Diet herbs.

People keep asking me about diet herbs.

Last week I was asked if I could do an article on herbs for weightloss for a local gardening glossy.

It's like, where do I even start to explain how wrong that idea is?

There is no such thing as a magic pill for weight loss. Not even a herbal one.

If you want to lose weight you should eat less and exercise more. That's the only thing that works.

I could do a long long piece on hyperinsulinemia, but that's out of the focus of a gardening rag.

There's some obese people who get a kick out of overeating. They eat 2 or 3 large (as in huge) pizzas every day for lunch, and ask for the dessert menu ... they're OK as long as they also exercise heavily every day, but once they can't, because their knees are shot from all that weight, they're just going downhill.

If you diet by starving yourself (and not by just gently ditching, say, all breads + sodas + sweets), the kilograms will be back in a flash once you stop, and you'll gain more than you lost: the body was in starvation mode and is now guarding itself against the next time food is scarce.

There's this 'mercan TV show (shown over here, too) where a Dr. Phil tells people to eat high-protein, high-vegetable, low-sugar, low-fat, and to exercise.
I'd change two things in that:
1) ditch the low-fat approach: if a food is available both as full-fat and as low-fat, the low-fat version is usually loaded with additives, which again usually are bad for you. A lot of low-fat foods are also loaded with sugar.
Also, we do need fats to function fully, so it's full-out butter and full-out cooking oil, at least in my kitchen.
2) do low-carb foods, too: too much simple carbs sets you up for hyperinsulinemia (syndrome X), which sets you up for adult-onset diabetes down the line.