detox today or diet tomorrow?
by Patsy Wescott
Alison Black has been dieting since she was 17 but she's never got back to the 9 stone 4lb she achieved with her first diet. She's tried every diet in the book, including the increasingly popular detox diets promoted by many celebrities, but she has yet to find a long-term solution to her weight problem.
© Getty
'I'm really cynical about everything in life apart from diets. You tell me any nonsense about any magical new diet and I don't care how much it costs, I'll buy it,' she says.
There isn't any scientific evidence to support detox diets. Scan the medical and scientific journals and you simply won't find any research into the effects of fasting, raw vegetable diets, herbal and other remedies aimed at cleansing your bowels and helping you lose weight. But that doesn't stop thousand of people, like Alison Black, from trying them.
'Detox is great because you're full of rubbish and this just cleans it all out beautifully. You're all pure and sparkling, so you can start again and go out for a pizza,' laughs Alison.
Diet reviewer, Amanda Ursell, believes that those who choose detox are looking for something other than just losing weight:
'They want a bit of inner purity and it's a socially acceptable way of eating nothing when you're out. You can give up wheat, dairy and whatever and say "I'm detoxing". The only good things about detoxing are the visualisation and meditation that go with it. They probably do people loads of good.'
Alison explains that raw vegetable, fruit and seed detox diets are quite pleasant, but she admits that the more extreme fasts she's tried, with accompanying colonic irrigation to flush out the bowel with water, can be challenging.
'It makes you very shaky and nervy, and you're starving and fed up, and you can't see when it's going to come to an end. You don't want people around you, so my advice would be to do it on a desert island,' she says.
As with detox diets, there is no scientific evidence to support colonic irrigation. Dr Wendy Doyle, from the British Dietetics Association, points out that it is as likely to flush out the friendly bacteria we all need in our bowel to aid digestion as it is any harmful ones that people might be trying to remove.
(January 2003, resources updated February 2005)
