Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days (10 page)

These two photo’s show the difference
after eight diets

Saturday 29th November to Wednesday 3rd
December

Weight: 14 stone 1.5 lbs

On the face of it, the grapefruit diet
should be right down my alley. For starters, I love grapefruit. It’s one of
those fruits which divides people – they either seem to love it or hate it.
It’s the Marmite of the fruit world, and as I don’t like Marmite it seems only
fair that I should like grapefruit. My wife, on the other hand, loves Marmite
and hates grapefruit. I’ve never met anyone who either likes or hates both.
Feel free to get in touch if you do – I’d be interested to see if any such
people exist. ([email protected])

Another reason for me warming to the
grapefruit diet is the fact that I can drink as much black coffee as I like; in
fact it’s positively encouraged. As I researched the diet further, I was happy
to see that they encouraged you to eat protein in the form of eggs, and I was
happy to see that toast was also on the menu. To be honest, grapefruit, coffee
and eggs on toast is my ideal breakfast and if I were served that at a hotel, I
would consider it a little treat and certainly not a diet. Maybe this is the
perfect diet for me to start eating a healthy breakfast again?

As I read on the full details of the
diet started to become clear and I suddenly became far less enthusiastic. It
turns out that this is just another one of those diets on which I have to
drastically limit my daily calorie intake. Somehow, I’d have to spend the next
five days limiting myself to just 800 calories. The problem I have with that is
that if I’m limiting myself to just 800 calories, surely it’s that in itself
which will help me lose the weight rather than the grapefruit. This is not so
much the grapefruit diet plan, more the 800 calories a day diet plan.

I read on and I was encouraged to see
that there was an alternative. The original grapefruit diet that limited
calories to 800 a day was popularised in the 1980s and has been widely
criticised since. Nutritional experts were queuing up to dismiss it as another
fad diet, saying that the ‘fat-burning’ properties of grapefruit were, in fact,
a total myth and any weight loss that occurred was almost certainly down to the
extremely low and potentially dangerous calorie intake.

Studies have since been published by
scientists in San Diego which suggest that adding grapefruit and grapefruit
juice to your diet really can aid weight-loss. Importantly, this can be
achieved without changing what else you eat. I’m at a stage in the challenge
now where I want to eat healthily. I’m in the zone. I’m making healthy choices
and avoiding sugary and fatty foods. Having just been on the calorie-controlled
diet, I know that I can easily get by on around 1,500 calories a day, which is
far less than the average recommended intake for a man. I’m interested
therefore to test out the theory that I can still lose weight, or even lose it
faster, by simply adding grapefruit to my diet. I have the perfect benchmark
test, having just done the calorie-controlled diet. I figured that if I just do
the same again but add grapefruit to the mix, I will have conducted the perfect
study.

The study that was conducted in San Diego included 100 obese people who were divided into three groups. The first group
ate half a grapefruit before each meal three times a day. The second group
drank grapefruit juice before each meal. The third group received no grapefruit
and no other changes were made to any of their diets.

After twelve weeks, the participants who
ate grapefruit with each meal lost, on average, 3.6 lb. Meanwhile, those who
drank grapefruit juice three times a day lost 3.3 lb in the twelve weeks. By
comparison, those who didn’t consume any grapefruit lost just 0.5 lb on
average.

3.6 lb is only a third of a pound a
week, and I’ve already proved that I can lose two pounds in just five days
without so much as a sniff of grapefruit juice. In the interest of fairness, I
need to lose at least 2.25 lbs for the grapefruit diet to be considered a
success.

The leader of the study in San Diego went on to say, "For years, people have talked about the grapefruit diet.
Now we have data that grapefruit helps weight-loss. Our study participants
maintained their daily eating habits and slightly enhanced their exercise
routine. The only dietary change was the intake of Florida grapefruit and
grapefruit juice."

I find it strange that the study group
decided to ‘slightly enhance’ the participants’ exercise routines. I’m no scientist,
but I’m pretty sure that in order to test a theory, you start with a control
and then go on to change one variable at a time. It’s like saying, "Look
everyone, we’ve proved that you can send cancer into remission by eating
gooseberries! The only other thing we did was slightly increase the frequency
of the chemotherapy..."

I personally have deliberately kept the
amount of exercise I do the same throughout the challenge so as not to skew the
results. It might not be a lot, but at least it’s consistent. Perhaps if the
guys in San Diego had done the same, they might have come up with an entirely
different result.

It’s clear that my nutritionist, Louis,
isn’t a fan of the grapefruit diet, at least in its original 1980s format. He
says that while grapefruit is relatively low in calories and high in vitamin C,
it most definitely isn’t a magical fat-burner. He says that limiting food and
calories does not encourage dieters to change their eating habits for the
better – if anything it creates new negative habits. He was definitely far
happier when I explained that I was ditching the grapefruit diet of the
eighties in favour of the grapefruit diet of the noughties. I’ve essentially
traded in the Walkman for the iPod. Actually, my analogy of comparing portable
music devices to grapefruit diets works on more than one level, because an iPod
offers far more choice (as does the grapefruit diet of today) and it’s much
more expensive (more calories means more money spent on food). Talking of iPods
and fruit, I do find it funny that there are two giants of technology with
products named after fruit. I am referring of course to Apple and Blackberry,
and I know there are thousands of journalists out there keeping everything
crossed and hoping against hope that both companies collapse on the same day,
just so they can run the headline "Apple and Blackberry crumble".

The grapefruit diet for me has been the
easiest one yet. I’m used to eating fewer calories now and that has been helped
by cutting out snacks completely and hugely reducing my portion sizes. Another
technique I have adopted, which I urge you to do if you are thinking of losing
weight yourself, is to drink a glass of water before each meal as it helps you
to feel full more quickly. I got into a routine of peeling and segmenting a
grapefruit for breakfast and saving and storing the subsequent juice to have
with my lunch. I then had a normal evening meal followed by another grapefruit
for dessert. I really enjoyed my five days on the diet and I genuinely feel sorry
for those people who had to suffer the 1980s version, especially for the ones
who don’t even like grapefruit in the first place...

I stepped onto the scales on the
Thursday morning expecting to have lost very little weight. Even though I had
kept to my promise of eating exactly the same as the previous week with the
only variable being the grapefruit, it still meant that I was consuming an
extra 100 or so calories a day with my morning and evening shots of vitamin C.
The scales registered a 1 lb loss, and I was pretty happy with that. Sorry San Diego, but I beg to differ.

Summary:

A perfectly healthy diet if you are to
take on the most recent incarnation, but I’m not convinced the grapefruit
actually does anything for you other than increase your vitamin C levels.

Starting Weight: 14 stone 1.5 lbs

Finishing Weight: 14 stone 0.5 lbs

Weight loss: 1 lb

% of body weight lost: 0.5 %

Faffiness: 2/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Would I do it again? Yes

Total weight lost: 27.5 lbs

Thursday 4th December
November to Monday 8th December

Weight: 14 stone 0.5 lbs

So it’s finally here – the
last diet of my 50-day challenge, and I’ve decided to finish on what could be
deemed the most extreme diet of all – the cabbage soup diet. For the next five
days I’ll be consuming at least three bowls of cabbage soup, combined with a
small amount of other allowable fruits and vegetables, every day. It’s an
extreme diet with a proven track-record, with some people claiming to have lost
as much as 10 lbs in just seven days. Every article I have read, however, has
some kind of disclaimer which says that the weight-loss is only ever short-term
as the weight you’re losing is from water rather than fat.

I’ve never been a huge fan
of cabbage, except for when it’s swimming in butter and cream or served with
the welcome addition of lardons or walnuts. I just find it a little bit boring
on its own. In restaurants, the tastiest foods get top billing, and when a dish
is described on the menu you'll notice that the ingredients are listed in order
of either taste or cost. You’ll also notice that cabbage almost always features
last, thanks to being out-scored on both counts.

Here’s an example:   

Roasted fillet of local
lamb with sautéed sweetbreads, confit lamb shoulder, baked Jersey royals with a
chilli and rosemary butter, minted peas and spring cabbage.

Every other item on the
menu either explains in detail how it’s cooked or what it’s cooked with, but
the cabbage is just a cabbage. It’s cheap and it’s reliable. If the cabbage
were a chess piece it would be a pawn, if it were to appear in a Hollywood film
it would be an extra, and if it were a car it would be the humble Toyota Yaris.
The thing is, the pawns always get taken, no-one remembers the extras, and I’ve
never felt a desire to own a Toyota Yaris. In my opinion, when it comes to
food, the cabbage should never, ever be the star of the show and so I’m going
to make it my mission to make the cabbage soup taste nothing like cabbage.

As far as I can tell from
my research, I am allowed to add a few other ingredients such as onions,
peppers and mushrooms, and I have every intention of adding copious amounts of
chilli and garlic while also raiding the herb garden. I’m going to make the
best bloody cabbage soup that anyone’s ever tasted, so tasty that I’ll want to
eat five bowls a day instead of the required three.

Okay, so by day two, that
theory has well and truly been blown out of the water, because I’ve realised
that it doesn’t matter how amazingly tasty something is, if you have it for
every meal of the day you are soon going to become sick of it. My favourite
meal of all time is the good old British roast dinner, and if I were to pick a
favourite roast, it would have to be the Christmas dinner. Festivities and good
will aside, if someone told me I had to eat it three times a day for five days
straight, I’d tell them (much like the turkey) to get stuffed!

Quite how I’m going to get
through the next few days, I really don’t know. Trying my best to think outside
the box, I realised that there may be a way to make things a little more
interesting. What if I were to use the same ingredients, but come up with
something altogether different? It is difficult, I’ll admit, especially with so
few ingredients, but you just need to be a little bit creative. How about a
bubble and squeak without the bubble? Actually, thinking about it, is it the
bubble or is it the squeak? I’ve never been sure what part the vegetables play
and what part the potato plays when it comes to bubble and squeak. And talking
of not knowing which is which, I was using a pestle and mortar the other day
and had no idea which was the pestle and which was the mortar, so halfway
through making a spice mix, I found myself checking the internet. Out of habit,
I went straight to Google, but in a moment of nostalgia I decided to consult
the original internet guru himself, Ask Jeeves, as it seemed the sort of thing
a butler would know. Disappointingly, the US site has been rebranded to just
Ask, so I found myself asking Ask why it was no longer called Ask Jeeves,
quickly followed by the question "What did Jeeves do to deserve
this?"

Sadly, the company decided
to dispense with the character and he disappeared from the search engine
altogether on 26th February 2006. He was said to be ‘going into retirement’,
although the UK and Ireland versions of the site decided to bring him out of
retirement in 2009. When football players, boxers or evens bands come out of
retirement it’s normally born out of some desperate need to earn money, and I
can’t see that it’s any different with Ask. It seems like a desperate move to
try to grab another miniscule piece of Google’s market share, and I can’t see
it working.

The thing is, the word
Google is now synonymous with search engine searches and is even considered a
bone fide transitive verb. If you want to find something out, you simply
‘Google it’. Try the same with ‘Ask’ and the phrase ‘Asking for it’ sounds far
more threatening. People up and down the country would be having conversations
like, "Why did Debbie end up splitting up with Tony?" "Well, she
caught a glimpse of his internet search history, and apparently he was just
‘Asking for it’."

You’ll be glad to know
that I did actually find out about the bubble and squeak, and neither the
vegetables nor the potato can be called the bubble or the squeak; it originally
got its name from the noise it made while cooking. Also, in case you’re
interested, the pestle is the crusher and the mortar is the bowl, and I’ve
committed this to memory by thinking that pestle sounds a bit like pencil and a
mortarboard is a funny hat which, when turned upside down, could pass for a
bowl. It’s the only way I could learn anything at school and I’m glad it’s
still paying off today.

Anyway, trying to be
creative with so few ingredients was a complete disaster, and I ended up
settling for simple cabbage soup for the last three days and being bloody
miserable with it. It was a frustrating end to the challenge because I had
built up a version of how it would play out in my head, and while I could have
accepted that the reality would feature fewer letters of gratitude from heads
of state and perhaps a little less ticker-tape, I did at least envisage me
finishing it with a smile.

I suppose in the end I did
find myself finishing my final diet with a smile actually, as I looked at the
scales for the final time (for this challenge at least) to see that I had made
another 3-lb loss.

Summary:

The cabbage soup diet is
proven to work. You will lose weight if you follow it to the letter, but you
will also get incredibly bored and incredibly miserable incredibly quickly.
Feel free to try it out for yourself but be warned that the weight almost
certainly won’t stay off for good. There are too many foods which are
off-limits and you consume far too few calories for this ever to be considered
as a viable long-term option for weight-loss. My advice would be to steer
clear.

Starting Weight: 14 stone
0.5 lbs

Finishing Weight: 13 stone
11.5 lbs

Weight loss: 3 lbs

% of body weight lost: 1.0
%

Faffiness: 5/10

Difficulty: 8/10

Would I do it again? No

Total weight lost: 30.5
lbs

Here is the final before
and after picture – 30.5 lbs in 50 days.