5 post New Year diets you should absolutely not try.

Oh, Christmas. The only day of the year where absolutely everyone eats themselves into food-coma oblivion. Naps are abundant. Cake is everywhere. Cadbury Favourites are ESPECIALLY everywhere – I think I ate about 600 mini Crunchies in less than 24 hours.

So of course, everyone enters the New Year feeling quite like they need to lose some weight. Potentially a lot of weight. Advertisers know this, and they start pushing crazy diets that – in your post-indulgence, sugar-crazed state – you somehow end up signing up to, thinking that they’re a really good way to tone up.

Hint: they are generally not.

I’ve collected 5 CRAZY diets for you that you should absolutely not try in this post-Christmas time of year. Under no circumstances, do not take any of these on board…

1. The Instagram diet

I love Instagram for food inspiration. But I never knew that it could be used as a dieting tool. According to Refinery 29, scientists discovered that if you stare at pictures of food before eating food – the real food will taste worse.

This from Refinery 29:

In a study conducted at Brigham Young University, people were given pictures of either sweet or salty foods to look at, then offered peanuts to eat and asked to rank them based on enjoyment factor. Even though the salty-picture crew hadn’t been shown pics of peanuts, the fact that they had looked at salty foods apparently diminished their appreciation of the nuts. They ranked them as less enjoyable than did the people who had been viewing cakes and cookies.

So if you’re scrolling through a feed full of delicious-looking cronuts and you go to read a regular old donut? It’s going to be pretty upsetting.

The Gloss has (with their tongue firmly in cheek) come up with the following exact Instagram diet that will get you losing weight and not even feeling sad about it:

Step 1: Decide that you need to lose weight.

Step 2: Isolate the foods that you like to eat that are turning you into a fatty fat fat

.Step 3: Troll Instagram until you find photos of that exact food.

Step 4: Stare at said photos. There’s no mention of how long you need to spend doing this, so I’d advise between 10 minutes and six hours.

Step 5: Find your original food completely unpalatable. Throw it away.

Step 6: Maybe eat some peanuts? NOT TOO MANY THOUGH, YOU’RE ON A DIET!
Read more:

Incidentally, the Instagram diet is similar to…

2. The vision diet

This is one in which you wear blue-tinted glasses everywhere, so that anything you plan to eat looks disgusting. The idea being that we eat with our eyes, and all that, and we won’t want to touch something that’s blue and gross.

The reality is that you’ll probably still eat whatever you want – you’ll just look particularly silly while doing it, because you’ll be wearing blue-tinted glasses.

3. The liquid diet

You know those diet milkshakes and such? The ones that reckon you’ll lose an incredible amount of weight if you just, you know, give up all food and exist entirely on vaguely chocolate-flavoured liquids?

They are a poor choice. This is exactly why they are a poor choice. Stay away.

Stink Yourself Slim is an actual product that’s on the market. It’s a spray that you use just before you’re tempted to eat anything; it smells so bad that it actually puts you off your food.

According to the Daily Mail, it was invented by a 46-year-old London businesswoman named Alex Fontaine, who combined the scent of sewerage/mothballs/anything else disgusting to create a spray that would make anyone lose their appetite. She reckons that we eat 10 per cent less if we smell something bad before a meal – “which can, over time, lead to weight loss of about 2lb a week”.

The bad thing? You have to also walk around, sniffing at a little spray and resisting the urge to spew every time someone offers you something to eat. No. Thank. You.

 5. The Diet Perfume diet 

Who needs a healthy lifestyle when you can just use DIET PERFUME – a perfume that claims to “to suppress appetite while also improving the mood and boosting the metabolism”. 

Because that seems like a really plausible method of controlling your appetite and weight. Cough cough cough.

Seriously – it’s been well-proven that fad diets are a poor idea. They’re not sustainable, they can turn you crazy, and they can even make you dumber.

We’ve said it before and we will say it a million times again. If you need to change the way you are eating, do it in a smart way – a way that works for you. Don’t just put yourself on some kind of detox that involves drinking nothing but water infused with chillies (yes, I know someone that actually tried this) or milkshakes that supposedly suppress your appetite.

Think about the effects certain foods have on your body. Think about what makes you happy. Think about how to switch it up so that you can be content and eat the things you love but still feel good about yourself. Make caring about yourself a priority.

And stay far, far away from the diet perfumes.

Have you ever tried a crazy fad diet?