for a short time but the majority of dieters regain the weight they have lost, and more besides.
Can you really imagine yourself sticking to a diet forever? And, now for the big one.
As the Social Issues Research Centre's timeline shows, dieting is nothing new.
As early as 1550, Luigi Cornaro documented his daily food limits and dietary antics and, a little over a hundred years later, walnut juice was being heralded as the latest super-food by Italian physicians.
By 1894, the first diet book followed and within no time at all, fad diets became commonplace.
So, by 2009, with well over 400 years of diets and dieting experience behind us it seems pertinent to highlight that, if diets worked, surely we would all be slim by now! So - what does this leave us with? Diet companies don't just sell diets, they sell dreams.
They don't sell you a weight loss method, they sell you the image of being on an exotic beach in your bikini, with all your friends and acquaintances at home gossiping about how you did it, aren't you so beautiful and restrained, wonderful and perfect...
and the dream goes on.
And that's exactly what diets are - dreams that become nightmare realities because we all know, from facts and figures, from our own deprivation and despair, that diets don't work.