'Make your health a priority, not your weight’

The other day, I came across a press release by UK-based company MoneyTransfer.com who have compared the costs of the six most popular diets.

The costs were calculated by ingredients for 1,500 calories per day – the ingredients were calculated with Tesco online in UK. The diets in question were vegan, gluten-free, no sugar, Mediterranean, vegetarian and keto.

The least expensive diet to follow out of these six would be the vegan diet while people who follow keto will have less money in their pocket left. While vegans don’t eat anything animal based like cheese, milk, eggs etc, the keto diet is based on high protein and fat food such as lard, butter eggs and meat. While a vegan diet was calculated at £59.24, Keto could cost you £125.87 – and yep, that’s double the money (the prices have been calculated in February this year).

At the beginning of each year the magazines are full of miracle cures for the winter weight and promise the reader that they will feel amazing and look gorgeous when they can lose 10kg in 2 weeks by either only drinking water from a holy mountain or eating berries that have been picked by sea fairies in dewy valleys.

I personally (and pleases keep in mind that this is an opinion piece) believe that cutting out any food group is not healthy unless you are really allergic. The Harvard Medical School publication actually warns their readers about the keto diet as being too risky on the body – the keto diet was never intended to help with weight loss but for medical purposes and long-term use of the diet have never been studied to see the effects it might have on the body.

The normal amount of daily fat intake should be around 7% of your daily calories but in keto it is much higher and your liver and kidneys might not be too happy about this.

Now, vegan is also not a diet I could ever follow as I love my cheese and butter way too much to ‘suffer’ through the diet.

A careful curated menu plan could provide the eater with enough nutrition to keep the body healthy but in my opinion (and that is based on industry numbers and studies of people’s shopping behaviour), the majority of vegans eat highly processed ready-made meals. This leaves gaps in vitamins, minerals etc that our bodies need and these people will have to consider the addition of supplements to make up for it (nutrition education is needed for people who want to follow a vegan diet healthily).

Saying all that – my mum had a theory when someone said that he or she wanted to lose weight: ‘Just eat less’ – simple. That of course is a very simple theory but one that works for many people. Cutting out foods, skipping meals etc will give people a short-term success but weight will creep up again when dieters return to their normal lifestyle. Make your health a priority, not your weight.