Starting a New Year diet? Save yourself the money and pain

THE NEW YEAR brings a glut of new diets and weight loss television programmes cashing in on our guilt and optimistic resolutions. But commentators agree – dieting might help you lose money (we spend about £1bn in western Europe on weight-loss products), but it won't help you lose weight.

Misery makes us fat

"If you are anything like me, you emerged into 2012 with a terrible sense of disbelief," says Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. "You pinched yourself and... you seemed to have acquired a second stomach over the course of the festive period."

As a nation we're eating more and drinking more, says Johnson. A classic psychological analysis might say we're unhappy with ourselves. Forget the gym and Atkins regimes, surely what we need, if we are all going to lose weight "is to create a less insecure, hung-up, envious and self-hating kind of society". Until that happens, "lay off cheese".

The joy of others' suffering

The first week of January is traditionally the time when the nation looks down at its bulging post-Christmas belly and groans, blogs Stuart Heritage for The Guardian. But television is there to help us with a glut of TV programmes (Fat Fighters, Biggest Loser etc) to shock us into transforming into bikini-ready micro-nymphs "when we're all at our podgiest and most guilt-stricken".

They generally show diet and exercise to be "simultaneously harrowing and terrifying", adds Heritage. There's some joy to be had from watching them though – "Lord knows it's always fun to watch other people suffer". But he'd be surprised if any of them actually help people lose weight.

Dieting industry profits

Deciding to go on a diet is the most popular of all New Year's resolutions, says Jane Shilling in The Daily Mail. "But if you are gripped by the prevailing spirit of self-denial... step away from those scales".
 
There's "an unsavoury crew of self-described modern diet experts who claim to be able to turn the body hideous into the body beautiful with the assistance of massage, supplements, meal replacements or even prayer", says Shilling. But the ancient Greeks had the right idea: "the secret of the body beautiful is to eat less and move about more".
 
Try the Santorum diet

Even though research keeps showing us that our bodies rebel against diets, says Erin Gloria Ryan on Jezebel.com, the new year brings new "awful ways to grow cranky and demoralised without losing weight".
 
There's the Shame Diet, where you sit about feeling ashamed of yourself instead of eating; the Santorum Diet – just Google the meaning for the word Santorum and it will put you off your food; or the New Clothes Diet – when you realise the clothes you bought at the sales won't fit you, so you have to lose weight.
 
So happy dieting, says Ryan. "May it be a year of unrealistic expectations peddled by snake oil salesmen, and may you come as close to disappearing as your little hearts desire". ·