For many years there have been the Low-Fat Low-Calorie Diets everywhere we look. Diets that promise amazing results in the shortest time - you couldn't open a magazine without seeing one, usually advertised by an incredibly skinny model. You needed a microscope to find an excess ounce of fat on her.

These diets certainly appeared to work in the short term; one lady I knew called Margaret had shed over 60 pounds and had been named Slimmer of The Year. She kept the photo of her Award Ceremony on her desk and showed it to everyone who came by.

But you wouldn't believe it to look at her. The photo was a year old. In that year, she'd not only put the 60 lb back on, but another 20 as well. She was morbidly obese and had developed diabetes because of it and she was very unhappy - the photo and her past slimming glories seemed to be all that kept her going, and were her main topic of conversation.

The diet she had so religiously stuck to was low-fat, low-cal. It required much preparation and planning and the endless weighing of ingredients; and it must have been incredibly boring! She admitted that she'd often been hungry while following it - not surprising as the diet was only allowing 1,000 calories a day. I'd have been tempted to eat the plate as well! Her diet seemed to consist of mainly turkey (and not a lot of that) and veg or salad. The turkey had to be cooked without added fat, and in those days all vegetables were boiled to death, anyway, so her meals must have been utterly tasteless. No red meat, no butter, no olive oil, no cheese. Tiny amounts of bread, and she even had to weigh out a potato on the days she was allowed one - boiled of course!

The willpower involved must have been staggering. But, God love her, she'd stuck to that culinary Hell-on-Earth for 9 long months, although she admitted to me that she'd often felt nauseous, tired, nervous and irritable and had even had trouble sleeping. She'd "got her reward" (or so she thought) by seeing the pounds drop off on the scales - sometimes up to 5 lb in a week, she told me excitedly, her eyes shining with the fervour of the Truly Obsessed…

And of course, that was the problem. That amount of weight loss was far too much and far too quickly - it just wasn't natural. And no exercise was advised; she wouldn't have the energy to work out, in any case. She reached her target weight. Big party, photos, flowers, featured in a magazine; the whole enchilada. And then it was all over, and life carried on. She returned to eating "normally", but was given no advice on how to eat "sensibly". And the pounds came back. Quietly, insidiously, inexorably. In 12 months she put 80 lb back on and became almost suicidal. She was truly heartbroken - she'd tried so hard and done so well - where on Earth had she gone wrong, she asked?

She tried again, half-heartedly this time - lost a bit, put it back on and more, and that was how it went on. Yo-Yo dieting, getting fatter and fatter and more and more depressed, completely convinced she was an abject failure. Finally she gave up completely and just lived in the past, gazing at that photo for hours on end and sighing. From that point on, no healthy eating-and-exercise-plan on the planet could help her, because she was convinced weight loss just "didn't work" for her. She'd made up her mind and the facts didn't matter. If you'd like to read the facts that would have changed Margaret's life, please see Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work Part 2.

Carol J Bartram

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Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 1