Forget celebrity fad diets and go with your gut instinct

PATRICIA CASEY – PUBLISHED 17 MARCH 2014 02:30 AM

If preoccupation with food, diets and body size is a risk factor for eating disorders, then it's hardly surprising that eating disorders are so prevalent. Diets have been around since the third Century BC but then there were no dieting magazines, no internet and, of course, no food programmes on television to reach the massesThere wasn't even any printing press to spread the word about Cleopatra's latest food fad or the approach to weight loss adopted by Eurydice of Athens.Modern-day celebrities are not so constrained and from Jane Fonda toBeyonce, their every snack and fad diet becomes our temptation.Magazines feed us information about how one celebrity lost 30 pounds on the cabbage diet, or how another dropped two dress sizes on a diet of grapefruit or by eating egg yolks and asparagus. No concoction is too bizarre for a public frantic for nutritional tips.

Our self-esteem is intimately linked to our weight, to our shape and to our clothes size. The benefit of weight loss in shoring up our self-image is the carrot used to sell us all kinds of diets.

For several decades governments promoted the food pyramid. First developed in Sweden, it was in vogue until a modified version was introduced in 2005 and finally in 2011 it was replaced by Myplate.

According to the underlying theory of the pyramid the first step was the one from which most food should be selected and this contains bread, rice, cereals, pasta and potatoes. Meat, poultry, eggs, beans and nuts were near the top and so lesser amounts of these should be consumed.

This way of looking at diet seems counter-intuitive since most of us know that bread, potatoes and pasta are fattening. Myplate is the latest official nutritional guide in the US and a broadly similar version, the Eatwell Plate, is promoted in Britain. It depicts a plate divided in four segments and a side dish representing four food groups and dairy products. However, Harvard University has issued its own modified version called the Harvard Healthy Eating plate. And on and on it goes.

The average person pays little attention to such advice, especially when it changes as often as we change our shoes. Instead we wrestle with our food intake and stagger from diet to diet in the hope of becoming svelte but healthy.

One of the most popular, the Atkins diet, consisted of high protein and low carbohydrate while derivatives of it recommended high protein, low carbohydrate, low fat.tinyurl.com/l732drj