Diets, like hemlines and haircuts, fall out of fashion almost as quickly as they are ushered in. The latest diet, it seems, is always the one which is going to make you lose the most weight in the shortest amount of time, and far exceeds the results obtained by all previous diets. In the seventies there was the cabbage soup diet, in the eighties food combination, in the nineties the Atkins and now the diet to follow is the GI (glycemic index).
Many would debunk some of these diets as fads which might have significant immediate effects but which are certainly not sustainable over any period of time. After all how long can someone really be expected to live on cabbage soup or to be in possession of the terrible bad breath which is a side effect of the Atkins? One would hope not for long!
Surely we are able to see through these fads and take on board the rules about restricted calorie consumption and exercise as a part of our daily lives without resorting to specific periods of ‘dieting’? Well it seems not.
A new survey that has just been published has revealed that the average woman living in the United Kingdom will spend a DECADE of her life on a diet. The figure might seem staggering but of course the weeks quickly add up.
The average woman will go on two diets a year. Each of these will last, on average, five weeks. If a woman continues this pattern every year of her adult life to the age of 70 then she will have been on a diet for a total of ten years.
If that seems like a lot of time to spend on a diet then consider the ten per cent of women who take dieting to a more extreme level and spend 25 years of their lives on some kind of diet.
The poll, which was carried out on 4000 women, discovered that one third of those who were questioned had gone on their first diet before the age of 16.
The research also found that the average British woman aspires to be a size 10 dress size although 25 per cent saw their ideal size as an eight.
77 percent of the women interviewed wanted a ban on airbrushed pictures of celebrities and models. What this fails to recognise, however, that the human body has been represented in an idealised form since humans have been on the earth, whether in wall paintings in the Egyptian pyramids, Michelangelo’s David or the Venus de Milo. Perhaps the solution lies with us all being happy in our own skins whilst, at the same time, striving to maintain a healthy weight rather than spending vast chunks of our lives unhappy and obsessing about it.