On popular diets

Choose any diet. They will all work. But if you go on a diet, then at some point it means you'll come off a diet.

You have a holiday coming up in 3 months and you want to look your best on the beach. This becomes your goal. And after a bit of research, you choose a diet you think you can stick with.

But all diets have one thing in common: reducing calorie intake. There are many different ways to do this, and all diets achieve this in different ways that can include removing carbs or other food group, removing fats, reducing portion sizes, intermittent fasting, or substituting a high-calorie food for a lower-calorie alternative.

The issue with this is once you're on holiday (looking and feeling great), you cave in to all those things your body has missed over the last few months. That’s okay, as you'll go back on that diet when you get back home... Right?

But this time it’s much harder. For one thing, you no longer have a goal and therefore a lack of motivation. Your dopamine baseline has increased, so you get the holiday blues and you continue to consume all those ‘naughty’ things again.

Not only that, but this time your body really holds on to it, which was vital in hunter-gatherer times as your body doesn't know when you'll get all that so-called goodness again, and you put on even more weight than you had before. This is called the Yo-Yo diet effect, which gets worse as you get older due to lower metabolism, lower energy output, and reduced testosterone.

Remember, it's all about consistency. You can't keep overindulging on food and drink then suddenly have bouts of dieting and exercising. It doesn't work. And you can't work off a bad diet anyway. 30 minutes going for it on the treadmill is barely a few biscuits.

Change your daily habits and allow time for your body and mind to get used to them until it becomes the norm.

As the philosopher Seneca once said - "Eat merely to relive your hunger; drink merly to quench your thirst".

(He means water by the way ;-)