Every now and then a different fad diet does the rounds. Proponents regale us with tales of dramatic weight loss with little effort. Recently, as a means of experimentation, I tried one of these fad diets. I didn’t want to crap all over it before trying it for myself. The diet in question is called “The Military Diet”, which claims that you can lose up to ten pounds in one week. The diet only lasts three days, with four rest days and consists of basic rationing, eating specific meals three times a day with no snacks, very little sugar and zero exercise. An image from the website shows a military person exercising beside the words saying that this is “the diet that military people eat” and that it doesn’t require any exercise. A bit of contradiction surely. 
For breakfast on the first day, I had a slice of toast with peanut butter, a black coffee with no sugar and a half teaspoon of baking powder dissolved in water. The diet recommends half of a grapefruit but there is a substitution list for the foods you don’t like. The reason for such specific food groups is not really explained on the website. However, grapefruit alkalises your stomach making it easier to breakdown foods, the website states. The peanut butter on toast provides protein and carbohydrates for energy and the coffee provides energy in the form of caffeine.
Lunch has the same idea, caffeine, carbs and protein. The diet states that you should have a slice of dry toast, cup of black coffee and a tin of tuna. However, being a vegetarian, I swapped out the tuna for some Quorn meat slices which are high in protein. Dinner provides your biggest source of calories for the day. You are allowed 300 calories worth of meat/protein, a green veg of your choosing, half of a banana, an apple and 300 calories of plain vanilla ice cream. The combination of these foods, the website claims, makes it easier for your body to process and break down. It is also supposed to speed up your metabolism. The calorie count drops each day which is reflected in the portion size of each meal.
The diet doesn’t change much for the next two days, but the amount of food drops significantly but you do get to have some cheese with crackers, boiled eggs and apples. Over the three days I consumed around 3000 calories, about 4500 calories less than recommended. On the rest days I still ate healthily, consuming around 1500 calories per day. By the end of the week I had dropped over five pounds. “The results speak for themselves” you might be thinking. However, when you stand back and analyse what has happened, you begin to see that the diet has no special qualities, the combination of foods had no bearing on the weight loss whatsoever. I managed to keep off the weight but that’s only because I tend to eat healthy anyway. If you eat foods that are high in fat and sugar on your rest days or when the diet is over, then you will put all the weight straight back on.
The three day diet breakdown
In the first week of any diet, the amount of weight lost is usually higher than any other subsequent week. The reason for this is that the human body stores water as a survival mechanism. It is these stores that go first, they are the easiest to burn and the easiest to replace. Any diet which limits you to around 1000 calories per day is going to see the kind of results that the military diet claims to provide. I may have lost over five pounds, but I was miserable, I had constant headaches, which were unbearable at times, I felt faint while at work and almost collapsed a couple of times. In the second week I ate the same as the first and only lost one pound, but that one pound of weight loss was not worth the horrible mood swings and general feeling of misery.
The website gives three reasons for why the military diet works. Firstly, they state the obvious, which is that the diet is low calorie. A low calorie diet will always lead to some kind of weight loss. The second reason given is that the diet is a form of intermittent fasting (IF), which the website claims speeds up the metabolism. However, several studies into the effect of IF state that although IF does increase the metabolic rate, they also state that it can take up to six weeks before IF begins to have an effect on the metabolism. This means that the diets second reason for working is invalid as it states that the diet should only be done three out of four weeks. Lastly the website states that most foods on the diet kick start the metabolism and promote fat burning. However, their scientific reasoning falls down under scrutiny.
This means that the only reason the diet seems to work is simply down to the fact that you are restricting your calorie intake. The diet might as well be called “The Extreme Low Calorie Diet” because that is the only reason for the weight loss. It is something which can only be done once or twice in a month as it is to unbearable to endure anymore than that, but that’s just me.
James Owens 