1. The lower the calories eaten per day, the harder it is for you to get your daily requirements of proteins and vitamins.

2. Dieting makes your body believe it is starving so it starts to save fat, as this is its best way to store energy.

3. Losing weight means digesting your own body tissues instead of food and unfortunately, dieting does not tell your body what parts it needs to digest or which parts to save.

4. Severe dieting causes muscle loss and if you are unlucky the loss may be from your heart with severe consequences.

5. Dieting will make you difficult to live with and your family may want to kill you.

6. Dieting changes your body chemistry and one effect may be bad breath.

7. If you’re a smoker you may smoke even more to dull the hunger pangs.

8. Binge eating, generally with very unsuitable foods often follows dieting.

9. Dieting makes you food obsessed.

10. Breaking a diet often results in guilt, poor self esteem and despair often followed by comfort eating.

11. Dieting emphasises food as a reward or compensation – so called ‘comfort eating’ where food is used to cheer us up or because it’s raining we are somehow entitled to eat lots of sweets or cakes.

12. Dieting lowers the base metabolic rate which means you can live on less food, so when you return to your normal food intake which was already too high, you put on weight even faster than before and will probably end up heavier than before the diet.

13. Dieting does nothing to teach you to eat healthily. Healthy eating does not mean going hungry.

14. Dieting often causes constipation and this concentrates toxins and carcinogens within the bowels and they are present for a longer period. Fruit and vegetables have a positively beneficial effect on the smooth running of your digestive system.