I just don’t get the banting fad

I know banting seems like all the rage these days but I just don’t get it. Well, I roughly understand what the basic rules are but this diet and others like it seem to be, well, fads. At the moment banting is huge and people swear by it (I hear there are crop circles and everything) but what happened to moderate, yet fairly well rounded eating habits?

Before I continue I should probably point out that I’m not a dietician so don’t rely on what I am about to say or leap off tall buildings, even if you are wearing a red cape.

I had to change my diet a while ago when I was diagnosed as diabetic. What I really liked about the meal options my dietician gave me was that they made a lot of sense. She took me off sugars (diabetes – obvious, right?) and put me on to low GI foods which included carbs, fruits, vegetables and so on. I also stuck with relatively low fat meat, dairy and other foods which tend to have fat content.

My amazing wife switched our family’s diet almost overnight to this healthier option and I started exercising a lot more. I lost about 15 kgs by eating better and exercising more regularly and started to feel a lot better than I had for a long time. It was a little tough in the beginning because I was used to all the sweet stuff but I found a balance between small quantities of the “bad sweet stuff” I used to eat and my healthier meal options and it literally changed my life in a very sustainable way.

Food, to me, is something to enjoy and eat in moderation. Sure, many people can’t eat certain types of food and adjust their diets accordingly but when a diet becomes a hardship, it tends not to be one you’d be motivated to stick with. Also, add the seemingly fanatical banting supporters to the mix and it becomes a hazard carrying a loaf of bread in the vicinity of a bantite (what do you call banting adherents?).

Clearly banting has worked for a lot of people but it just seems like a fad to me which will be replaced by whatever post-paleo, neo-banting diet rolls around next …


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One response to “I just don’t get the banting fad

  1. Paul avatar

    Paul mentioned this Post on pauljacobson.me.

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