
The Gillian McKeith Diet, made famous by the Channel Four You Are What You Eat series, is perhaps the healthiest way we can imagine to lose weight. It's not easy, and can be a bit pricey buying all that fresh fruit and veg, but this is much more than weight loss, it's about changing your lifestyle. There are undoubtedly easier and cheaper ways to lose weight but we highly recommend this one to anyone who wants to be healthy as well as thinner. You can't help but pick up good eating habits and tastes that can last a lifetime. The reviewers speak from personal experience, having followed it strictly for 3 months, and now using it each January as a post-Christmas detox.
The main requirement of the Gillian McKeith diet is time--you need to do alot of cooking. You'll certainly learn alot about cooking and fresh ingredients you may never have known existed. It really is a culinary adventure as well as a "diet."
You won't be hungry on this "diet"--you have three meals and three snacks every day. In fact, we found the sheer volume of food is huge and often turned down one or two of the daily snacks. Since so much of it is good fibre, you'll probably lose 6-10 pounds in the first week alone, though much of this is gunk which has been caked to the walls of your intestines (not water as in so many other diets' initial loss), and the loss slows down after that. However, if you follow the diet strictly and do the recommended exercise, you can match the large weight loss achieved in the TV series, easily a few stone or more over three months, depending on your start weight and your normal eating habits.
You may or may not have watched the TV show, but we do recommend buying Gillian's basic diet book to get the scoop on how to follow this rather in-depth diet--this isn't one you can really wing it on. There are several other related books, but you can certainly get buy with just this one.
Menu: Well, it doesn't get healthier than this. The diet is very heavy on vegetables, with lots of fruit, nuts, seeds, grains (many of which you may never have even heard of), and a few servings of fish or sometimes chicken each week. It has practically no dairy or wheat products as well as many other processed staples of the modern diet. It also uses the principles of food combining such as in the Hay Diet. You may also learn alot about your food tolerances and intolerances as well, which plague many people unknowingly.
Prices: Afgain, if you want to follow this diet on your own, simply buy the main book You Are What You Eat (which has a 1-week sample menu) which retails for 14.99, but can be purchased at Amazon for £9.24, or her Ultimate Health Plan book which has a 4-week plan, perhaps adding the Cookbook if you intend to do this longer term, for greater variety. Note the seasonality of the fruits and vegetables in each of these diets though, as trying to do a summer fruit based plan in mid winter can be extremely costly!
But we do think it's worth spending a bit more on your diet for optimum health and weight loss, after all, you are what you eat...

