The British Dietetic Association has announced its annual festive list of fad diets to avoid.
These regimes are not so much fad as mad and usually come recommended by a D-list celebrity.
The Drunkorexia Diet is simple. You don't eat at all during the week. Save all the calories for binge-drinking at the weekend. You are allowed 201 shots of spirits or 131 glasses of wine.
One side benefit is that you are likely to star in a satellite channel TV programme about bevvied people turning a city centre into a no-go area. Food may be involved as you take along some carrots and sweetcorn to decorate your pavement pizza.
Drunkorexia is best followed in conjunction with the Empty Fridge Diet*. No food therein, only half an elderly lemon. The lemon may be used at the weekend with the 201 gin and tonics. But the fruit is best left to develop a penicillin-type mould which may be handy when you become ill, as you undoubtedly will.
Or consider the Legless Diet. End your binge-drinking session by lying across a railway line (soon to be available in Edinburgh now some trams are running). Minus your lower limbs, you will lose at nearly half your body weight. The good news is the loss is permanent.
The Ketonic Enteral Nutrition (KEN) Diet also involves eating no food at all during 10-day cycles (except there is no healthy cycling activity involved). The only nutrition allowed is a liquid formula dripped directly into the stomach via a plastic tube that goes up the patient's nose and is taped on to the face.
If you want to look really unwell, try the African Infant Mortality Diet. There's no food involved and no naso-gastric drip either since medical equipment is in short supply.
Drink some polluted local water and weight loss will be enhanced by a dose of cholera. A short visit to Africa offers the opportunity to top up the suntan and look good in Ray-Ban shades.
You could always try a safe and sensible regime. It's the Eat Less diet. Just have what you normally consume for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But not so much of it. You will lose lbs and save £s. Send the latter to the children in Africa.
*Some of these diets I just made up.
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