The Food Diet

the Cambridge Diet

The food diet is the most well-known and popular of the vlcd diets. The food Diet from cambridge provides a mere 330 cal per day. This allows dieters to achieve a degree of weight management reduction approaching that normally only seen as a result of near starvation.

Unlike other crash diets or fasting however, the meal replacements that form the basis of the food diet have been formulated to provide all the vitamins and minerals and trace elements, as well as supply of essential amino acids and fatty acids necessary for maintaining good health.

The selling point of the food diet from Cambridge is that, despite providing subsistence level of calories, you will nevertheless still get all your nutritional requirements.

For fast weight loss you simply substitute all normal meals with three liquid replacements or snack bars for four weeks only when on the Cambridge Diet.

Estimated weight loss is initially for around three to seven pounds/1.3 to 3 kg per week. After this, a 400 cal 3280 kJ meal, which may be purchased from Cambridge Nutrition Ltd, is added to the diet and you are supposed to juggle around with the meal replacements and low-calorie kilojoule meals until the target weight has been reached.

For anyone determined to lose a lot of surplus weight very quickly and safely, this is an ideal diet. It allows you to achieve an average weight loss of 18 pounds/8 kg in four weeks, and about fourteen pounds/6 kg in each month thereafter.

According to Dr Alan Howard who devised the programme, far from being a fad diet, it was developed only after eight years of medical nutritional research and stringent testing to establish its safety.

Extensive monitoring of severely overweight people who have been on the Cambridge diet for long periods suggest that side effects are few, if any. Many advocates of the diet remark on feeling particularly well and enjoying high levels of energy, a fact which Dr Howard tributes to the improved quality of nutrition.

Dieters often continue taking the various diet aids as a supplement with everyday food, even after their ideal weight has been reached.
The profit incentive method of marketing the Cambridge diet has, however, aroused a certain amount of controversy.

Only "Cambridge Counsellors", men and women who have followed the diet themselves, are allowed to sell the product following a short period of training in the basic principles of nutrition.

This they buy wholesale, and sell at a profit to other clients, keeping a percentage of the profits. Critics point out that, in spite of having little medical nutritional background knowledge, counsellors are setting themselves up as diet experts and using hard sell techniques to boost their profits.

Not withstanding criticism, Cambridge counselling centres, most of them well run, continue to be opening up throughout the world.