Nourish Don't Punish

Deprivation and crazy diets have long been the go-to when it comes to weight loss (especially when time is short and results are wanted ASAP), but they’re hard to sustain and often impact your health negatively. Here, experts show how to have a more balanced approach to shedding kilos.

- Lauren Sams

Way before maca powder and bee pollen, grapefruit was the star ingredient of a famed 1930s diet. The idea? Eat the tangy fruit as often as possible to help suppress your appetite for, well, more appetising foods.

Then there was the cabbage-soup diet (self-explanatory), the Israeli army diet (lots of boiled eggs, hardly any carbs) and, of course, an endless number of kilojoule-counting plans.

Each of these has one thing in common: restriction. For so long, the most popular approaches to weight loss and wellness have focused on cutting back what we eat, whether that be giving up carbs, fats or kilojoules. “Depriving oneself leads to short-term weight loss during the deprivation period. However that period is not sustainable and more often than not people revert back to their old eating habits,” says Cape Town-based dietician Hanlie Jordaan. So if restriction isn’t keeping us healthy, what will?

A NEW WAY OF THINKING