Start the year sensibly

THE proliferation of diet books on the shelves can be bewildering, even for nutrition boffins like myself.

Formulating a coherent and effective diet from this morass of information and misinformation can be overwhelming. The confusion’s compounded by anecdote from those around us — ‘Did you hear Siobhan has lost three stone since Christmas on the Atkins diet’? ‘No way, Paula’s down a couple of stone on her GI plan’.

To make things easier, I’ve outlined five rules to get you lean in 2013. These tips are simple pointers that don’t encompass the whole diet, but are a distillation of priorities for weight loss.