The ‘public humiliation diet’ is very effective

As another summer approaches, I’ve embarked on yet another attempt to lose weight. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson by now – what goes down, must come up – but it turns out yo-yo dieting is actually good for you. At least, that’s the conclusion of a team of researchers at Oxford University who analysed 124 trials involving 50,000 people trying to lose weight. They lost an average of between five and ten pounds and regained it at a rate of less than a pound a year. According to Professor Susan Jebb, co-author of the study, it took the participants in the study between five and 14 years to put the weight back on, during which time their blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol levels were all lower, thereby reducing their risk of diabetes and heart disease.

The last time I lost weight was when I got cancelled at the beginning of 2018. This followed my appointment to the Office for Students, a new government regulator. Within minutes of it being announced, an army of online metal-detectorists set to work, frantically sifting through everything I’d ever said or written trying to find things to be offended by. Needless to say, they soon struck gold and within days a petition demanding the prime minister sack me had attracted more than 220,000 signatures. It was the usual story: Downing Street first stood firm, then wobbled, then a trusted intermediary called and urged me to do the decent thing. I duly resigned and issued a grovelling apology, whereupon the same mob demanded I stand down from every other job I held. Within a few weeks I had lost five positions. But there was a silver lining. I also shed half a stone, which I referred to at the time as ‘the public humiliation diet’.

I went on to lose another stone and managed to keep it off until March 2020, when Boris Johnson gave the British people a very simple instruction: ‘You must stay at home.’