Most diets are doomed to failure because they are overly prescriptive and impossible to stick to; step forward the cabbage soup diet. Popular in the 1980s, this diet allowed you to eat unlimited cabbage soup and little else. Not exactly a recipe for success.
As a nutritionist, following healthy patterns of eating, such as the Mediterranean diet, rather than strict regimens, makes much more sense. The IDip (or individualised diet improvement programme) is the latest, and works along similar lines.
Rather than focussing on cutting certain foods down, or cutting them out, the iDip is based on the sound nutritional premise that increasing fibre and protein intake will fill you up. Alongside a modest calorie reduction, it can lead to sustainable weight loss.
The diet, devised by researchers at the University of Illinois, saw participants create an individualised program based on the foods they usually ate – but increasing their daily protein intake to around 80g and fibre to 20g.
So, if a chicken salad was on their usual menu, they would just increase the amount of protein and fibre in it. They simultaneously reduced their overall calorie intake to no more than 1,500 per day. As a result, the dieters successfully reduced their waists by an average of 7cm after 6 months, and a further 2cm after 15 months.
Increasing fibre and protein in your diet is easy and will make you feel fuller which should mean you eat less overall, helping to shift those unwanted pounds.
Here are a nine tips on how to do it…
1. Have protein at every meal
To get up to 80g of protein per day you need to include 20-30g at every meal. For example, have scrambled tofu, eggs, oats, or yogurt with nuts and seeds at breakfast time, beans or fish for lunch such as a tuna and bean salad, and fish or lean meat with wholegrains for dinner.