The “I” diet, ELLEuk.com

Rules

Roberts is now known as The “i” Diet.

It’s all about learning practical strategies for controlling your eating in order to create healthy habits that you’ll keep for life. In this sense it’s sort of an anti-diet (and it claims to be different to all the crash diet books on the market), healthier and sustainable and giving slow but steady weight-loss that lasts. While there are rules to begin with (in the form of a very prescriptive two-week regimen which consists of just three days of meals which you repeat), their intention is to restrict the five aspects of eating that Roberts believes leads to weight gain. These are: hunger (so far, so obvious), availability (if it’s there, you’ll eat it), variety (the need for which makes you eat more and more), familiarity (think comfort eating) and how rich or calorie-dense the food is.

In real terms, this means menus and recipes that restrict variety in the form of a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, with plenty of high-fibre foods to keep you full. The two-week starter plan is a 1,200 calorie per day plan during which time Roberts promises you can expect to lose about 10lbs, afterwards you move onto a six-week follow-on plan during which you’ll learn the strategies to make your own healthy eating decisions and get a bit more flexibility back.

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Pros

You’re not losing water weight on this plan, you’re losing the fat your body usually holds onto – and it’s not even that difficult. The deprivation is limited and if you follow it properly you shouldn’t feel hungry.

Cons

The diet is devised by an American, so while the menus and foods Roberts lists are widely available in the States, this isn’t the case in the UK. This is fine as far as the principles of the diet go but tricky when you’re supposed to follow meal plans to the letter in the initial stages. What’s more, some of the food suggestions seem less than healthy – processed cheese for example, and diet “soda”.