Can A 15-Minute Diet Work?
- Lose weight by eating every 15 minutes? Sounds too good to be true.
Emma Messenger (Elle Magazine) finds out if the diet is a dream or a nightmare.

A 13-minute diet? Lose weight in less than a quarter of an hour? Surely this is the kind of pound-shifting miracle that women have been waiting for, like, forever? I read the blurb on my website..... Oh right: you have to eat every 13 minutes. Well as perfect diets go, that seems a close second. And so, I embark on a two-week trial of this miracle gut-busting regime.

The diet is all about eating little and often, so that you never feel hungry (bonus!) and your metabolism speeds up so that you lose weight (double bonus!), which apparently starts happening immediately (bullseye!)

That's the good news. But eating little and often does not mean you get to munch on Krispy Kremes. Nor does it mean you don't have to worry about the contents on your plate for your three main meals, which adhere pretty much to traditional weight-loss protocol: lots of lean protein and vegetables, little fat and no alcohol.

The magic little-and-often, save-you-from-starvation, make-you-thin bit is not as easy as it sounds. You fill in a Vitaline questionnaire and then given a personal diet plan, tailored to your metabolic rate and lifestyle. My diet was a 15-minute one

After breakfast onwards, I had to have a 'nibble' (a small piece of raw vegetable) or a 'burn' (small piece of protein) every 15 minutes. And when I say small, i mean small: the size of a little fingernail.

On top of the hours of fine chopping and careful filing of sandwich bags and Tupperware boxes with little cubes of food for the day's intake, there was the tricky matter of remembering to hit the 15-minute target. A friend lent me a stopwatch, but it's not ideal in the middle of a work meeting or, worse, a date, when there's a sudden beeping and you have to pop a flake of tuna or single mangetour in your mouth.

On day one, I was ravenous by lunch time and wolfed down a baked potato, expecting its usual afternoon-slump effect. But it didn't happen. Perhaps it was the quarter teaspoon of cottage cheese I had at 3pm. Or the gallons of permissible hot water and Marmite I'd glugged.

Day two, I was marginally less hungry. By day three, I'd stopped dreaming of biscuits - though I has begun eating sugar-free jelly, the only sweet thing allowed. Day four, my stomach didn't gurgle once. By day five, I thought I couldn't look at another smidgeon of chicken or cucumber, but I ploughed on. It was worth it. By day six, my skinny-fit jeans felt decidedly baggier - I'd lost 31lbs. And, at the end of two weeks, another 21lbs. Results!

It's hard to say if it was the science of the diet that worked, or just the psychological aspect of it: thinking about food four times an hour becomes so boring you'd rather not think about food at all. Or maybe it was the discipline of this regime, which has to be executed with such military precision you feel like you'll be court-martialled if you even smell a pizza. But when my fortnight was up, I did more than smell one, I ate the whole thing! Such is the way with a diet like this: unless you change your eating habits for good, the fix may be fast, but the undoing is faster.

THE VERDICT: DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TIN: YOU'LL LOSE WEIGHT FAST WITHOUT FEELING HUNGRY. BUT YOU NEED TO KEEP THE PRINCIPLES OF IT UP FOR PERMANENT RESULTS, WHICH TAKES TIME AND DEDICATION.

RATING: ****

FACT 20 PER CENT OF WOMEN IN THE UK, DIET ALL OR MOST OF THE TIME*

For details, call (0161) 292 4918 or visit www.vitaline-slimming.com
A four-week online diet plan cost £49.95